Elon Musk is now the sole owner of Twitter. He bought the company for $44 billion, and the deal went through.
Three anonymous sources told the Washington Post on Thursday (local time) that Musk had fired three top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, as one of his first decisions as head of the social media giant.
The company also fired the CFO, Ned Segal, and the person in charge of legal policy, trust, and safety, Vijaya Gadde, according to the newspaper.
The Tesla CEO’s purchase ends a six-month saga in which Twitter first turned down Musk’s offer to buy the company and then sued the billionaire when he said he was going to back out of the deal because of spam accounts.
Related: Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter starts with firings and the announcement that the “bird is freed.”
Musk’s interest in the platform has become a hot topic in the debate about free speech in the digital age. Critics worry that if he runs the platform, hate speech and false information could spread easily.
Musk says he is a “free speech absolutist,” and he has spoken out against Twitter’s moderation policies and censorship that go beyond what the law says.
In a long message he posted on Twitter before the deadline to buy the company on Friday, Musk denied that he had any plans to make Twitter a “free-for-all hellscape.” He had changed his Twitter bio earlier that day to say “Chief Twit.”
“I bought Twitter because I think it’s important for the future of civilization to have a common digital town square where people with different ideas can talk about them without getting violent,” he said.
