Elon Musk takes over Twitter

In offices in San Francisco, New York, and on company messaging channels, Twitter employees spent all day Friday searching frantically for some news of who had been fired, how their jobs would change, and even official confirmation that Musk had actually bought the company. But no official announcement went out.

The company’s remaining senior leaders — four had already been fired — huddled privately in offices with Musk’s team and didn’t emerge, according to two people familiar with the deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe them. And a meeting with Musk that chief marketing officer Leslie Berland had previously announced to the company didn’t appear to be happening, the people said.

A Qatar investment fund contributed $375 million to Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter, a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission said Friday, noting the deal had closed on Thursday.

The investment, which was widely expected after Musk named the Qatar sovereign wealth fund as a contributor, came shortly before the deal closed, the filing said.

The funds were provided by a subsidiary of the Qatar Investment Authority, the filing said. As a result, the fund said, it would no longer hold shares of Twitter stock — which would be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange, but rather a stake in the private company owned by Musk.

About two dozen reporters and several TV camera crews gathered outside Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters Friday, waiting to see if Elon Musk would show up or if employees would come out and speak to them.

Curious tourists and locals stopped to ask what was happening. Some employees went in and out, but declined to speak to reporters.

Early in the day, two people came outside carrying boxes and claiming they had been fired from the company, but the company did not confirm that they were real employees or that any layoffs had occurred. They appeared to be pranksters.

When Elon Musk visited Twitter headquarters this week, hauling a kitchen sink inside with him, employees felt conflicted. Musk’s ownership bid had been met with dismay, particularly over his plans for steep job cuts, which he outlined in presentations with potential financial partners.

But Musk is a bona fide celebrity, drawing crowds and inviting intrigue — if not adulation — wherever he goes, including at Twitter’s own coffee bar during Wednesday’s appearance.

“Did you see Elon?” one employee was overheard asking another as they caught up outside the company’s Market Street headquarters.

Brandon Borrman, Twitter’s former head of communications, tweeted that Musk’s idea for a content moderation council was “really ill-suited to a platform where content moves at the speed of Twitter.”

He compared Musk’s idea to Facebook’s own Oversight Board, which he said was not working. Then added a shrug emoji.

Jason Goldman, a former Twitter vice president, noted the social media company would be outsourcing moderation to a committee when the company already has a committee to do so.

Twitter’s new owner appears to be wasting little time trying to reinvent Twitter in his other companies’ image.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO, who shot down the notion last week that he might merge his successful companies with the new Twitter, is looking to his electric car and rocket-building businesses for help turning Twitter around.

Documents detail plans to gut Twitter’s workforce

The Post reported Wednesday that Musk was expected to look to Tesla and SpaceX for specialists who might help Twitter reverse its fortunes. Then on Thursday, Bloomberg News reported that Tesla engineers visited Twitter’s offices to review code for the new owner.

A “free-speech platform” sounds great in theory. Everyone loves free speech!

In practice, almost every venue in society, online or offline, has norms around what you can and can’t say. So as generations of online forums have discovered, a “free-speech platform” immediately becomes an outlet for all the pent-up venom you can’t spew elsewhere. We’re seeing some of that already.

Twitter today is filled with users who say they’re done with the site and don’t want to tweet their thoughts on a Musk-run app. Unfortunately, there’s no one clear Twitter alternative, and even if there was everyone would have to agree to relocate to the same service.

One buzzy option is Mastodon, an open source Twitter alternative that has tried to catch on as a less toxic Twitter for years. Mastodon gained 27,796 new accounts this past week, and 7,719 on the day after Musk took over, Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko said on Friday.

More than 7,000 Twitter employees have been waiting all day for any word — anything! — from senior management. Silence.

Musk represents a new breed of social media company owner. Twitter co-founder and longtime CEO Jack Dorsey and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg are technologists, like Musk, but they all tried to keep their platforms out of politics.

Dorsey supported Black Lives Matters and Zuckerberg nominally supports democratic causes and is pro immigration. But generally they steered away from broadcasting many political views. Same with YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki.

Zuckerberg chose growth over safety

What’s different is the Musk isn’t afraid to be overtly political. He has at times painted himself as a moderate who wants Twitter to reflect a broad spectrum of viewpoints.

In the short term, Elon Musk’s announcement that he’ll convene a content moderation council before making any “major content decisions” is a shrewd punt. It buys him time and eases the pressure on him to ban or reinstate people right away.

But anyone who sees a content moderation council as a long-term solution hasn’t kept up with Facebook’s Oversight Board.