Elon Musk fires Twitter Deputy General Counsel James Baker

Yahoo Finance's Alexis Keenan joins the Live show to discuss Twitter's exec shakeup as Elon Musk announces the departure of Twitter Deputy General Counsel James Baker.

Video Transcript

BRAD SMITH: And staying with the theme of some social media, or at least, a person who owns social media and the company, Elon Musk facing a new bump in the road in his Twitter takeover journey. Musk informing in a tweet yesterday that Twitter deputy general counsel James Baker was exited from the company over concerns about Baker's possible role in suppression of information. And here with all the details on this is Yahoo Finance's Alexis Keenan. Alexis, what do we know so far?

ALEXIS KEENAN: Hi, Brad. So Jim Baker was one of the company's top lawyers for Twitter. He joined in 2020. He was also a former general counsel for the FBI, and he was let go after some of his internal communications from Twitter were turned over to two Substack journalists that Musk has really commissioned, if you will, to review some of the company's internal documents from prior to his takeover. Musk calls this project M-- calls it the Twitter files, rather. And he is trying, he says, to expose past management decisions that benefited or benefit Democrats and to rebuild trust on Twitter's platform.

Now, he didn't elaborate. Musk did not elaborate in that tweet that you showed. But he did say that Baker was let go due to possible, his possible role in suppression of information important to the public dialogue. Now, these two former journalists, or former-- I shouldn't call them former journalists. One is a former Rolling Stone reporter. His name is Matt Taibbi, and the other is former New York Times op-ed editor Bari Weiss.

Now, when they released the first batch of these internal communications, that was on Friday. And that included some communications from 2020 between Twitter's employees, some of them being Baker. And there were discussions in those internal communications about Twitter's decision to block that controversial New York Post story that ran on Hunter Biden's laptop in the run-up to the presidential election.

Now, Taibbi also said that there should be some additional communications that the public can expect to be released in the coming days, that there will be more internal communications to see that these two journalists are still going through the documents.

However, it's really important to note that he also said that he had to agree to certain conditions in order to publicize these Twitter communications. We don't know at this point what those conditions are. Hopefully, we will find out what they are, but unusual for a journalist to agree to conditions behind the reporting. So we'll have to see what all that entails.

JULIE HYMAN: Well, I mean, Taibbi is not a typical journalist, right? I mean, he was most-- he's probably best known for deeming Goldman Sachs the vampire squid, right, wrapped around the face of humanity, famously, in Rolling Stone and has been an independent journalist now for quite some time.

Bari Weiss, who used to be with the New York Times and then left because some controversy there, or she was seen, perhaps, by some as too right leaning for that publication-- I don't remember the exact circumstances. But whatever the case, that's sort of the context for this coming out. And one could argue the discussions that were revealed were sort of typical moderation discussions that happen at social networks.

One more just sort of thing to throw into this, Alexis, Jack Dorsey, of course, former CEO of Twitter, tweeting this morning as well about this whole situation, tweeting in response to Elon Musk, saying, if the goal of trans-- if the goal is transparency to build trust, why not just release everything without filter and let people judge for themselves, including all discussions around current and future actions, and make everything public now, Dorsey says, which Musk has not quite yet done.

ALEXIS KEENAN: Yeah, though he has said that there could be a document dump that does include just unedited, unfiltered communications from the company. So we'll see if that happens.

JULIE HYMAN: Yes, we will.

BRIAN SOZZI: Yes, we will. Alexis Keenan, thanks so much.