Elon Musk Makes Bid to Buy Twitter: Live Updates, News and Reactions

When Elon Musk contacted Twitter’s chief executive, Parag Agrawal, to tell him that he intended to buy shares in the company and wanted to discuss changes to the platform, Mr. Musk was reaching out to someone who had already shown interest in some of his ideas.

Mr. Musk and Mr. Agrawal, who became the company’s leader last year after Jack Dorsey stepped down, are known to be friendly. The current and former Twitter chief executives have both expressed views in the past that appear to align with Mr. Musk’s larger vision for a less moderated version of the platform.

Mr. Agrawal had been with Twitter for 10 years before taking on the role, most recently as chief technology officer, and acted as Mr. Dorsey’s confidant. In stepping into the top job, Mr. Agrawal became responsible for bringing to fruition Mr. Dorsey’s ideas for decentralizing Twitter — ideas that Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Musk have discussed publicly on the platform.

In March, Mr. Musk polled his roughly 82 million followers asking them if they agreed that Twitter’s algorithm should be open source, prompting Mr. Dorsey to swiftly respond: “The choice of which algorithm to use (or not) should be open to everyone,” he wrote in a tweet.

This month, after buying a 9.2 percent stake in the company, Mr. Musk had a similar exchange with Mr. Agrawal, who replied to Mr. Musk’s poll on giving users the ability to edit their tweets. “The consequences of this poll will be important,” Mr. Agrawal wrote. “Please vote carefully.” Twitter later announced that it was testing an edit feature for tweets but specified that it “didn’t get the idea from a poll.”

But though Mr. Musk has been chummy with Twitter’s leaders, he was critical of them in the Securities and Exchange Commission document he filed in his bid to take over the company. He said that he didn’t trust leadership to make the changes he saw as urgent, including those that would make Twitter a platform for “free speech around the globe.”

“If the deal doesn’t work, given that I don’t have confidence in management nor do I believe I can drive the necessary change in the public market, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder,” Mr. Musk said in the filing. “This is not a threat, it’s simply not a good investment without the changes that need to be made. And those changes won’t happen without taking the company private.”

Mr. Agrawal has not made any public comments about Mr. Musk on Twitter since announcing this week that Mr. Musk would no longer join the company’s board.