Although Judge McCormick gave the two sides time to hammer out a deal, Musk would quickly relent, consummate his acquisition and make himself $44 billion poorer. There had long been rumors that he intended to slash the Twitter workforce by about 75%, and after posting a bizarre stunt of him walking into Twitter HQ carrying a sink in some misguided attempt at humor, it wouldn’t be the kitchen sink he’d get to work on, but the chopping board.
Parag Agrawal would be one of the first heads on the chopping block, swiftly followed by chief financial officer (CFO) Ned Segal, Gadde, and general counsel Sean Edgett. But this was only the beginning of Musk’s great purge of the social media platform. While he tweeted ‘the bird is free,’ little did he know that his decisions and actions would have devastating consequences not just for the site and its around 450 million monthly active users, but his public standing and personal wealth.
