Elon Musk Asks Twitter Employees to Deliver “Exceptional Performance” or Leave
- Laurent Giret
- Nov 16, 2022
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24
After it was recently reported that Elon Musk had unceremoniously fired Twitter employees that disagreed with him publicly or privately, the Twitter CEO has apparently had enough: The Washington Post is reporting today that Elon Musk has asked Twitter employees to either commit to a new “hardcore” work culture or leave the company.
Musk reportedly sent his ultimatum by email to employees this morning: Twitter employees have until tomorrow at 5 PM ET to sign a pledge to stay at Twitter or leave the company with three months of severance pay. In his email, Musk wrote that employees who choose to stay “will need to be extremely hardcore” in the near future.
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“This will mean working long hours at high intensity,” Musk added. “Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.” Musk’s ultimatum is also tied to the new requirement for Twitter employees to spend a minimum of 40 hours per week at one of Twitter’s offices.
Twitter laid off half of its workforce earlier this month, though it was later reported that the company had been asking “dozens” of fired employees to come back. Earlier this week, it was also reported that Twitter had also fired 80% of its contractor employees with no notice. That represents around 4,400 people in total who were working on content moderation and other core infrastructure services.
Elon Musk’s ultimatum for employees remaining at Twitter will probably push many of them to leave. It’s hard to imagine how the platform can stick around in the long run after losing so many employees in such a short amount of time. It’s not been a month since Elon Musk took over Twitter, but the work environment for those who remain seems to have changed for the worst.
All this drama doesn’t seem to derail Elon Musk’s plans for Twitter so far. After the company stopped its rollout of the new Twitter Blue subscription last week, Musk tweeted that the new plan is to relaunch “Blue Verified” on November 29th and “make sure that it is rock solid.”