Since billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk took over Twitter in late 2022, the social media platform has undergone a serious restructuring. One of the most significant moves was to significantly cut the staffing at Twitter for the company to start generating positive cash flow. Reports of mass firings at the tech giant have plagued the media for months.
It is reported that Elon Musk recently asked various managers to create a list of their best employees that worked under them. What the managers didn’t know was that they were actively compiling a list of their replacements as they would be fired. Unsurprisingly, many employees and former employees aren’t responding well to this behavior from their CEO. “A big part of the way we think about our jobs is having a sense of pride about the job we do and where we work,” says Bruce Daisley, former vice president of Twitter in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, who left the company before Musk took over. “The more Musk behaves like the local drunk – getting into slanging matches with disabled ex-employees – the less current employees will be proud to say they work there.”
In another recent incident Musk mocked an employee he fired by tweeting a clip from “Office Space”. Elon Musk said, speaking about the firing, “The reality is that this guy (who is independently wealthy) did no actual work, claimed as his excuse that he had a disability that prevented him from typing, yet was simultaneously tweeting up a storm. Can’t say I have a lot of respect for that. But was he fired? No, you can’t be fired if you weren’t working in the first place!”
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.
Some say Musk’s radically different leadership style could inspire other tech CEOs to change how they run their respective companies. For years, it has been noted that Silicon Valley is overstaffed and structured inefficiently.