After laying off 50% of the company, Elon sent the following message to the remaining Twitter employees, which prompted 1200 more employees to quit. So in two weeks, Twitter went from 7500 employees to roughly 2500 employees. It’s reported that a number of teams have nobody left to carry out the day to day operations and people worry that Twitter might stop functioning. But it has been about 5 days and I don’t have any issues using Twitter. It remains to be seen if this mass exodus has any significant negative long term impact. I do think it’s quite a risky move from Elon to make so many changes in such a short period of time. But I hope things work out in the end.
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:
[Google form link]
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.
In addition to the massive staff changes, Elon also reinstated many people back to the platform including Donald Trump after putting up a poll on Twitter. People thought the world would be ending when that happened but Donald Trump hasn’t made any tweets since he was unbanned. We will see what happens if he does come back. I do think this is a calculated move from Elon. He only reinstated Trump after more than 50% of support from the poll. The midterm election is over and the red wave didn’t really materialize. The Trump phenomenon seems to be fading and with his deep business interest in Truth Social, the risk of Trump coming back to Twitter and causing huge problems for them seems low. And Elon got to take a victory lap of free speech.
Elon is also pausing the $8 per month verified account program as there are too many impersonations. Someone got a verified check impersonating Eli Lilly and tweeted that “insulin is free now”, prompting chaos and tanking LLY 0.00%↑ stock. Twitter obviously did a very shoddy job for this product launch that they need to do better.
Elon’s dramatic actions so far have prompted multiple culture wars including work ethics vs. work life balance, free speech vs. misinformation minimization and moving fast vs. moving thoughtfully. I could see arguments for both sides on many of the issues highlighted. He is definitely taking a lot of risks most people of his stature wouldn’t take but that’s precisely how Elon Musk was made. I don’t necessarily agree with a lot of his decisions but I appreciate his transparency and his speed of decisions and execution. I don’t know if he will succeed in turning around Twitter in the end but I am sure it will be a very dramatic and bumpy ride for us onlookers to watch.