Elon Musk is already making good on his promise to lay off over 5,000 Twitter employees once his $44 billion acquisition of the platform went through. Per The New York Times, Musk swiftly began firing high-level executives at the company once he officially closed the deal on Thursday.
Among those reportedly given the boot are CEO Parag Agrawal; CFO Ned Segal; Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s head of legal, policy and trust, and safety; and general counsel Sean Edgett. When CNBC first reported the closed deal, it was also noted that Agrawal and Segal had departed Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters. Musk has not yet directly commented on any of the firings.
Musk’s acquisition of Twitter marked the end of an era for the platform, which spent nine years as a publicly traded company after taking the leap in November 2013. In a characteristically trolling late-night tweet on Thursday, Musk wrote: “the bird is freed.”
In a longer message on Thursday, Musk shared some more expansive (and no less condescending) thoughts about his pricey purchase. Per Musk, his acquisition of Twitter is both a key tenet to the ongoing success of civilization, and a completely humble choice with zero ulterior motives.
“The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence,” Musk writes. “I didn’t do it because it would be easy. I didn’t do it to make more money. I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love.”
In spite of his professed love for humanity, Musk still has a professed desire to fire three-fourths of Twitter’s employees—and several executives, however consequential, are drops in that barrel. Although Musk’s intentions with Twitter aren’t entirely clear, his intentions with the people who staff the platform seem pretty plain.