On Wednesday morning, Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, sent an email to Twitter employees giving them a deadline of 5 p.m. this Thursday to decide if they want to work for him. He asked those who did not share his vision of a new “hardcore” Twitter to leave their jobs and offered them three months of severance.
“Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore,” Musk wrote in the email. “This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”
In the memo, Musk outlines his plan to make Twitter, “much more engineering-driven,” and directs staff to an online form where they can check yes if they want to be part of the” new Twitter”.
The email, with the subject line “A fork in the road,” comes as Musk has clashed with employees regarding his new approach to running the company. Musk has fired about half of Twitter’s 7,500 person workforce, dismissed thousands of contractors, and let go of at least four of Twitter’s top executives, including the chief executive officer and chief financial officer since acquiring the company.
Remaining Twitter employees say managers instructed them to work 12-hour shifts, seven days a week to hit Musk’s aggressive deadlines and that their jobs are at stake as reported by Business Insider. The billionaire also ended Twitter’s work-from-home policy.
At least one Twitter employee has tweeted about sleeping on the floor at the office to meet Musk’s goal of bolstering the company’s bottom line. Musk has also reportedly made confusing asks of employees, such as requesting that they print out dozens of pages of code they’d recently written and then reversing course and telling them to shred it.
Since completing his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter on Oct 27, Musk has launched several unsuccessful features. The billionaire introduced a new paid verification subscription feature where users can pay $8 to obtain the blue check. This resulted in a wave of fake accounts creating havoc on the app. He also overhauled the way the platform does content moderation to bolster what he calls “free speech,” potentially undoing years of efforts from the company to address misinformation and harassment.
This announcement came shortly after Musk announced that Twitter has suffered a “massive drop in revenue” due to advertisers pausing spending money on the platform, which Musk blames on “activist groups pressuring advertisers.”
Musk has also reportedly told prospective investors in the deal that he planned to get rid of nearly 75% of the company’s staff, in a move that could disrupt every aspect of how Twitter operates. Engineering will be the primary focus, Musk added in the email early Wednesday, with design and product management taking a back seat. It’s unclear how much collateral damage Musk’s actions will inflict on the company long term, but there doesn’t seem to be too much optimism in the air.