Shock move! Elon Musk buys Twitter, sacks Indian-origin CEO Parag Agrawal

According to reports, moments after taking over Twitter, Elon Musk has fired top officials including CEO Parag Agrawal.

Completing the acquisition deal of Twitter, Elon Musk has fired top officials of the company including the CEO Parag Agrawal in a shock move. (AFP)

After completing the $44 billion Twitter acquisition deal, the first big move for Elon Musk was to fire top officials in the company including CEO Parag Agrawal, Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal and legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde, according to reports. It was also revealed that both Agrawal and Segal were present in the San Francisco headquarters at the time of the deal closing and they were promptly escorted outside. 

According to reports by Reuters, Musk had earlier accused the sacked officials of misleading him and Twitter investors over the number of fake accounts on Twitter. The multi-billion acquisition saga first began in April of this year when Musk became the largest shareholder of the company and expressed his desire to buy Twitter. 

The Twitter acquisition saga

In the same month, it became known that the two parties had reached a deal of $44 billion. However, before the deal could be closed, Musk had second thoughts and publicly complained that the company was not revealing the exact numbers of spam and fake accounts in Twitter and that it was much higher than the estimated figure of 5 percent. 

In the following months, he backed down from the deal on the account of being misled over bot accounts and lack of cooperation in showing the real figures. In retaliation, Twitter sued Musk four days later, asking him to complete the deal. 

The long drawn court trial was reaching its pivotal point as Musk was set to be deposed by Twitter's lawyers on October 4. But before the deposition, Musk offered to close the deal and buy Twitter as earlier agreed upon. The deadline given by the court to close the deal was October 28.

Yesterday, October 27, confirming the change of ownership, Musk changed his Twitter account's bio to ‘Chief Twit'. Later, he posted a video of entering the Twitter headquarters with a porcelain sink in his hands and captioned it with “let that sink in”.