Vijaya Gadde had been a low-key Silicon Valley power figure for years, and she was instrumental in Twitter’s controversial choices to ban Donald Trump and censor news items concerning Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Gadde and her family encountered bigotry while she grew up in Beaumont, Texas, where she claims her father had to get permission from the Ku Klux Klan to sell door-to-door insurance.
According to federal records, she has also contributed routinely to Democratic candidates, contributing more than $18,000 over the past two decades and most recently providing $2,700 to Kamala Harris in 2019.
As Twitter’s senior legal officer and general counsel, Gadde wields immense power at the firm, where she has long held virtually final authority over who is permitted on the network and what they can tweet.
Gadde once stated in an interview with Bloomberg that former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey delegated the formulation and implementation of content restrictions to her.
He rarely weighs in on specific enforcement decisions, according to Gadde. “I cannot even recall a period when. Typically, I go to him and explain what will transpire.
Gadde’s power has placed her at the center of some of Twitter’s most contentious moderation decisions, such as the decision to permanently ban Trump after his supporters stormed the US Capitol in January 2021.
She also endorsed Twitter’s decision to prohibit the posting of links to a New York Post article based on files from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop prior to the 2020 presidential election.
As Musk hurried them out last night, he instructed Tesla engineers to report to headquarters today to begin updating the coding for the website.
He intends to provide a ‘edit’ option for all users and open source algorithms to boost the openness of how users’ data is used to propose content to them.
He also intends to reinstate President Trump’s access to the site.
Trump applauded his takeover, writing on his own social networking site Truth Social on Friday. ‘TRUTH SOCIAL has become a phenomenon of sorts.
Last week, it had more users than every other platform, including TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook.
It also appears and functions better to my eyes. I am ecstatic that Twitter is now in sensible hands and will no longer be managed by anti-American radical left-wing lunatics and crazies.
Twitter must now work diligently to eliminate the bots and false accounts that have caused it so much harm.
It will be somewhat smaller, but superior. I LOVE TRUTH!’
Conservative figures who were previously barred from the podium now believe that his commitment to free speech will let them to return.
Donald Trump, Roger Stone, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, and U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene are among the prominent individuals who have been banned from Twitter.
Former head of global public policy, Colin Crowell, is among several who have criticized his proposals as risky.
He left Twitter in 2019, far before Musk had any plans for the site, but he told The New York Times: ‘It’s a ‘back-to-the-future’ return to content guidelines from 2010, but one that disregards the lived experience of the last decade.
People soon recognize that the Wild West requires a sheriff, both to ensure the safety of its residents and to improve its commercial prospects.
The price of Twitter shares has increased significantly over the week in anticipation of the acquisition, although trading will cease on Friday on the NYSE.
Musk intends to take the company private, a move that will shelter him from some of the regulation and red tape he suffers as the CEO of a publicly traded company.
Former top Twitter attorney Gadde, who earned $17 million in 2021, was reportedly in tears as news of Musk’s takeover broke in April. Insider reported that she has already been compensated $12.5 million for her difficulties.
Ex-CFO Segal, who was responsible for Mr. Trump’s Twitter ban, also received $25.4 million after being dismissed by Musk on Thursday night.
In addition, former CCO Sarah Personette received $11.2 million as part of Musk’s estate sale.
Despite Musk’s clear satisfaction with the agreement that will go down in history, several experts assert that he “overpaid” for the platform.
Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives told the US Sun that the sale “will go down in history as one of the most overvalued tech acquisitions in the annals of M&A deals on Wall Street.”
Ives, who works for a Los Angeles-based financial firm, estimates the company’s valuation to be closer to $25 billion than $44 billion.
“With a reasonable value that we would estimate to be around $25 billion, Musk’s purchase of Twitter remains a big mystery that he was eventually unable to escape after the Delaware Courts were involved,” he said.
In anticipation of the South African’s acquisition of the social media company, the market responded favorably, with share prices clearly rising.
They increased by 7.23 percent over the past five days and were up approximately 1 percent at $53.94 on Wednesday morning.
In July, the stock price reached its lowest point in four months. Since then, the share price has increased by around 65 percent.
However, the New York Stock Exchange website indicated that Twitter shares would be stopped from trade following Musk’s acquisition.
The South African publicly challenged Twitter’s current leadership team, specifically their content moderation and censorship policies. He has also argued with them about data on the number of bot or spam accounts.
This agreement closes at the eleventh hour, just one day before Musk was to be dragged back into court by Twitter over a back-and-forth he had regarding whether he would purchase the firm.
Wednesday, the billionaire updated his Twitter profile to describe himself as “Chief Twit” and shared a video of himself lugging a porcelain sink into the company’s headquarters in San Francisco.
This encouraged rumors that Musk had acquired Twitter, since he released a video with the description, “Entering Twitter HQ, let that sink in.”
Agrawal, who took over from founder Jack Dorsey about a year ago, and Musk have been at odds over the number of authentic Twitter users, with Musk reacting to one of Agrawal’s threads in May with a ‘poop’ emoji.
When Musk launched his initial takeover proposal in April, he claimed he had not been provided with proper information regarding spam accounts and bots.
Musk withdrew his proposal after three months, claiming he had been deceived about the size of the company.
Twitter has stated for years that less than 5 percent of its’monetizable daily active users’ are bots (mDAU).