Elon Musk to Twitter staff: Be Part of New ‘Hardcore’ Twitter or Leave

Twitter has rolled out a series of rapid-fire and chaotic changes since Elon Musk’s $44 billion dollar takeover – Copyright AFP Yuichi YAMAZAKI

One day after firing people who criticized him, Musk emailed staff and asked them to sign a pledge if they wanted to stay.

Staff received an email on Wednesday morning stating: ‘If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below.’ Anyone who did not sign the pledge by 5 p.m. Eastern time Thursday would receive three months of severance pay, the email said.

Gizmodo tried to reach out to Twitter on Wednesday morning for confirmation but did not receive a response. Apparently, Twitter no longer has a communications department.

In addition to cutting the workforce in half, Musk appears to be watching what is said about him on the company’s Slack channels. On Tuesday, Musk fired employees who were shitposting about him in Slack with an email, which stated that their behavior had “violated company policy.”

After some employees shared that they had been fired on Twitter, Musk mocked them in a tweet. “I would like to apologize for firing these geniuses. Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere,” he wrote.

Musk’s new vision for Twitter

Musk, who has dubbed himself both ‘Chief Twit’ and ‘Twitter Complaints Hotline,” has announced that Twitter would be more of “an engineer-driven operation going forward,” and while the design and product-management areas would still be important and report to him, he said, “those writing great code will constitute the majority of our team and have the greatest sway.”

Musk is also halting for the time being. Twitter’s Blue Verified, his first major product since taking over last month as Twitter’s owner and CEO. The company will be sorting out issues with the feature following a botched rollout.

When Twitter debuted the product last week, users got a blue check-mark icon next to their name for a fee of $7.99 a month and promises to reduce the number of ads they see by half as well as giving their posts additional visibility.

In any case, the service will relaunch on November 29 “to make sure that it is rock solid,” said Musk.

About 150,000 users were subscribed to Twitter Blue — which encompasses Blue Verified — at the time of the pause, according to one of the people with knowledge of internal matters, a figure corroborated by internal data on tweets from Verified accounts and an external analysis.

Those who subscribed to Blue Verified were often accounts promoting right-wing politics, cryptocurrency speculation, and users hawking adult content such as pornography, a review of Twitter data compiled by a software developer showed.