Elon Musk completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, ending a months-long saga that had veered from surprise bid to attempted withdrawal to the eve of a Delaware trial. He walked into headquarters carrying a sink and, within days, fired the CEO, CFO, and top legal executives.

What followed was the most aggressive restructuring in modern social-media history. Musk cut roughly three-quarters of the workforce, overhauled verification into the paid Twitter Blue, and reinstated previously banned accounts, testing advertisers' tolerance and the platform's stability simultaneously.

The deal was also a leveraged-finance event: banks committed roughly $13 billion in debt that they were subsequently unable to sell down, leaving the acquisition among the most fraught buyout financings of the era. Musk would later rebrand the company X and fold it into his broader corporate empire.

For the startup world, the takeover was a live demonstration of a thesis Musk would carry into xAI and beyond: that a lean headcount and a willingness to break things could, for better or worse, run a platform at a fraction of its prior cost.