According to a copy of a late-night internal email received by the billionaire, Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk has given employees until Thursday evening to commit to “extremely hardcore” work or else leave the company.
“Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore,” Musk wrote in the memo. “This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”
Musk continues in the message by outlining how Twitter will be “much more engineering-driven” before giving the crew a deadline. The message asks personnel to click “yes” on what looks to be an online form if they are certain they want to participate in the new Twitter.
The message stated that those who did not sign the pledge by Thursday at 5 p.m. Eastern time would receive three months of severance pay.
A company whose staff Musk had already cut in half is anticipated to experience even more attrition as a result of the commitment email and a new rule requiring a return to the office. In the future, according to Musk, Twitter will be run more by engineers, while the design and product management departments will still be crucial and report to him.
He said: “those writing great code will constitute the majority of our team and have the greatest sway.”
Additionally, it coincides with Musk’s announcement that he is delaying Twitter’s Blue Verified, his first significant product since taking over as owner and CEO of the company last month, as the company works out problems with the feature following a botched rollout.
The product, which costs $7.99 per month and grants users a blue check-mark icon next to their names, was introduced by Twitter a week ago. It promises to cut the number of advertisements users see in half while also increasing the visibility of their posts. By Friday, the option was gone amid fraudulent accounts that claimed to be LeBron James and President Biden, among others.
Musk tweeted late Tuesday that the service wouldn’t “relaunch” until Nov. 29 “to make sure that it is rock solid,” after sign-ups were halted Thursday night.
A person with knowledge of the internal discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation said that Twitter staff are utilizing the extra two weeks to conduct a postmortem on the launch and try to understand why the impersonations grew out of control.
