Friday, Twitter’s thousands of employees were anxiously waiting for Elon Musk to say who owned the company.
Employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity about sensitive internal matters said that they looked in vain in San Francisco and New York offices and on company slacks for news about who might be fired, how their jobs would change under Musk, and any official confirmation that the Tesla CEO had bought the company.
The people said that Musk’s team and the company’s remaining senior leaders—four of whom had been fired the night before—huddled in offices and didn’t come out. Musk led Tesla engineers as they looked at Twitter’s code while the tech executive asked his trusted technical experts for advice. Alex Spiro, Musk’s lawyer, was in charge of some transitional matters.
The underperforming Silicon Valley social media company is expected to change now that Musk owns it. Musk fell out with management over simple things like censoring online speech. Even though he said on Friday that Twitter’s rules about content moderation hadn’t changed, he is likely to loosen them.
Twitter workers have been waiting for weeks to find out if they will keep their jobs after the company was bought.
Musk is known for firing people who don’t do their jobs well, sometimes in a fit of anger. He is also admired for his ability to get the best people to join the world-changing missions of the companies he runs.
Musk bought Twitter on Thursday for $44 billion after months of talks. Musk backed out of the deal in July, citing spam and bot accounts on Twitter during a time of economic uncertainty. Twitter took him to court for breaking a contract. Musk’s offer to buy the site was accepted again this week, so he didn’t have to go to court.
According to the Washington Post, Musk told investors last week that he would fire almost 75% of Twitter’s 7,500 workers. He told Twitter employees on Wednesday that he didn’t have any plans to do so.
Musk met with Twitter employees on Wednesday and seemed cautiously hopeful.
Musk just started tweeting on Friday. After the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, which led to his permanent ban, he promised to bring back former president Donald Trump’s account.
A person who knows Musk’s initial plans says that he is evaluating the company and its employees from the inside. He looks for and keeps Twitter’s best employees. He has also put his team, which includes Tesla and SpaceX, in charge of learning more about Twitter.
“Stop printing, please be ready to show your recent code,” said a Friday calendar invite to some engineers, who were asked to show their recent code on their computers.
“Please bring code that you can review on your own machines with Elon as a backup.” Company sources say that Tesla engineers looked over the code.
One anonymous former Tesla engineer who was not involved said that Tesla engineers would have a hard time figuring out Twitter’s code. The person said that the automaker doesn’t specialize in large networks like Twitter’s.
“It’s funny that Elon is surrounded by Tesla engineers who are looking at Twitter code,” the person said.
On Thursday, Musk got rid of Parag Agrawal, Ned Segal, Vijaya Gadde, and Sean Edgett.
On Friday, Twitter employees told The Post that they feared something similar would happen.
Musk went to the company’s headquarters on Wednesday and brought a kitchen sink with him to “sink in” the fact that he owns the company.
The company’s chief marketing officer told employees that Musk would meet on Friday, but it didn’t happen.
Employees at Twitter had “a creeping sense of cautious optimism” that Musk’s plans to lay off people were overblown. The person said that engineers were eager to ship products that Musk liked.
As the deadline was Friday afternoon, many employees were surprised when Musk closed the deal on Thursday. When the news came out that the deal was done, some employees in New York and San Francisco were in costume for company Halloween parties.
On Friday, 15 reporters and a few camera crews waited outside Twitter’s offices in San Francisco for Musk or employees who had been let go.
Early in the day, two men carrying boxes said they were fired, but the company said there were no layoffs and the men seemed to be playing a joke.
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