Elon Musk reportedly threatened to fire Twitter employees unless they agreed to put in “long hours at high intensity.”
The new owner of the social media company advised employees to accept the promise in an email if they wished to remain, according to the Washington Post.
According to Mr. Musk, those who don’t sign up by Thursday will receive three months’ worth of severance money.
Twitter has been contacted by the BBC for comment.
The Guardian was also given access to Mr. Musk’s email to the staff in which he stated that Twitter “will need to be extremely hardcore” to succeed.
Elon Musk reportedly threatened to fire Twitter employees unless they agreed to put in “long hours at high intensity.”
The new owner of the social media company advised employees to accept the promise in an email if they wished to remain, according to the Washington Post.
According to Mr. Musk, those who don’t sign up by Thursday will receive three months’ worth of severance money.
Twitter has been contacted by the BBC for comment.
The Guardian was also given access to Mr. Musk’s communication to the team in which he stated that Twitter “would need to be pretty hardline” to thrive.
Mr Musk added that there was “no way to sugar-coat the message” that the slowing global economy was going to hit Twitter’s advertising revenues.
But tech investor Sarah Kunst said the real reason Twitter is facing difficulties is because Mr Musk’s takeover has saddled the company with debt.
His behaviour since the takeover has also led some advertisers to pause their spending, she said.
“He’s now trying to inflict that pain and uncertainty on the employees,” she said.
She added that there was a question mark over how enforceable Mr Musk’s email about hours to staff really was.
“Can you just send an email to staff who already work for you and just unilaterally change their working contract? That remains to be seen.”
Mr Musk himself has been sleeping at Twitter in recent weeks, even while leading electric carmaker Tesla and rocket company SpaceX.
He described his work habits in a US court on Wednesday, where he appeared to defend the eye-popping $56bn pay package he received from electric carmaker Tesla in 2018.
“I pretty much work all the time, with rare exceptions.” he said.
In response to questioning, he later added that the “fundamental organisational restructuring” at Twitter would be complete by the end of this week.
One way Mr Musk could lighten his workload is by sharing the leadership of his other companies.
At the hearing, James Murdoch, a Tesla director and the son of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, said that Mr Musk had identified a potential successor to head the car maker.
Asked to confirm that Mr Musk had never identified a potential new Tesla chief executive, Mr Murdoch said “he actually has”, adding that it had happened in the “last few months”. He didn’t identify who the potential successor was.
Dan Ives, a senior equity analyst at Wedbush Securities, said that Twitter’s culture had “dramatically changed” with Mr Musk at the helm.
“Elon Musk is not going to be doing candlelight dinners and playing ping pong in Twitter’s cafeteria and this is a shock to the system,” he said.
“But he also needs to play nice in the sandbox because if key Twitter engineers and developers leave, this will be a major void in the Twitter ecosystem,” he warned. “There’s a careful balance ahead for him, in this tightrope act.”
Source: BBC
