When Twitter agreed to sell itself to Elon Musk for $44 billion on April 25, the two parties agreed to specific terms of the merger, signed a document, and filed it to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

‍

Musk doesn’t yet own Twitter, and he won’t for many more months, but he is now locked into a contract with the social network’s current management, and there’s a $1 billion penalty at stake if he pulls out. The two sides also agreed to certain rules of behavior for the period before the deal closes. And one day after that agreement was reached, Musk already broke the rules.

‍

What rule did Musk break?

‍

After Politico reported that Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s top lawyer and head of trust and safety, had cried in an internal meeting following news of the acquisition, conservative journalist Saagar Enjeti tweeted a screenshot of the article alongside the message: “Vijaya Gadde, the top censorship advocate at Twitter who famously gaslit the world on Joe Rogan’s podcast and censored the Hunter Biden laptop story, is very upset about the @elonmusk takeover.”

‍

Gadde’s team

which is in charge of content moderation decisions at Twitter, briefly blocked a link to an October New York Post article about a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, son of soon-to-be-US president Joe Biden. It also temporarily locked the Post’s account. The laptop was eventually confirmed to be Biden’s, and then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apologized, saying Twitter made a mistake.

‍

On Tuesday, Musk jumped into the fray, in essence agreeing with Enjeti’s critique of Gadde. “Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate,” he tweeted.