- Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk has made it clear that he will not be serving as the CEO of the social media platform for the long term.
- Musk says that when he feels Twitter is properly reorganised, he will begin to step away from the company, however, this will take some time.
- This as Musk gives an ultimatum to his Twitter staff: either be “hardcore” or find a new job.
It isn’t the best time to be an employee of Twitter. With Elon Musk taking over the social media company in October, the acquisition has been highlighted by pandaemonium around pushing and pulling new features, and mass layoffs at the company.
However, Musk doesn’t expect to be at the Blue Bird forever despite owning the company.
While Musk is the owner of Twitter in a business sense, he is also its leading executive officer in a temporary capacity. The Space X CEO replaced previous Twitter boss Parag Agrawal on 1st November as part of the takeover.
Agrawal had only led Twitter since November 2021 after co-founder and first CEO Jack Dorsey let go of the social media company’s reigns stating that he felt “[Twitter] is ready to move on from its founders.”
Musk elucidated a bit more on his long-term plans at Twitter on Wednesday. According to a report from Reuters, Musk is planning to begin stepping away from a leadership role at Twitter eventually, but only after the company is successfully “reorganised”.
These remarks come as Musk was testifying in a Delaware court while defending his other company Tesla against claims that his $56 billion pay package from the automobile manufacturer was approved by Tesla’s board of directors.
“There’s an initial burst of activity needed post-acquisition to reorganize the company,” Musk said during the testimony. “But then I expect to reduce my time at Twitter.”
The Tesla executive added, however, that this would all “take some time.” This initial “burst of activity” has apparently led Musk to spend long hours at the Twitter offices in order to “fix” all the issues with the platform.
Tesla stakeholders are making their concerns known about Musk devoting so much time to Twitter lately, so this may be a reason why the richest man in the world has decided to make these sentiments public.
But then who will lead the company once Musk decides it is properly reorganised? When asked if he would ever return to the CEO role at Twitter, Dorsey simply said “Nope.”
Perhaps he will seek to promote from within the company but this is a far stretch as he has reportedly brought on engineers from Tesla to assist in “evaluating” Twitter’s own engineering teams.
Musk is seemingly unhappy with the performance of the Twitter staff remaining after the company’s widespread job cuts earlier this month. In a newly shared internal email at the platform, Musk served an ultimatum to employees.
According to the email, he said that from now on Twitter staff would have to be “extremely hardcore” to turn the company around and if any employees were unhappy with this new direction they were free to simply leave.
“This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade,” the email reportedly reads. He then asks anyone who is unwilling to join him on this extreme mission to simply not answer a survey he linked.
“Anyone who has not done so by 5pm ET tomorrow (Thursday) will receive three months of severance,” Musk adds.
Whichever employee decides to depart after this will only be joining other laid-off tech staffers from the likes of Meta and Amazon, among others, as the so-called “tech winter” takes hold.
[Image – Elon Musk on Twitter]
