Elon Musk endorses Republican Party for U.S. Congress

Twitter’s new CEO Elon Musk has voiced his support for the Republican Party ahead of the United States midterm elections.

On Monday, Mr Musk tweeted to his 114 million followers, making it the first time the head of a major social media platform explicitly endorsed a U.S. political party.

“To independent-minded voters: Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic,” Mr Musk tweeted. 

In May, Mr Musk announced that he would stop voting for Democrats and would instead vote Republican in the midterms. At the time, Mr Musk said that the Democratic Party was divisive.

In April, Mr Musk said that Twitter had to “be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.”

Mr Musk began mass layoffs last Friday to implement changes since he completed his $44 million acquisition of Twitter. He dissolved the microblogging platform’s board of directors, leaving him to run as the ‘sole director’ of the social media giant.   

Former CEO Parag Agrawal and several other top executives were the first to be sacked after Mr Musk completed the buyout ahead of the court-imposed deadline of October 28.

Ned Segal, the chief financial officer; Vijaya Gadde, the top legal and policy executive; and Sean Edgett, who has been general counsel at Twitter since 2012, were also dismissed. 

The Washington Post cited interviews and documents, reporting that Mr Musk had told prospective investors that as part of his deal to buy Twitter, he would get rid of nearly 75 per cent of the company’s 7,500 workers. At the time, Twitter clarified afterwards to its staff that there were no plans for company-wide layoffs. 

In early October, Mr Musk agreed to buy the company at $54.20 per share, the price he agreed to pay for the company in April after a lengthy legal battle over the terms of the acquisition deal. 

Mr Musk had attempted to back out of the deal by officially notifying an attempt to terminate the agreement in July. However, Twitter approached the court in July, asking it to compel him to complete the deal.

Mr Musk accused Twitter of failing to disclose information about spam bots, also known as fake accounts, on the platform. He maintained that he did not believe the company’s public statements that roughly 5 per cent of its active users are bots.