Twitter 2.0: Five men in Elon Musk's inner circle

Elon Musk has appointed a core team of his trusted lieutenants to execute his plans for Twitter after his $44 billion takeover of the social media platform. These men include the head of his family office, an Indian-origin ex-Twitter executive and the business tycoon’s laywer. After taking sole control of Twitter, Musk fired the company’s four top executives, including Indian-origin CEO Parag Agrawal and legal executive Vijaya Gadde.

These are the 5 men who are part of Elon Musk's core team at Twitter:

Jared Birchall

(Image credit: Jared Birchall/LinkedIn)

Jared Birchall is the head of the family office that manages Elon Musk's assets. He was hired by the Tesla ad SpaceX chief in March 2016. A former Morgan Stanley banker, Birchall has advised Musk on his interactions with Wall Street for several years, according to regulatory filings and legal documents. He also hired an investigator to probe a Musk critic that Musk called "pedo guy" back in 2018, according to court documents. Birchall 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.

Jason Calacanis

(Image credit: Jason Calacanis/LinkedIn)

Jason Calacanis is an entrepreneur and venture capitalist who is a close associate on Elon Musk. It was Calacanis who first tested waters on 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. Musk had replied, "Interesting." Calacanis’s web directly “Mahalo” had raised $20 million in venture capital from investors including Musk.

Alex Spiro

Alex Spiro, high-profile celebrity lawyer, is a long-time legal representative of Elon Musk. The Harvard Law School graduate is a partner at the law firm Quinn Emanuel. It is Spiro who led conversations on the mass layoff of employees at Twitter. In December 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.

Sriram Krishnan

(Image credit: @sriramk/Twitter)

Indian-born Sriram Krishnan last month revealed that he's helping Elon Musk with Twitter "temporarily" after he took over the company. A former Twitter employee, Krishnan is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) which is venture capital fund that invests in crypto and web3 startups. The ex- senior director of product at Twitter was also a top executive at Meta and Snap. Apart from web3 and startups, Sriram Krishnan is also passionate about cryptocurrency and often shares insights about it on his YouTube channel. He also hosts podcasts with wife Aarthi Ramamurthy.

David Sacks

(Image credit: @DavidSacks/Twitter)

Venture capitalist David Sacks is also a long-time associate of Elon Musk. Like Musk, Sacks too was born in South Africa. He worked with Musk at PayPal where he was the Chief Operating Officer (COO). According to The Washington Post, Sacks recently appeared in a Twitter company directory with an official Twitter email and the title “staff software engineer”.