If you click “Yes”, you are committing to working “long hours at high intensity”. If you click “No”, you leave your job with three months’ salary in your pocket. Twitter employees had two days, Wednesday November 16 and Thursday November 17, to make a choice whose binary nature bears the signature of Elon Musk. Aware of the originality of the method, the latter insisted that this email was indeed an “official communication from the company”, and not “a phishing attempt”.
Eager to build a “Twitter 2.0”, the American multi-billionaire intends to apply the methods he introduced at Tesla. Namely, counting in its ranks only “extremely hardcore” teams, capable of displaying “exceptional performance”, according to the terms of the email sent to employees, the content of which was revealed by the Washington Post. The brutality of the Musk method is a policy, and after the layoff of half of the 7,500 employees at the end of October, the place is initially more or less voluntary for hundreds of others. After these times of upheaval, Musk hopes that there will only be soldiers left capable of improving the situation of a company which he considers “fragile”.
This Thursday afternoon, the badges of all employees were temporarily deactivated, while by a process of mise en abyme, many starters announced their departure by messages on Twitter. The now ex-supply chain manager, for example, wrote there that she was “perhaps exceptional, but not unconditional”. Another ex-tweep – the nickname of Twitter employees – Deanna Hines Glasgow reminisced about the good memories, happy to have been able to accomplish more than she “never thought possible”. Many gathered in one of the platform’s audio lounges to share a last moment together. The starters are legion, and without knowing their exact number, the social platform Blind reveals that of the 250 connected people associated with Twitter, 73% of them had decided to leave.
Thursday evening, when the ultimatum ended, luminous messages hostile to Musk were projected on the facade of Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco. It read: “Elon Musk, shut up”, or “Forward to bankruptcy”. With these thousands of departures, many observers fear for the survival of Twitter, wondering how such a large network can continue to operate effectively with so few employees. To the point that the hashtag
The challenges Twitter faces go beyond the buyout as seven senators on Thursday asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether the company has breached a consumer confidentiality agreement since Musk took over as CEO. . According to them, changes in internal reviews and data security practices put users at risk.
