Twitter’s deal with Elon Musk progressing _CEO

Twitter’s CEO, Parag Agrawal, and its legal chief, Vijaya Gadde, told employees on Thursday that the deal is not “on hold” and reassured staff that the deal will go ahead, Insider reported.

The revelation came after several remarks by Elon Musk that the deal was put on hold to enable his team verify allegations of fake accounts on the micro-blogging platform.

Former President Donald Trump of the United States who enjoys Elon Musk’s sympathy has also advised the younger billionaire to withdraw from the $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, saying the deal was bad.

Twitter had suspended Trump’s account for alleged misinformation.

The revelations came as a Twitter user urged Musk on Friday to add more security guards to his team and said that he will receive more threats after he owns the social media platform; and Musk admitted he has a rising security risk with the acquisition of the company.

Musk recently said his $44 billion takeover of Twitter will not proceed until he gets clarity on how the social media platform calculates the number of fake accounts on the site.

The call for Musk to bolster his security team comes days after Insider revealed that the SpaceX founder paid a flight attendant $250,000 to settle a sexual misconduct claim against him in 2018.

The flight attendant, who worked on a SpaceX corporate jet, accused Musk of offering to buy her a horse in exchange for an erotic massage and of exposing his erect penis to her, according to interviews and documents obtained by Insider.

Musk denied the sexual misconduct allegations and said on Twitter: “Those wild accusations are utterly untrue.”

He later said the accuser should describe his scars or tattoos in a tweet seemingly aimed at the source and said “she won’t be able to do so, because it never happened.”

Meanwhile a top Twitter executive has told employees that Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover bid for the company had created a “chaos tax,” according to internal Slack messages seen by The Wall Street Journal.

In an internal message addressing the tumultuous takeover of the company, Twitter’s new head of product, Jay Sullivan, told employees: “I expect the ‘chaos tax’ and ups and downs to continue.”

He added: “As I know more, I will find ways to share with this group!”

According to The Journal, Twitter has held 15 company-wide or division-wide meetings to address employee concerns amid upheaval following the Twitter board’s decision to accept Musk’s hostile takeover bid.

Sullivan himself joined as a result of this upheaval, replacing one of the two executives let go by CEO Parag Agrawal in a “shake-up” that also included a hiring freeze and rescinding job offers.

Some employees have left the company, others are looking for new jobs, while others are said to be hunkering down to see how Musk changes the company, The Journal reported.

Musk has publicly berated Twitter since agreeing a deal to buy the company, accusing it of not being politically neutral, blocking free speech, and being wrong about its estimates of the number of bots on the platform. He has put the deal “on hold” over the question of fake accounts.

Agrawal wrote a Twitter thread on Monday explaining why Musk’s proposition that Twitter should take a sample of 100 users to determine the number of bots would not work. Musk replied with a poop emoji.

The Journal reported that a number of employees had expressed optimism about the takeover, with “dozens” in a Slack channel labeled “i_dissent” hoping Musk could help transform a company that had overcounted its user total for three years.

In early May, Musk said he wanted to hire more people and quintuple Twitter’s revenue by 2028.