Swacch Twitter Abhiyaan: Musk Fires ‘Anti-India’ Parag, Gadde

New Delhi | Updated: 28 October, 2022 9:35 am IST

After officially closing the deal to purchase Twitter, billionaire Elon Musk terminated the employment of top executives like chief executive officer (CEO) Parag Agrawal and legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde.

Twitter chief financial officer Ned Segal was also fired immediately, reported Reuters quoting people familiar with the matter.

As per the report, the Tesla CEO accused these executives of misleading him and Twitter investors over the number of fake accounts on the social media platform.

Gadde is said to be responsible for removing then-US president Donald Trump from Twitter in January last year.

Agrawal and Gadde both are India-origin Americans.

Agrawal and Segal were in the San Francisco headquarters of the social media giant when the deal was finally closed. Both were escorted out of the office, as per Reuters.

As per reports, Agarwal’s yearly compensation was pegged at USD 1 million and he will leave the microblogging platform with around USD 42 million, including the money received after selling shares in his pocket.

Gadde, whose yearly package was around USD 17 million will get a severance package worth USD 12.5 million that includes Twitter shares, according to The New York Post.

Before finalizing the USD 44-billion Twitter deal, Musk, the world’s richest man, posted a video on the platform featuring himself walking into the Twitter headquarters with a big grin and carrying a porcelain sink. “Let that sink in,” he tweeted before changing the description of his Twitter account to “Chief Twit”.

In April, Twitter agreed to accept Musk’s offer to take the company private. A month later, Musk pushed for the agreement to be cancelled, accusing Twitter of misleading him about the number of “bots” — a charge rejected by the company. It led to Agarwal dragging him to a court to hold him to the terms of the takeover deal, subsequently a trial for October to decide whether the agreement would be finalised.

But after Musk wrote to the company to say he’d proceed with the sale, the trial was delayed.

The Washington Post reported that Musk intended to lay off three-fourths of Twitter’s workforce.

Bloomberg claims that Musk revealed the information to the bankers during a Monday video chat. According to reports, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Barclays were the deal’s main financiers. Each has reportedly agreed to provide at least $2.5 billion in debt financing for the deal.

According to reports, Musk obtained $12.5 billion in bank loans, with the remaining funds coming from his cash, which has increased as a result of the sale of Tesla shares, and a wide range of equity investors, including billionaires Marc Andreesen and Larry Ellison as well as Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund.

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