Musk issues ultimatum to remaining Twitter staff to commit or leave with severance
Elon Musk sent out an email that all Twitter employees must respond to, committing to a 'hardcore' Twitter operation or resigning with severance.
Twitter has been a spectacle since Elon Musk was forced into completing the $44 billion deal that put him in ownership of it. In the wake of that takeover, Musk has turned the company inside out, laying off thousands of employees, removing leadership, and even firing tech staff for perceived as critical of his new direction with the company. Now, it seems those still working at Twitter have a choice to make: Commit to “hardcore” work on Twitter or take severance and leave the company, and all employees must make their decisions this week.
Elon Musk reportedly sent out an email putting the above decision on the table for all Twitter employees, as reported by the Washington Post. The email was sent at around midnight on November 16, 2022, and linked to an online form in which all staff was asked to submit their choice.
“If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below,” Musk said in the email. “[Twitter] will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity,” he said. “Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.
Source: Image via Twitter
This email comes amid chaotic times within the Twitter workforce. Elon Musk had already moved to lay off thousands of Twitter employees shortly after taking over the company. Additionally, the CISO, Chief Privacy Officer and Chief Compliance Officer also resigned in the wake of Elon Musk’s moves with the company. Even Twitter Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth quit the company after having been initially supportive and optimistic that Twitter would be in a better place after matters settled from the transition to Musk’s leadership.
It's also very possible that at this point, Elon Musk is trying to cover himself and remove liability on further firings after the last round of layoffs brought about a possible class-action lawsuit in California and could be followed by further legal action in other regions affected by Elon Musk’s firings. With his decision to cut remote work and force employees to return to offices, it’s likely that a large portion of further Twitter staff will simply be forced to leave the company.
With more tangles in the system such as the delay of Twitter Blue verification, the situation under Elon Musk’s Twitter continues to look like it will get more complicated before it shows any sign of smoothing out. Stay tuned as we continue to follow with further updates.
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replyTJ Denzer posted a new article, Musk issues ultimatum to remaining Twitter staff to commit or leave with severance
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Elon Musk just sent an email to all staff outlining "Twitter 2.0", writing it will"need to be extremely hardcore". Long hours, high intensity.
People need to click "yes" to confirm being part of this by 5pm ET tomorrow, else they get 3 months severance. More details:
https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1592801188277538818
Leadership!-
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I’m sure the best left prior to the deal even going through.
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It’s only fair!
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It baffles me that it is legal to just make people work more than 40 hours a week in a Western country. "Work 12 hours daily or you're fired" is just straight illegal in most if not all of Europe, I think. You can work overtime if you want but it is regulated to assure you have sufficient time to rest. Fix your shit America.
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You can't force people to do something outside of their signed contract, especially in Europe, no idea how that works over in the U.S.A. If their working contract states 40hrs then they would need to sign a new contract or their positions made redundant which would see them get a payout.
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Musk isn't even a worst offender unfortunately https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_resident_work_hours#:~:text=for%20first%2C%20second%2C%20and%20third,10%20hours%20off%20between%20shifts.
First there is the fact that *limiting down* to 80 hours per week is needed, and then, anecdotally, these restrictions are not even enforced (aka not actually followed).
I'll give you one guess as to why a for profit hospital would want so many hours of cheap labor under the guise of "doctors need to be the most elite trained hardest workers".-
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I give up lol
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Does not seem legal, or like it should be legal. Something about Musk and this whole ordeal really reminds me of turn of the century robber barons.
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Turn of last century*
:)
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A union at twitter would be fucking awesome right now
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Could you imagine if every single Twitter employee joined a union?
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I would do a banderas.gif, valcan_s style
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to be fairr EST is bEST
https://media.giphy.com/media/Nl6T837bDWE1DPczq3/giphy.gif
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Why does it need to be extremely hardcore? Why not just actually project manage with a real schedule with reasonable work hours.
Amateur, toxic bullshit.-
Maybe Elon made a bet with another billionaire that he could drive away every single employee by the end of November.
