Musk poses workers with a choice: quit Twitter, or prepare to get “hardcore”
Times are changing at Twitter. In about two weeks under Elon Musk’s leadership, Twitter has fired over 3,700 people, and a slew of high-ranking execs have resigned. But the company’s personnel changes aren’t ending there. According to a report from The Washington Post, Musk sent a late-night email offering the remaining Twitter employees a choice: they can either resign and receive three months severance pay, or they can commit to a “hardcore” work environment.
Twitter employees have until 5 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday to make up their minds.
“Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore,” the letter reads. “This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”
Musk issued a similarly intense email to staff last week, when he ended remote work effectively immediately.
In his short tenure, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has already set product deadlines so aggressive that deleted tweets from employees suggested that they had to sleep at the office. But after a botched rollout of Twitter Blue verification, he pushed that product re-launch back to November 29, at least according to his own tweets.
As Twitter employees weigh the ultimatum that landed in their inboxes late last night, Musk continues to find time to shitpost.
On Tuesday, after several Twitter employees posted that they were fired for criticizing Musk, the “Chief Twit” posted a selfie with two actors who pretended weeks ago to be laid-off Twitter employees.
On the day after Musk took over the platform, the actors walked past a crowd of journalists who were camped outside the Twitter HQ, carrying boxes as though they were just fired. One claimed his name was “Rahul Ligma,” a clear giveaway that he was trolling (please, don’t make me explain the Ligma meme again), but unfortunately, the journalists on the scene were not very meme-literate and reported the layoff of “Ligma” as fact. At the time, Musk had not yet began conducting the anticipated mass layoffs.
“Welcoming back Ligma & Johnson!” Musk tweeted two weeks later, posing with the trolls. “Important to admit when I’m wrong & firing them was truly one of my biggest mistakes.”
The message is especially cringe-worthy given that Twitter asked some employees to come back after they were cut in the mass layoffs.
