Musk, ultimatum to Twitter employees: “Give everything for the new course or quit”

Ultimatum to Twitter employees from Elon Musk: decide to work on the new course of the social network in a “tireless” and unreserved way, or leave the company, with a good exit. This is the content of an email, published by the Washington Post, in which the new sole owner of the social network wrote to the 2,700 employees left after the massive layoff plan that halved their number.

The text reads: “If you are sure you want to be part of the new course, click yes on the link below”. The email refers to an online form in which employees are invited to accept or reject the proposal. And everyone will need to do so by 5pm Wednesday SF time. Midnight in Italy.

Twitter fired 50% of its employees two weeks ago. The highest rate of layoffs among large Silicon Valley tech companies in 2022, and which currently sees a partial 130,000 job cuts, led by the 11,000 employees fired by Meta, and by the 10,000 laid off by Amazon on Monday last.

The email would have been sent at midnight between Tuesday and Wednesday. Musk writes that Twitter’s corporate policies will be “very strict” going forward. And this will mean “working long hours, and at a high pace”. And again: “Only exceptional performance” at work “will constitute a sufficient grade”. A letter that seems to follow the cardinal principles of his business philosophy, told during a long meeting with his new employees, and in which he said in no uncertain terms that he was “obsessed with failures”, and that in the technology industry, “only the paranoid (of work) survive”.

The ultimatum comes a few days after the new course imposed on work by the social network, which put an end to smart working adopted en masse by the social network until before its arrival. And a week after the launch of Blue Verified, the product that gives users a blue check icon next to their name for $7.99 a month. Failed launch.

Twitter had to take a step back on Friday as a series of fake accounts of popular profiles appeared soon after, from US President Joe Biden to LeBron James. It should be available again on November 29th. Last stumbling block of a month that began with the difficulties of reorganizing Twitter, and which will continue today with the trial that sees him accused by Tesla shareholders of having set too simple objectives to obtain a 53 billion compensation package as CEO of the company.

The trial will be held in Delaware: the same court, the same judge who should have decided on the lawsuit filed by Twitter, before Musk decided to honor the commitments made in April, and to pay out 44 billion for 100% of the company’s share package.