Elon Musk now owns Twitter

Reports surfaced earlier on Thursday that several members of Twitter’s senior leadership had been summarily fired, including CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and head of legal Vijaya Gadde. Sources familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal that Musk had completed the deal on Thursday, one day before a court imposed deadline.

The abrupt purging of top executives and the lack of any official update from Twitter regarding the status of the acquisition appeared to bring to an end, in fitting fashion, one of the most bizarre deals in corporate history.

Musk agreed to buy the social networking site in April for $54.20 per share, but changed his mind and sought to back out of the deal a couple of months later as the markets suffered a sharp decline.

Musk said that Twitter had misinformed him about the amount of fake “bot” users on the platform, claiming without evidence that the number of bots was significantly higher than Twitter’s 5% estimate. Twitter then sued Musk in Delaware Chancery Court to force him to close the deal.

With roughly 240 million daily users, Twitter is one of the most influential social media services, used by politicians, celebrities, activists, and business moguls to announce news, share information and make jokes.

The sale to Musk, the world’s richest person and the CEO of two other companies — electric car maker Tesla and aerospace company SpaceX — means that Twitter will become a privately held company owned by Musk.

Musk’s ownership of Twitter has raised concerns inside and outside the company regarding his plans. The 51-year-old has said he intends to loosen Twitter’s rules about acceptable speech on the service, including potentially overturning the lifetime ban on former president Donald Trump, and that he intended to layoff 75% of the company’s staff.

Twitter representatives did not return requests for comment.