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I truly don't wish unemployment on anyone at Twitter but I'd really like that man to face actual, consequential failure.
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I'm fine with those people staying and working their asses off for a boss that clearly doesn't value the work that they do. There's always going to be a few of those corporate-hero types who love to be ground into dust. But I hope everyone else there finds a better alternative role elsewhere & leaves for it immediately.
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Also people might be really attached to their career's and what they built at Twitter. Not everyone who stays is doing it for Elon.
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Why does it have to be so fast and brutal? It's a private company now, so there's no quarterly pressure.
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It's obvious he had no plan prior to making the purchase. And it seems like - and I'm not a billionaire or business owner - but it seems like that taking his time to learn the company and understand its structure and issues (deeply), would probably pay off over time, and possibly even get to profitability faster than slash & burn.
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I think his problem is that he immediately saddled the company with the debt he used to purchase it (another thing that should be illegal, but I digress) so it was going to be hemorrhaging money if it didn't find ways to cut costs and earn more fast. Instead of figure out how the company works and develop a plan with the people on board Musk did his usual bullshit. It's failing this time because, even though most of his other companies are tech companies, they are goods companies instead of service companies. They were also much less established. Musk has found the limits to his success and will probably crash and burn with Twitter here.
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He's like a kid who just got a new toy for Christmas. He wants to play with it.
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He has to pay that $800 million a year interest or whatever it is
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Take the severance. I don’t think it had 3 months left
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Please everyone quit, I've always wanted to witness a $44 BILLION dirty diaper fire.
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He's gonna run it into the ground and be screwed because he has to pay back all those loans. Idiot.
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Haha, he's not going to pay back anything to anyone.
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Seems like the main reason for staying is the broader job market. But yeah, if an employee can find another company to move horizontally to, it's a no-brainer.
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He just mentioned the other day they’d be giving stock like SpaceX does
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“Hey guys, we might go bankrupt. Have some stock!”
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Not even worth it, if he's requiring insane hours.
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If twitter recovers it will be dwspite Elon, not because of him.
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Ok? He's still a dipshit.
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I mean this is how non public companies work. You take a risk to join them with lower compensation in hopes of outsized returns when they go public or are acquired.
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Usually those companies don't just up and tell you they're probably going to go bankrupt right before they ask you to work your ass off for stock. The point here is that this sales pitch is hilatiously terrible.
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Elon's going to be left with an engineering team in the hundreds whose primary qualification is that they're his fans. He's going to try to stitch together the remnants of a dozen divisions to accomplish work that probably would have been a multi-year effort at pre-merger staffing levels.
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the problem arises when there are people who rely on working to keep their visas..those people are essentually forced to stick with this asshole
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As someone whose livelihood was reliant on employment overseas with a work visa for nearly a decade, I can attest to working for a nightmare of a company without many alternative options.
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That's the sort of thing that's normal when you're a shoestring startup with people working for sweat equity to build something that doesn't exist. Not something you expect at a company that's the market leader (for Twitter-like services) and has been doing it for 16 years.
Like I have no doubt Jack Dorsey and the other guys pulled some crazy long hours. They have long since cashed out. -
What would happen to someone who was on vacation this week? They just come back and see they're fired because they didn't click a link?
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"Long hours, high intensity." - does that mean you get paid overtime? If not, why would you give a shit about this? You're not working on rockets.
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lmao
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Musk acts like he is changing the world when is really just another degenerate rich person
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It's clear he needs attention just as much as trump. Everything he does at this point is just to draw attention to himself, it's like oxygen to him.
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I feel like him being there at the ground floor for Tesla, SpaceX, etc. is why his insanity has gone unchecked so far — it's simply woven into the fabric of his cult of personality, and perhaps it's why he thinks it's a successful formula.
What he's running into now is the conflict of another cult of personality, Jack Dorsey's, where his version of insanity went unchecked (relatively speaking), and the reckoning is going to be very hard for him to surrender to and process. -
Someone has overestimated the intersection of highly skilled employees vs employees willing to sacrifice their personal time for the god emperor.
