In the whiplash that is Twitter: The Elon Musk Era, it’s getting ridiculous to keep abreast of the latest drama. There’s chatter, on the daily, but today shit is getting real. Reports have emerged that ALL Twitter employees have been locked out of the company’s buildings by Musk.
Platformer’s managing editor, Zoë Schiffer, is reporting on her own Twitter account that Twitter has told employees that all office buildings are temporarily closed and their badge access is suspended. Why? Just Elon Things, apparently.
NEW: Twitter just alerted employees that effective immediately, all office buildings are temporarily closed and badge access is suspended. No details given as to why.
— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) November 17, 2022
Schiffer’s tweet continues:
“We’re hearing this is because Elon Musk and his team are terrified employees are going to sabotage the company. Also, they’re still trying to figure out which Twitter workers they need to cut access for,” she wrote.
Followed by:
“Offices will reopen on November 21st. In the meantime: “Please continue to comply with company policy by refraining from discussing confidential company information on social media, with the press or elsewhere.”
This is of course unverified, Gizmodo Australia can’t exactly reach out to our internal PR friends when they don’t have access to their laptops, and if the situation is as Schiffer is reporting, as an employee, I’d personally be shit scared to tell my media pals anything other than, “Everything is fine”.
Reports emerged this week that Musk gave his staff an ultimatum. Per The Washington Post, Twitter is “shifting to an engineer-driven operation”, one that “will need to be extremely hardcore” going forward. The Post said Musk told staff in this memo that “This will mean working long hours at high intensity” and “Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade”.
This…this sounds quite scary, actually.
Musk hasn’t said anything about these reports, his last tweet at the time of publish was this:
Twitter is like open-sourcing the news
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 17, 2022
But, as Schiffer earlier wrote, she was hearing noise of a lot of Twitter employees not signing Musk’s hardcore offer.
Things are going well at twitter.elonmusk.com.
We’ll update this article as we learn more.