#livetweeting the Twitter Takeover

Elon Musk closed his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter late on Thursday night. Since then:

• At least five execs, including the company’s CEO, CFO, general counsel, policy chief, and chief customer officer, were fired “for cause” (allowing the company to potentially avoid paying out tens of millions in severance and bonus pay).
• Twitter’s homepage has changed; logged out users visiting Twitter.com are now redirected to the Explore page instead of being faced with the signup form it previously showed – a change that would’ve previously taken weeks of internal debate to finalize, The Verge reports.
• Musk, the world’s king troll🧌, fought/is fighting off an organized group of other trolls. Following his takeover, a group of accounts began tweeting slurs and other derogatory terms in an organized effort to make users think Twitter changed its content policy, the company’s security chief revealed yesterday. But according to Musk, no decisions on content or reinstating of accounts will occur until a “content moderation council” is put in place.

👀 Looking ahead… More layoffs are expected to come soon. Ross Gerber, CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management, a small investor in the deal, told the NY Times he was told by Musk’s family office to expect ~50% of the company to be laid off, though other reports peg that number at 15%-30%.

+In the know: Twitter engineers – real ones, this time – were asked on Friday to compile recent code contributions from the last 30 to 60 days to be reviewed by Musk, a stickler for code-writing, and Tesla engineers.