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"I sleep in the office and work every waking hour so obviously these employees should be willing to do the same" says man worth more than any other person on Earth
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Anecdotal but I knew a few folks that applied to work at SpaceX back in the day and it turns out there was a ton of engineers that just burned out because Elon was huge on stuff like mandatory overtime and not allowing vacations. This “hardcore” gimmick is him trying to squeeze as much productivity out of Twitter’s remaining labor force.
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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/14/tesla-texas-construction-workers-gigafactory-lawsuit-labor-violations
Amid accusations of constant hazards and onsite accidents, one worker said his bosses at an unnamed subcontractor falsified credentials instead of actually providing him and others with required job training involving education about health, safety, and workers’ rights – including the right to refuse dangerous work.
Other whistleblowers are reporting what they describe as wage theft and say they weren’t paid at all or didn’t receive proper overtime compensation for their work on the hi-tech facility.
“Nobody deserves what happened in the gigafactory to happen to them, or their family members, or whomever,” Victor, a worker who asked the Guardian to withhold his last name out of fear of retaliation, said in an exclusive interview about working conditions, adding: “I don’t think it was humane.”
Shocking - "move fast and break stuff" also applies to human beings. -
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The transitive genius property at work again. He's now a lawyer.
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He’s going to fuck around and find out.
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Yeah what’s the estimate for how many people taking this deal? Twitter is already operating well below 50% of past full staffing including contractors. This could take them down to like 20%
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Twitter is not tesla or SpaceX. People are passionate and would do this for companies putting cutting edge technology out there. Who would kill themselves for a dime a dozen social media comps y
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Those people are fools, IMO. No job is worth this kind of disrespect of your time as a human.
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It’s past its prime too, it’s not like this was 2012.
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It's not even like he's making them click a "Fire me" button or anything. If they simply continue to do their jobs without clicking the button, then he will fire them. And he just left a record in writing saying that it was not because of their personal performance. I don't think he'd be able to weasel out of paying them severance.
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BREAKING: @elonmusk says he plans to find someone to replace him as acting CEO of Twitter
https://twitter.com/stocktalkweekly/status/1592918089771134978-
I think Parag Agrawal was recently made available to take a CEO job.
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So he's not a complete idiot then
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Heavy emphasis on “acting”
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"My work here is done!" - *walks away from explosion without looking back*
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https://i.pinimg.com/736x/2f/80/03/2f8003617c8eaa77c42d603687bc3988.jpg
But, obviously, not Justice League
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But John, SpaceX and Tesla are only successful because of his tech contributions to spaceships and cars!
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I worked for a company that did that, installed a new president, I was her support and she seemed confused and had nothing to do for a couple weeks and then suddenly she was being interviewed on 60 Minutes or some shit because the company was being sued into oblivion by the attorneys general of like 19 different states for fraudulent practices. The interview went horribly as you would expect and she was like a deer in headlights the whole time. The next Monday, they fired her to great fanfare and the old company president stepped back in.
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I'll bet you a thousand bucks it won't be a little person.
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I’ll bet you ten thousand bucks it won’t be a left handed person whose birthday is in July, has green eyes and is exactly 1/4 Mongolian 1/4 Finnish 1/16 Native American and their name starts with a vowel and their middle name is exactly 6 letters long and graduated from a university in North Dakota
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I think you mean losing billions of dollars in 3 weeks.
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Text of the email
https://twitter.com/donie/status/1592859900941852674-
Reported as phishing attempt
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Yeah, good fucking luck becoming more engineering driven when the CEO has made every capable engineer start looking for a better job.
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I know that nothing should surprise me at this point, but it is honestly astonishing to me that this really is a thing that Elon said:
https://twitter.com/chancery_daily/status/1592892118569455617 -
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ML says the darndest things. https://twitter.com/digiphile/status/1592895138967453697
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