Elon goes hardcore
After demanding the remaining Twitter employees pledge their loyalty, Musk's product priorities are coming into focus
I. Extremely hardcore
On midnight Wednesday, Twitter employees received the latest email from their new owner and CEO. “Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore,” Elon Musk wrote. “This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”
Musk went on to say that “Twitter will be much more engineering-driven,” and that while design and product “will still be very important,” engineers “will have the greatest sway.” And then Musk presented employees with an ultimatum: click “yes” on a Google form affirming your desire to “be part of the new Twitter,” or leave in exchange for three months’ pay.
Employees were told to decide by 5PM ET today.
The deadline has sparked an agonizing debate among Twitter’s remaining employees, who are already reeling from losing half their full-time colleagues and 80 percent of their contractors.
To stay is to be a good steward to Twitter, a service that most employees I’ve spoken with still feel deeply protective of. But it is also to risk being seen as condoning the behavior of Musk, who has consistently denigrated employees’ work, and even to be seen as a “goon” — their word for the team of venture capitalists, lawyers and outside engineers he brought in when he took over the company.
To leave, on the other hand, is to enter an uncertain job market that has seen widespread cuts across the tech industry, as well as to introduce personal complications for employees who may be here on visas, pregnant, or experiencing other health issues. Some employees worry that three months might not be long enough to find a new job.
In Blind, an app where employees can discuss their workplaces anonymously, one employee who is choosing to leave urged others not to criticize those who are staying. They wrote:
I personally know a Tweep whose spouse is undergoing cancer treatments. There is no way this person can leave now. Folks have kids with medical issues, elderly parents to take care of, or haven't interviewed in years, or are purchasing a house, or are on an H1B & other restrictive visas, or are tight on money because they are helping overseas relatives, or are just plain scared of the way the market looks at the moment.
Everyone's appetite for change, and risk tolerance, are different. Lets keep this about the people, and not turn it into us-vs-them Squid game type of s**t.
In Slack, some managers are declaring that they’re staying and urging employees to join them. (“Cringe af,” an employee noted in another Blind post.) Meanwhile, employees’ paranoia appears to be at an all-time high, as some workers doubt whether Musk will actually pay out the severance he has promised. Here’s another employee in Blind:
Will they be tracking how long it takes people to click? Like is it a mark against anyone who clicks tomorrow instead of today? (“if you’re truly hardcore, this is a no-brainer! Just click as soon as you read your email”) I’m out of here, so not personally worried. I just hate that he is the kind of person that makes me feel like everything is a trap :(
The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter reported that internal polls show only 25 percent of software engineers at the company intend to stay.
II. The roadmap
So what will remaining Twitter employees be working on?
A seating chart obtained by Platformer for the 10th floor of Twitter headquarters in San Francisco offers some clues.
Employees working on special projects and the product team have been assigned to the 10th floor, according to the document. It lists five project teams:
Blue verified, the $8-a-month verification badge that is scheduled to relaunch Nov. 29 after a disastrous debut last week.
Blue for business, a new enterprise verification offering.
Encrypted direct messages.
“Tips on tweets,” a possible expansion of a feature that lets users send one another tips through their profiles.
“Longform notes,” an apparent replacement for a feature that launched in June but that Musk cut soon after taking over.
Details about some of these projects could not be learned. But materials shared with Platformer provide some insight into what “Blue for business” will look like.
One team is undertaking a three-week sprint to ship the feature, which would allow companies to buy verification badges for their employees. Mockups show that user profiles will gain badges underneath their follower counts that list organizations they are affiliated with.
One mockup showed the profile of the New York Times with a new “Journalists” tab that lists the paper’s individual verified journalists. Each journalist’s profile has a New York Times badge on their profile as well. Individual tweets from the journalist show both the standard white-on-blue verification badge and a separate badge showing the Times’ logo. (Disclosure: I do a podcast with the Times.)
Sources said the slides shared with Platformer were only mockups; a Times spokesman said the company is not in discussions with Twitter around a verification program.
Another mockup showed Verizon, its CEO Hans Vestberg, and the UN Foundation, on whose board Vestberg sits. In the image, Vestberg is verified as affiliated with Verizon and the foundation, and has three badges by his name in tweets: the verification badge, a Verizon badge, and a foundation badge.
Meanwhile, a meeting for the sales team on Wednesday tried to strike a more optimistic note. It was led by Robin Wheeler, the head of sales, who tried to resign from the company but was ultimately persuaded to stay. According to minutes shared with Platformer, Wheeler is now sitting in on all product meetings to communicate the company’s direction to the sales team.
Regarding the company’s 6-year-old trust and safety council, which has been a key part of Twitter’s efforts to make itself safe for advertisers, the team was told that no decisions have been made. “We may keep it, diversify it, blow it up or start anew — we don’t know yet,” the minutes said. (Musk has said he would start a separate content moderation council, but offered no other details.)
Leaders acknowledged that a lack of communication had hurt relationships with the rank and file. But they expressed optimism about the path ahead.
