Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Inc., announced in a filing on Monday that he will lead Twitter, the social media firm he recently acquired for $44 billion, a move that Wall Street analysts have warned could wear the billionaire thin.
The previous CEO of Twitter, Parag Agrawal, and other senior corporate executives were sacked last week by Elon Musk, who also owns the rocket company SpaceX, brain-chip startup Neuralink, and the tunnelling company the Boring Company.
In comparison to the 12% fall in the benchmark S&P 500 index during the same time period, Tesla’s stock has lost a third of its value since Musk made an offer to purchase Twitter in April.
In a previous reference to his intended action, Musk altered his Twitter bio to read “Chief Twit.”
Twitter on Monday declined to comment on how long Musk might remain CEO or appoint someone else.
Musk announced that as a result of the acquisition, he is now the only director of Twitter in another filing he made on Monday.
Bret Taylor, Parag Agrawal, Omid Kordestani, David Rosenblatt, Martha Lane Fox, Patrick Pichette, Egon Durban, Fei-Fei Li, and Mimi Alemayehou, who were Twitter directors prior to the merger’s effective time, “are no longer directors of Twitter,” Musk stated in the filing.
Musk quickly tweeted that the decision to abolish the board “is only temporary” without going into further detail.
A lengthy saga came to an end last week with Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of the social networking firm.
Since the takeover Musk has moved quickly to put his stamp on Twitter, which he had ridiculed for months for being slow to introduce product changes or take down spam accounts.
His teams began meeting with some employees to investigate Twitter’s software code and understand how aspects of the platform worked, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
Some employees who talked with Reuters claimed they had minimal contact with Musk or other executives and were making sense of the business through news stories.
