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Journalism of Courage
Chaos continued at Twitter with more employees now ready to resign, after Elon Musk’s last email asked them to commit to ‘Twitter 2.0’ and prepare for some “hardcore” work or leave. Unsurprisingly, many employees appear to have opted for quitting– with some reports claiming that nearly 80 per cent want out. Now Musk is scrambling and making last-minute appeals to get employees to stay, specifically those critical to Twitter’s functioning. We break down the latest chaos taking place at Twitter.
Wednesday midnight, Twitter employees received an email from Elon Musk asking them to consider their future at the company. The email had the subject line, “A fork in the road,” and told employees that those who wished to stay would have to work “long hours at high intensity”. This would likely include weekends as well. Employees who did not wish to do so could take a severance package that would include three months of pay. The email included a link to a Google form, where employees who were okay had to click on yes. According to several reports, ‘yes’ was the only option in the form. Some pointed out that the email was almost like a ‘loyalty pledge’ to Musk and his inner circle.
“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 long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade,” said the email. It is not clear what would constitute ‘exceptional performance’. More importantly, employees were told they confirm being part of this by 5 pm New York Time Thursday. “Whatever decision you make, thank you for your efforts to make Twitter successful,” it ended.
If Musk was hoping for a loyalty pledge from Twitter’s remaining workforce, well, the email had the exact opposite effect. According to The New York Times, resignations started rolling in and hundreds of employees were taking the exit deal. For Twitter, which has already lost half of its workforce — Musk fired nearly half of the original 7,000 staff after he took over — this new spate of resignations comes as further bad news. It also raises questions on whether the company and social network will have enough staff left to function properly. More importantly, given Musk’s grand visions for the platform from Twitter Blue to a spate of new features, the further loss of key employees will only hamper these plans.
Plus, it doesn’t help that Musk has been sacking engineers and others who have been critical of him on the platform in public and even those who joked about him on the company’s official Slack messaging platform. For instance, Musk publicly fired one Twitter Android engineer, who called him out over his claims that Twitter’s Android app was slow.
It looks like Musk is attempting some last-minute damage control. According to several reports, he and his team are trying to reach out to employees deemed critical and trying to persuade them to change their minds. According to NYT, he also sent messages allowing remote work— which he had ended in an earlier email. He said that remote work would be allowed if the team manager vouched for an employee, and ensured that they were doing exceptional work. If the employee did not deliver, then the manager is also liable to be fired. Musk also appeared to joke about Twitter’s future posting, “How do you make a small fortune in social media? Start out with a large one.”
In many countries, the hashtag #RIPTwitter was already trending with hundreds of thousands of tweets. There are serious concerns over whether using Twitter is safe, given that a majority of its employees want out. It is not clear how many employees plan to leave the company, or how many will be persuaded to stay. If Twitter does lose critical engineering staff, the functioning of the site comes into question as well. Remember, many senior executives, including Lea Kissner, Twitter’s former chief information security officer, Damien Kieran, the chief privacy officer, and Marianne Fogarty, chief compliance officer have already left the company. Yoel Roth, Twitter’s chief of trust and safety, also quit last week. It remains to be seen how Twitter will survive this latest round of turmoil.
