Illustration by Laura Normand / The Verge
With about 48 hours to go in the judge-mandated timeline to close his deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion, Elon Musk has arrived at the company’s San Francisco base of operations and is certainly walking around like he owns the place, which gives off the vibe that, soon, he really will.
As reported earlier by The Verge’s own Alex Heath, Twitter chief marketing officer Leslie Berland informed staffers in an email that they should expect to see Musk around HQ this week and hear from him directly on Friday.
Meeting a lot of cool people at Twitter today!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 26, 2022
Musk has also changed the description on his profile to read “Chief Twit,” which sounds fitting for the soon-to-be majority owner of Twitter and resident “Technoking” of Tesla. Why Musk entered Tesla’s HQ carrying a sink is unclear; however, he followed up the introductory tweet with another message that read, “Meeting a lot of cool people at Twitter today!”
Musk did not tweet anything about today’s report by Reuters of an ongoing criminal investigation into Tesla over its claims about the Autopilot driver-assist technology.
Those cool people would likely include some who his lawyers have accused of fraud and who could be fired in a mass culling of Twitter’s workforce that Musk has reportedly indicated he’s planning as he tries to turn the company’s finances around.
Of course, if the $54.20 per share payment clears — overpayment grumbling aside — and the two sides don’t run into any snags on the conditions for closing their arrangement, it will all be up to Musk as the service’s new owner.