Elon Musk mocks trolls, tweets ’Wasn’t Twitter supposed to die by now...’

Tuesday saw Elon Musk, the controversial Twitter chief, poke fun at the trolls who had predicted Twitter's demise shortly after his controversial takeover. "Wasn't Twitter supposed to die by now or something ... ?." Elon asked on the microblogging website.

Elon Musk, who soon after assumed control of the microblogging platform, had been making news for his ideas about how to enhance the platform.

Musk recently came under fire on social media for mass layoffs and his decision to charge users of the Twitter platform $8 to have their accounts verified.

Previously, Musk tweeted, "Trash me all day, but it'll cost $8."

Musk defended his decision to fire staff members by claiming that Twitter was losing more than $4 million every day and the firings were necessary.

"Regarding Twitter's reduction in force, unfortunately, there is no choice when the company is losing over USD 4M/day. Everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required," Musk tweeted.

Twitter agreed to take Musk's offer to buy and privatise the social media platform in April. Musk quickly cast doubt on his willingness to uphold the agreement, claiming that the business had not adequately disclosed the number of spam and phoney accounts using the service.

The deal was abruptly terminated in July by Musk, who had previously expressed interest in purchasing Twitter. The Tesla CEO claimed that by misrepresenting the number of spam and fake bot accounts on its platform, Twitter had broken the terms of their mutual purchase agreement.

The market experienced a significant drop following Musk's deal termination announcement. Twitter later filed a lawsuit against Musk, accusing him of using bots as a cover to back out of a deal. Once more, Musk reiterated last week that he would proceed with the purchase of Twitter at the initially agreed-upon price of USD 54.20 per share.

(With inputs from ANI)