LAST UPDATE | 16 Nov 2022
TWITTER EMPLOYEES MUST decide to stay in or leave the company by tomorrow in an ultimatum issued by Elon Musk.
Musk emailed employees to say they “will need to be extremely hardcore” to build “a breakthrough Twitter 2.0″ and that long hours at high intensity will be needed for success.
Mr Musk said Twitter is a software and servers company at heart will become much more engineering-driven, with employees who write “great code” comprising the majority of the team.
The billionaire, who completed the $44 billion takeover of the San Francisco company in late October, had already fired much of its full-time workforce by email on 4 November and is moving to eliminate an untold number of contract jobs for workers tasked with fighting misinformation and other harmful content.
He asked workers to click “yes” on a link provided in the email if they want to be part of the “new Twitter”.
He said that employees had until 5pm Eastern Time on Thursday to reply to the link.
Employees who do not reply by that time will receive three months of severance, according to the email.
“Whatever decision you make, thank you for your efforts to make Twitter successful,” Musk wrote.
‘Revamp’
The news comes after he also postponed the relaunch of the site’s paid subscription service after a first attempt saw an embarrassing spate of fake accounts that scared advertisers.
“Punting relaunch of Blue Verified to November 29th to make sure that it is rock solid,” Musk tweeted, delaying his new revamp, originally promised for yesterday, by two weeks.
Punting relaunch of Blue Verified to November 29th to make sure that it is rock solid
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 15, 2022
In an apparent attempt to avoid a repeat of the problem, Musk tweeted that in the new release, “changing your verified name will cause loss of checkmark until name is confirmed by Twitter to meet Terms of Service.”
In the original revamp users in the US could pay $8 for the verified checkmark and were left free to change their account names and impersonate existing accounts, attracting mischief.
Musk’s overhaul of Twitter had already been the subject of heavy criticism after he fired half of the company’s 7,500-strong staff and saw major advertisers suspend ad buys amid the chaos.
Firings this week continued at the platform, with one senior engineer dismissed via a tweet by Musk after he questioned his new policies.
US media reports said about a dozen employees were let go in recent days after openly questioning decision-making by Musk, who has called himself a “free speech absolutist”.
Musk has radically changed the company’s culture since taking it over on 27 October.
He has scrapped a highly popular work from home policy, imposed long hours and centralized authority around a small group of confidantes, including his personal lawyer.
With reporting from PA.
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