Elon Musk isn’t messing around. The new owner of Twitter has posed an ultimatum to the company’s employees, stating that they must commit to an “extremely hardcore” work environment moving forward, otherwise quit and receive three months of severance. The question was posed in an email sent to employees late last night and obtained by The Washington Post.
The news comes as Musk moves forward in working on what he calls “Twitter 2.0,” which will seemingly be a reinvention of Twitter as a product and company under his ownership. In order to achieve that goal, Musk wants employees to work “long hours at high intensity” and that “only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.” If employees are okay with those terms, they are to sign an online form by Thursday at 5 p.m. ET. The full email can be found below.
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.
Twitter will also be much more engineering-driven. Design and product management will still be very important and report to me, but those writing great code will constitute the majority of our team and have the greatest sway. At its heart, Twitter is a software and servers company, so I think this makes sense.
If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below:
Anyone who has not done so by 5pm ET tomorrow (Thursday) will receive three months of severance.
Whatever decision you make, thank you for your efforts to make Twitter successful.
Elon
This new ultimatum is another way Musk is sorting out the employees he wants to keep on payroll. Upon closing his acquisition of Twitter, Musk laid off almost half of all employees, then proceeded to ask some to return. He’s also fired an astonishing 5,500 contractors, as well as a handful of employees who spoke poorly of him on Slack and (you guessed it) Twitter.
It’s clear that Musk is anxious to get Twitter to a place that he’s comfortable with. One of his pet peeves was the selection of accounts that received a blue checkmark in the past, marking them as verified. To defeat any elitism he saw in the previous verification method, he forced Twitter employees to develop a new $7.99 version of Twitter Blue that gave each subscriber a checkmark next to their name by a certain date, otherwise get axed. The feature shipped, but quickly, impersonations of previously verified people popped up left and right and resulted in many poor outcomes, including a fake announcement that Eli Lilly’s insulin would become free. Musk says he’s now targeting November 29th to relaunch Twitter Blue with a new way to verify more people.
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