On Thursday, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk remotely plugged into the latest town hall st Twitter and spoke with employees about his company plans, including a return to in-office work, possible layoffs and scaling up to one billion users.
Elon Musk’s recent address to Twitter employees at a town hall meeting on Thursday should alleviate doubts about him abandoning his $44 billion bid to buy Twitter due to the high amount of spam/fake accounts.
During the discussion, the Tesla CEO covered a slew of topics, including his lack of desire to run the social media company, the path that Twitter must pursue, aliens, the possibility of layoffs at the microblogging platform, and his quest to bring employees back to offices.
A couple of months ago, the technocrat expressed to acquire Twitter and followed up with an offer. The offer was accepted after a week of corporate dust-up but was later put on hold because Musk cast apprehensions on whether Twitter’s disclosure of 5% of its users being spam accounts is true. He now has full access to Twitter’s live-tweet database.
Between all this, Musk ended remote work at Tesla and ordered all employees to work in offices for at least 40 hours a week, a move directly contradicting Twitter’s policy of working full-time forever from “wherever you feel most productive and creative.†He is willing to let go of anyone who doesn’t want to return to in-office work.
Twitter is different from Tesla. “Tesla makes cars, and you can’t make cars remotely,†Musk told Twitter employees, according to a CNBC source. He said he is strongly biased toward in-person work. The billionaire added, “If somebody is exceptional at their job, then it’s possible for them to be effective, even working remotely,†another person who attended the town hall told Business Insider.
Musk further said he is open to permitting remote work only to those who are “exceptional†at their job.
But the possibility of being unable to work remotely should come as the second-most important thing considering the new prospective owner also talked about layoffs. “Right now the costs exceed the revenue,†Musk said.
Who will be fired depends on the individual performance as well as the financial performance of the company. “It depends. The company does need to get healthy.â€
Musk spoke about how he envisions Twitter as a product, which includes users saying “pretty outrageous things within the law,†and that Twitter shouldn’t amplify or promote it, crack down on “troll armies,†and comparison with TikTok and WeChat to hit one billion daily active users (DAUs). Twitter had 229 million DAUs in Q1 2022.
And if you were holding your breath, Musk said he has no evidence that aliens exist.
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