Elon Musk tells Twitter staff to work ‘long hours at high intensity’ or leave

The billionaire’s ultimatum, following sweeping layoffs and executive exodus, sets a deadline for employees to stay or take a severance package.

Elon Musk has emailed Twitter employees demanding that they commit to ‘long hours at high intensity’ or leave. Picture: Samuel Corum/AFP

Elon Musk emailed Twitter employees demanding that they commit to “long hours at high intensity” or leave, further roiling a staff already dealing with sweeping lay-offs, mass executive departures and repeated business missteps under the billionaire’s ownership.

Twitter employees must fill out a Google form by Thursday, 5pm. ET, to indicate if they want to remain at the company and are willing to work an intense regimen, according to the overnight email from Mr Musk that many employees woke up to on Wednesday, with the subject line “A Fork in the Road.” Those who opt not to commit would be given three months of severance, he said.

“Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore,” Mr Musk wrote in the email, which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal. “This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.” In the nearly three weeks since he completed his $US44bn ($A65.33bn) takeover of Twitter, Mr Musk has been radically reshaping its workforce and leadership while simultaneously pushing employees to revamp the company’s products and business model, rethink its content-moderation policies, and reassure advertisers concerned about the impact of all those changes.

His leadership style at Twitter has mixed exhortations, warnings and sarcasm. Several Twitter employees said they were fired after they criticised Mr Musk, with some saying they received an email stating their behaviour had violated company policy without specifying further. Some said the firings followed critical remarks they posted on Twitter or internally on Slack.

In one case, Mr Musk tweeted that he had fired a staff software engineer, Eric Frohnhoefer, after the employee posted on the platform saying that the billionaire was wrong in something he had tweeted about a technical matter. Mr Frohnhoefer confirmed to the Journal that he had been fired.

In response to a tweet about his having fired employees who were critical of him, Mr Musk said on the platform on Tuesday: “I would like to apologise for firing these geniuses. Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere.” Separately, Twitter also fired a number of contractors last weekend, including people working in engineering, customer support, marketing and product design, according to people familiar with the matter. The exact scope of the cuts couldn’t be determined.

In his latest email giving employees his ultimatum, which was reported earlier by the Washington Post, Mr Musk said Twitter will be “more engineering-driven” going forward. “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,” he said. “At its heart Twitter is a software and servers company, so I think this makes sense.”

The email came after an all-hands meeting last Thursday, Twitter’s first since Mr Musk’s acquisition was completed on October 27, in which the billionaire talked about ending remote work for most Twitter employees, saying they needed to come to the office if able, the Journal previously reported. Mr Musk last week also warned employees of “dire” economic challenges facing the company and said that bankruptcy is a possibility.

Mr Musk ousted many of Twitter’s top executives upon taking over the company, including the CEO, finance chief, and legal chief. About a week later he laid off about half of the workforce, which had started the year with about 7,500 employees. A number of other senior executives have resigned in recent days, including chief information security officer, Lea Kissner, who was responsible for data security, and Yoel Roth, head of trust and safety, the Journal previously reported.

On Wednesday, Mr Musk said he should be done with the “fundamental” restructuring of Twitter soon and plans to find a successor to run the company.

“I expect to reduce my time at Twitter and find somebody else to run Twitter over time,” he said during courtroom testimony in defense of a shareholder lawsuit over his multibillion-dollar compensation package at Tesla Inc., where he is also CEO.

The rapid workforce changes have coincided with efforts by the billionaire to put his imprint on the social-media platform. In one of his first product changes as the company’s new chief executive, Mr Musk got rid of a grey “official” check mark hours after launching it. A day later, Twitter said it was once again adding the label for some accounts to combat impersonation.

More recently, Mr Musk postponed the launch of the upgraded subscription and verification service to November 29 after a fumbled deployment earlier this month that prompted some users to create accounts impersonating major brands, celebrities, politicians and others.

Mr Musk has said he wants Twitter to become less reliant on advertising, which has accounted for about 90 per cent of the company’s sales. But he has also spent these past few weeks trying to appeal to advertisers, many of whom have paused their spending on the platform in the wake of his takeover, largely either out of concern that he might weaken content moderation, potentially leading to more objectionable speech on the platform, or because of the uncertainty surrounding the company’s direction.

A self-described free-speech absolutist, Mr Musk has pledged to limit content moderation in favour of emphasising free speech. After taking over Twitter, Mr Musk said Twitter would form a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints, and that no major changes to its content-moderation policies would happen before that council convenes.

The Wall Street Journal