Elon Musk Says “Bird is Freed”, Fires Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal

Elon Musk has fired Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and CFO Ned Segal after taking over the operations of the popular social media platform

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, and chief financial officer Neg Segal have reportedly been fired after Elon Musk took over the operations on the social media platform. Apart from Agrawal and Segal, Twitter’s Head of Trust and Safety and Legal, Vijaya Gadde has also been fired. Elon Musk, after closing the deal to purchase Twitter on 27 October, has tweeted: “The Bird is Freed”.

In October 2017, Twitter announced the appointment of Agrawal as chief technology officer following the departure of Adam Messinger.In December 2019, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced that Agrawal would be in charge of Project Bluesky, an initiative to develop a decentralized social network protocol.In November 2021, Dorsey announced that he was resigning as CEO of Twitter and that Agrawal was replacing him immediately.As CEO, Agrawal was awarded annual compensation of $1 million as well as stock compensation worth $12.5 million.

Musk said that the real reason why he purchased Twitter was because he felt it was important for future civilisations to have a common digital town square where a wide range of beliefs could be debated in a healthy manner without people having to resort to violence. “There is currently a great danger that social media will splinter into far right and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society,” said Musk in a statement.

He further went on to add that: “Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise. Advertising fuels the internet economy and helps provide valuable products and services to consumers,” while also stating that advertising done right “can delight, entertain and inform you,” while ads that are irrelevant to a user are “spam.”