After five months of mudslinging between Elon Musk and Twitter Inc., in court and otherwise, the mercurial billionaire finally owns the social network. The chaos of the deal was only a preview of what’s to come.
Musk has already axed much of Twitter’s leadership team, including its chief executive officer, and plans to be CEO himself in the immediate term, according to people familiar with the matter. Public shareholders are cashing out and passing ownership to a hodgepodge of investors that, besides Musk, include Oracle Corp.’s Larry Ellison and Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund. The company will stop reporting its financials — unless Musk wants to. He is expected to make severe job cuts, especially for roles outside of product and engineering.
Above all, the Tesla Inc. chief will bring a different set of values to the social network. Twitter has spent the last few years focused on reducing bullying and abuse on its network; Musk says he wants to loosen content restrictions and reverse account bans. Twitter is majority funded by advertising; Musk wants to build a more robust subscription product, he has told advisers. Twitter has worked to improve transparency and communication with its users; Musk tends to do much of the outbound communication for his companies himself — via tweets.