Elon Musk appoints five core team members in Twitter

Amid mass layoffs in Twitter, owner Elon Musk has appointed a core team of his trusted lieutenants, including the head of his family office, an Indian-origin ex-Twitter executive and the business tycoon’s laywer.

Musk fired the company’s four top executives, including Indian-origin CEO Parag Agrawal and legal executive Vijaya Gadde. The five men on whom Musk have shown trust are:

1. Jared Birchall - Jared Birchall was hired in 2016 as the head of the family office who manages Elon Musk’s assets. Jared is a former Morgan Stanley banker. He is also the Chief Executive of Musk's brain chip firm Neuralink, a director at Musk’s tunneling firm the Boring Company and a board member at Musk’s philanthropic private foundation.

2. Jason Calacanis - Jason Calacanis is a close associate of Elon Musk who is an entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He first tested the paid verification for Twitter accounts as he tweeted a poll last month, asking how much users would be willing to pay for the blue check mark that Twitter has historically used to verify higher-profile accounts so other users know it’s really them.

3. Alex Spiro - Alex Spiro is a long-time legal representative of Elon Musk. Spiro led conversations on the mass layoff of employees at Twitter. In 2019, Spiro had represented Musk in a defamation case linked to the latter’s comments on the rescue of a Thai boys’ football team and their assistant coach from a cave in Thailand.

4. Sriram Krishnan - Indian-born Sriram Krishnan is a former Twitter employee and is now a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a venture capital fund that invests in crypto and web3 startups. He was also a top executive at Meta and Snap.

5. David Sacks - Venture capitalist David Sacks is also a long-time associate of Elon Musk. He worked with Musk at PayPal where he was the Chief Operating Officer (COO). David Sacks recently appeared in a Twitter company directory with an official Twitter email and the title “staff software engineer”.