Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal clarified Friday that he was the force behind recent executive exits, not Elon Musk, whose acquisition offer hangs in the balance.
On Thursday, Agrawal fired Twitter’s general manager Kayvon Beykpour and Bruce Falck, the company’s revenue product lead. And on Friday, Musk said his $44 billion offer to buy Twitter was “temporarily on hold” as he looked for further calculation on the number of spam and bot accounts on the platform. He followed up by tweeting he was “still committed to acquisition.”
“While I expect the deal to close, we need to be prepared for all scenarios and always do what’s right for Twitter. I’m accountable for leading and operating Twitter, and our job is to build a stronger Twitter every day,” Agrawal tweeted Friday.
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Agrawal added that he remains committed to “improving Twitter as a product and business for customers,” even in light of new ownership.
“People have also asked: why manage costs now vs after close? Our industry is in a very challenging macro environment – right now. I won’t use the deal as an excuse to avoid making important decisions for the health of the company, nor will any leader at Twitter,” he tweeted.
Twitter accepted Musk’s $44 billion acquisition offer in late April. The deal is still pending approval from regulatory agencies and from shareholders. Musk has now claimed it’s also “pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.”
Musk has long rallied against what he sees as an inordinate number of spam accounts on the platform and has vowed to get rid of them once he owns the company.
In a recent filing, Twitter said false or spam accounts made up less than 5 percent of its monthly active users in the first quarter. This is an estimation, however, and the filing adds that it “may not accurately represent the actual number of such accounts.”
“We are continually seeking to improve our ability to estimate the total number of spam accounts and eliminate them from the calculation of our mDAU,” the quarterly report reads.
May 13, 2:20 p.m. PT Updated story and headline to clarify that Twitter underwent budget cuts and is implementing a hiring freeze but is not planning additional layoffs, a Twitter spokesperson says.
