Several more senior employees leave Twitter amid takeover

Ahead of the expected Twitter takeover from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, two vice presidents and another senior employee at Twitter parted ways with the social media platform.

Vice president of Twitter Service Katrina Lane, vice president of product management Ilya Brown, and head of data Max Schmeiser are all leaving, a spokesperson for the company confirmed, saying that they are departing for new opportunities.

Following the departures of the general manager of Twitter’s consumer product division, Kayvon Beykpour, and revenue product lead, Bruce Falk, the new departures came just a week after they left the company.

Beykpour tweeted that Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal asked him to leave and that it wasn’t “how and when I imagined leaving Twitter.”

The company’s board has unanimously accepted Musk’s $44 billion offer for Twitter in April.

Various ways to shake up Twitter were pitched by the Tesla CEO, including open-sourcing the algorithm, adding a small fee for government accounts, and generally making the platform less censorious, per report.

For now, waiting for regulatory and shareholder approval is why the offer is still pending, and Musk tweeted last week that the deal is “temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.”

Twitter’s CEO must provide proof that less than 5% of accounts are bots before the deal can move forward, said Musk, and called on the SEC to investigate the company’s internal estimate.

Musk would be taking Twitter private at $54.20 per share, which is about 36% higher than the company’s current share price of around $38.48. But this will only happen if the deal goes through.