Since Elon Musk took over Twitter last month, he’s wasted no time in making big changes.
In less than a month, Musk has fired most of Twitter’s executives, laid off half its workers, and introduced a controversial new blue checkmark system.
But he’s not done. Recently Musk gave an ultimatum to his remaining employees: Do “extremely hardcore” work or get out.
That ultimatum was part of a late-night internal email that was discovered by CNN.
In it, Musk wrote:
“Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”
He said that in the future, Twitter will be “much more engineering-driven.”
Then he threw down the gauntlet.
He directed staff to an online form and said, “If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below.”
He wrote that any employee who didn’t do so by 5 p.m. ET on Thursday would be let go (and receive three months’ severance).
This could be a strategy to cut costs, which Musk needs to do because he took on a lot of debt to finance his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter.
As part of that, he’s shown a desire to trim Twitter’s workforce. In addition to immediately laying off half its employees, he also recently fired nearly two dozen employees who criticized him.
That led to all kinds of criticism online.
Musk also had to pause his Twitter Blue subscription service, where users could pay $8 a month for a blue verification checkmark. That drew controversy after trolls used it to impersonate major brands.
One of the victims was drugmaker Eli Lilly, whose stock price tanked after an impersonator claimed the company would be giving away free insulin.
That forced the company to apologize and clarify that, no, insulin will not be free.
But there’s no escaping the fact that Twitter is kind of a mess right now.
And the pressure might be getting to Musk because he recently said he might be stepping down from his role at Twitter.
In court testimony over his Tesla compensation, he said: “I expect to reduce my time at Twitter and find somebody else to run Twitter over time.”
So we’ll see how many “extremely hardcore” workers stick around for Musk. Enjoy those 100-hour work days!
h/t: Digg