“It’s normal for morale to struggle,” read the response to a question about preventing further attrition. “We need to get to a point where folks believe in where we’re going. We still need to hear from Elon (this is a work in progress). Once everyone is understanding and committing to the company initiative, the team will be able to rebuild and move forward.”
On the podcast this week: Kevin tells me about his interview with FTX’s performance coach, who called the team “undersexed,” before we read SBF’s DMs out loud. Later, we talk about Elon’s (Hard??) Fork in the Road email and what else I’m hearing from employees inside the new Twitter.
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Governing
Trump announced he’s running for president again, and Meta said he can no longer be fact-checked. He’s banned from Facebook but other people can post his remarks. (Donie O'Sullivan / CNN)
Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, the company was exploring a project to develop a democratic process for creating content moderation policies. (Aviv Ovadya / Reimagining Social Technologies)
Lawmakers in the US are facing a reckoning in the wake of FTX’s collapse, asking whether they could have prevented the meltdown if they’d paid closer attention. (Tony Romm / Washington Post)
European data protection regulators say Qatar's official World Cup apps pose massive privacy risks. (Vincent Manancourt, Louis Westendarp and Laura Kayali / Politico)
Three of Meta’s top executives in India have left the company in recent weeks, including the India head of WhatsApp and the public policy director. (Newley Purnell / Wall Street Journal)
The field of generative AI is booming, but it’s still not clear if the way the models are trained — often using copyrighted material — is legal. (James Vincent / The Verge)
Tuvalu plans to recreate itself in the metaverse, preserving its history as rising sea levels threaten the tiny Pacific island nation’s existence. (Lucy Craymer / Reuters)
Industry
Elon Musk said he doesn’t intend to stay CEO of Twitter, and will eventually find someone else to run the company. (Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge)
Macy’s has paused advertising on Twitter ahead of the Thanksgiving Day Parade — the latest big company to flee the platform. (Adrianne Pasquarelli and Garett Sloane / AdAge)
Sam Bankman-Fried gave his most insightful interview yet via Twitter DM. He said he “fucked up. big.” But that his worst mistake was filing for bankruptcy. Whatever Sam! (Kelsey Piper / Vox)
FTX’s new CEO, John J. Ray III, issued a scathing assessment of Bankman-Fried "unprecedented" poor management in a series of court filings. Not often you hear the phrase “worse than Enron” … from a guy who worked on the Enron bankruptcy. (Jack Schickler / CoinDesk)
FTX employees say they were stunned by the exchange’s quick demise and the alleged misuse of customer funds. (Alexander Osipovich, Caitlin Ostroff and Gregory Zuckerman / Wall Street Journal)
Sam Bankman-Fried has been desperately trying to raise $7 billion from investors to cover customer losses and a review of FTX’s financial records reveals why those efforts aren’t going anywhere. (Angus Berwick, Anirban Sen, Elizabeth Howcroft and Lawrence Delevingne / Reuters)
The hacker who stole $477 million from FTX as the company slid into bankruptcy is now one of the world’s biggest holders of the token Ether. We do love a crypto success story. (Sidhartha Shukla / Bloomberg)
Crypto.com is trying to reassure customers that its business is sound after FTX’s collapse and its own staff cuts made people nervous. Here’s hoping it holds up OK — we can’t handle another arena being renamed this year. (Ari Levy and MacKenzie Sigalos / CNBC)
TikTok plans to double its staff in the Bay Area, and has been contacting laid off employees from Twitter and Meta about jobs. (Juro Osawa / The Information)
Activist investor TCI Fund Management sent Google a letter saying the company would be more efficient with fewer employees and needs to aggressively cut costs. (Miles Kruppa / Wall Street Journal)
Google's innovation lab, X, is working on commercial agriculture projects, building unmanned rovers with sensors and cameras to help agricultural companies collect data and make better decisions about their crops. (Max Chafkin / Bloomberg)
Amazon sent out “voluntary severance” offers to some employees in an effort to trim headcount beyond the massive cuts already announced. (Annie Palmer / CNBC)
OnlyFans is launching a shopping feature to allow creators to sell merchandise directly to their viewers. (Arjun Neil Alim and Cristina Criddle / Financial Times)
Built-in Discord voice chat is now rolling out to all Xbox users so people can connect to Discord voice channels directly through their consoles. (Kris Holt / Engadget)
DuckDuckGo’s App Tracking Protection is now available for public beta testing on all Android devices. (Jess Weatherbed / The Verge)
Most teens say social media has helped them develop stronger friendships, while 38% say they feel overwhelmed by social media drama, according to this survey. (Monica Anderson, Emily A. Vogels, Andrew Perrin and Lee Rainie / Pew Research)
Those good tweets
Talk to us
Send us tips, comments, questions, and your vision for an extremely hardcore Twitter: casey@platformer.news and zoe@platformer.news.
Elon goes hardcore
OK, perhaps Musk is not some evil agent who has planned to destroy twitter.
Perhaps, he is an egomaniac, who thinks he is a genius who's absolutely right on COVID / Crimea / Free Speech / Social Media and US politics.
Therefore, he's going to simply destroy twitter, because of sheer incompetence.
Is there some financial benefit to his completely destroying the company that we don’t know about?