Ahead of his $44 billion bid to acquire Twitter, Elon Musk declared that he had no confidence in the company’s management team.
In Exhibit B of Musk’s April 13 Schedule 13D filing with the SEC, he stated: “If the deal doesn’t work, given that I don’t have confidence in management nor do I believe I can drive the necessary change in the public market, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder.”
Sources told Bloomberg last week that Musk “featured job cuts” in his pitches to potential lenders for the deal. According to Bloomberg, “Musk told bankers that he would be focused on the social-media company’s bottom line and floated the idea of cutting both costs and jobs, according to people familiar with the matter.”
Additionally, on Friday, Reuters reported “three people familiar with the matter” said Musk told bankers he intended to reduce executive salaries as part of his cost cutting plans.
In the tweet below, Musk gave us a clue about who might be the first to get sacked.
Twitter’s chief legal officer and general counsel, Vijaya Gadde, serves as the company’s ultimate censor. Gadde, who earned $17 million from the social media platform in 2021, is said to be instrumental in Twitter’s decisions to boot former President Donald Trump from the site and to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, arguably costing Trump the election.
The insufferable Gadde was steamrolled over her left-wing bias during a 2019 interview with conservative journalist Tim Pool on “The Joe Rogan Experience.” Musk posted a flowchart based on their discussion.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 27, 2022
Pool asked, “So your platform restricts speech?”
“Our platform promotes speech unless people violate our rules,” Gadde replied.
“In a specific direction,” he said.
“In any direction,” she insisted. “It’s about a pattern and practice of violating our rules.”
Pool stopped the ridiculousness. “You have a pattern and practice of banning only one faction of people.”
He cited a report from media outlet Quillette. Out of 22 high-profile bannings from 2015, Quillette “found that 21 of them were only on one side of the cultural debate.”
“But I don’t look at the political spectrum of people when I’m looking at their tweets,” she protested.
Right.
And slavery is freedom, to quote George Orwell.
Last Monday, after the announcement that Musk had reached an agreement with Twitter’s board to buy the company, Gadde held a virtual meeting with her team. “Three people familiar with the meeting” told Politico that Gadde became emotional and cried at times during the meeting.
I’d cry too if I knew my $17 million per year salary was about to come to an end.