It did not take billionaire Elon Musk long to get settled in as the new CEO of Twitter, now that his purchase deal has gone through.
On the Tesla and SpaceX founder's first day, he fired the now-former CEO and let other high-ranking officials go who were responsible for banning then-President Donald Trump and blocking the Hunter Biden corruption revelations.
The Wall Street Journal reported:
Mr. Musk fired Chief Executive Parag Agrawal and Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal after the deal closed, the people said. Spokespeople for Twitter didn’t comment.
It wasn’t immediately clear who would step into those top positions. CNBC previously reported the firings.
Mr. Musk also fired Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s top legal and policy executive, and Sean Edgett, general counsel.
Not long after that report, Bloomberg News noted that there are several people who have been banned from the platform, including elected officials who could now be reinstated. Among them: Former President Donald Trump; Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.); Laura Loomer; Project Veritas Founder James O’Keefe; Steve Bannon; Alex Jones; and Milo Yiannopoulos.
“The person with knowledge of Musk’s account reinstatement intentions said it’s unclear whether Trump will be allowed to return to Twitter,” Bloomberg News said.
Earlier this year and shortly after news broke that he was interested in purchasing Twitter, Musk said that Trump never should have been booted off to begin with.
“It was not correct to ban Donald Trump,” he noted in May, according to Conservative Brief. “I think that was a mistake, because it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice.”
“He’s now going to be on Truth Social, as will a large part of the right in the United States. So, I think this could end up being, frankly, worse than having a single forum where everyone can debate,” he said.
“I would reverse the Twitter ban. Obviously, I don’t own Twitter yet, so this is not a thing that will definitely happen,” he said.
Musk's deal to buy Twitter was definitely an on-again, off-again affair after making his initial $44 billion bid for the company last spring. His big hang-up for moving forward had to do with his concern that Twitter was not upfront about the number of bot and spam accounts on the platform, especially after a couple of experts did their own analyses.
According to leading cyber security specialist Dan Woods, who formerly worked for the FBI and CIA, as many as 80 percent of Twitter accounts are bots, The Australian reported early last month.
“Sure sounds higher than 5%!” Musk -- who now calls himself "Chief Twit" -- wrote on the platform in response to Woods’ findings.
Sure sounds higher than 5%!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 1, 2022
“More than 80 percent of Twitter accounts are likely bots, according to former CIA and FBI cyber security specialist Dan Woods, who created a fake profile and quickly gained more than 100,000 fake followers in one weekend by purchasing them on the dark web,” the outlet reported.
“I’m not a programmer, but I watched YouTube and in a weekend I wrote a script that automatically creates accounts on Twitter without encountering any obstacles,” he told the outlet.
“There’s huge demand (for bots), there’s a marketplace to serve that demand, and if I can write a bot that creates accounts on Twitter, and I’m not even a programmer, imagine what a sophisticated programmer could do,” he continued.
“Twitter doesn’t want (its number of bots) to be that high, so they’re going through the motions of canceling some accounts,” Woods added.
“I’m not saying they’re lying, but we’ve really studied these accounts and we’ve come to the conclusion that there are a lot more fake accounts than Twitter is letting on,” he noted further.
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