Elon Musk, who’s reportedly on track to finalise his purchase of Twitter this week, doesn’t actually plan to cut the social media company’s staff by 75%, according to a new report from Bloomberg News. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be significant pain at the social media company after Musk shells out $US44 ($61) billion in the highly publicized deal.
Musk denied the report of a 75% planned cull of staff — which first appeared in the Washington Post last week — to Twitter employees in person on Wednesday, according to Bloomberg. Musk made an appearance at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, carrying in a sink, and even tweeted video of his entrance.
“Meeting a lot of cool people at Twitter today!” Musk tweeted.
Why a sink? Apparently Musk was making a reference to “let that sink in,” a cliche of sorts on the social media platform that’s expressed when someone believes they’ve tweeted something profound or unsettling. Personally, we would’ve gone with “overpaying for Twitter cost me everything and the kitchen sink,” but we’re not the comedy masters like Mr. Musk.
Musk will almost certainly still fire some staff at Twitter, as Bloomberg notes, but there’s an expectation that many employees will depart on their own. Musk, who had two kids with one of his employees and allegedly exposed his erect penis to another, is known to be an overbearing boss and will likely demand that all employees show up at work in person, despite many businesses shifting to more accommodating at-home policies and hybrid work schedules since the start of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020.
“Remote work is no longer acceptable,” Musk said in a memo to Tesla staff in March of this year, which leaked to the press. The billionaire oligarch insisted that anyone who wants to work from home should, “pretend to work somewhere else.”
One of Musk’s friends, tech investor Jason Calacanis, made the observation earlier this year that you could get people to quit if you mandated working in person at the office, according to text messages released in a court filing after Twitter sued Musk when he tried to back out of the deal. The obvious problem with that style of management is that the people most likely to leave are those that are the most talented and able to quickly find work elsewhere. The text messages also show Musk offered Calacanis a job working for him if the Twitter deal was finalised.
And while you can agree or disagree with Musk’s new policy for working in person at Twitter, it’s a little rich that a man with so many job titles thinks you can’t be working unless you’re physically in the office. Should Tesla shareholders be concerned he’s not working on Tesla while in the L.A. office of SpaceX or the San Francisco office of Twitter? Maybe they should. This is a man, after all, who has logged enough hours playing a video game that we can’t even be sure he’s putting in a 40-hour week with any consistency.
Musk is expected to close the Twitter deal by Friday. But there’s no timetable yet for layoffs, let alone when that guy might be allowed back on the platform in the name of free speech. You know the one. No, not that one. The other one. No, not that guy, the other guy. Sorry, they’re all coming back.