If you click “Yes”, you are committing to working “long hours at high intensity”. If you click “No”, you leave your job with three months’ salary in your pocket. Twitter employees had two days, Wednesday November 16 and Thursday November 17, to make a choice whose binary character bears the signature ofElon Musk. Aware of the originality of the method, the latter insisted that this email was indeed an “official communication from the company”, and not “a phishing attempt”.
Eager to build a “Twitter 2.0”, the American multi-billionaire intends to apply the methods he introduced at Tesla. Namely to have in its ranks only “extremely hardcore” teams, capable of displaying “exceptional performance”, according to the terms of the email sent to employees, the content of which was revealed by the washington post. The brutality of the Musk method is a policy, and after the layoff of half of the 7,500 employees at the end of October, the place is initially more or less voluntary for hundreds of others. After these times of upheaval, Musk hopes that there will only be soldiers left capable of improving the situation of a company which he considers “fragile”.
This Thursday afternoon, the badges of all employees were temporarily deactivated, while by a process of setting in abyme, many departing announced their departure by messages on Twitter. The now ex-supply chain manager, for example, wrote there that she was “perhaps exceptional, but not unconditional”. Another ex-tweep – the nickname of Twitter employees – Deanna Hines Glasgow reminisced about the good memories, happy to have been able to accomplish more than she “never thought possible”. Many gathered in one of the platform’s audio lounges to share a last moment together. The starters are legion, and without knowing their exact number, the social platform Blind reveals that of the 250 connected people associated with Twitter, 73% of them had decided to leave.
Concerns about the proper functioning of the social network
Thursday evening, when the ultimatum ended, luminous messages hostile to Musk were projected on the facade of Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco. It read: “Elon Muskshut up”, or “Onward to bankruptcy”. With these thousands of departures, many observers fear for the survival of Twitter, wondering how such an important network can continue to operate effectively with so few employees. To the point that the hashtag #RIPTwitter has met with wild success. The main interested party prefers to laugh about it, tweeting this Thursday a parody image from the burial of the social network to the blue bird, which this same blue bird is present at. As if a new Twitter was amused by the disappearance of the old one. Behind the scenes, he admits no mind independent of his own, the New York Times revealing that he had gone through employees’ messages and tweets in order to fire those who criticized him.
The challenges Twitter faces go beyond the buyout as seven senators on Thursday asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether the company has breached a consumer confidentiality agreement since Musk took over as CEO. . According to them, changes in internal reviews and data security practices put users at risk.