The future of Twitter is complicated, and a lot. The arrival of Elon Musk has caused absolute chaos both in his attempts to introduce new features to the service and —above all— in his strategy to cut costs. He has already fired a good part of the squad, but what is happening now is that the squad is resigning directly.
I don’t want to work for Elon Musk. Last Wednesday the owner of Twitter issued an ultimatum: those who wanted to stay on Twitter had to vote yes on a form that arrived in the mail. In doing so, yes, they agreed to accept Musk’s terms: endless days and no teleworking. The CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter made it clear: “we need to be extremely hard” (“extremely hardcore”) with the conferences.
hundreds of resignations. The deadline ended yesterday at 11:00 PM CEST, and just before that deadline ended, goodbye emojis started appearing on the internal Slack that they use on Twitter. Hundreds of employees said goodbye to their colleagues and confirmed their resignation from the company. Several of those who have left work published also messages various of farewell on their Twitter accounts.
Here’s the text of the email Musk sent to Twitter staff overnight.
Those who don’t commit to being “extremely hardcore” by 5pm ET today must leave the company. ‼️
Story: https://t.co/expt0d63dH pic.twitter.com/C8VDjRBvk1
— Donie O’Sullivan (@donie) November 16, 2022
How many have resigned? It’s hard to know, but among employees there is a staggering figure: 75% of the approximately 3,700 employees still on the payroll would have chosen to leave the company after the “hardcore” email, as it is now called. If the data is confirmed, Twitter would currently have a staff of about 1,000 employees, when just two weeks ago there were 7,500. The data, yes, is not officially confirmed and according to the journalist Fortune’s Kylie Robinson is a “perception among people on Twitter.”
What I’m hearing from Twitter employees; It looks like roughly 75% of the remaining 3,700ish Twitter employees have not opted to stay after the “hardcore” email.
Even though the deadline has passed, everyone still has access to their systems.
—Kylie Robison (@kyliebytes) November 17, 2022
Musk is not worried (and jokes about the resignations). The resignations do not seem to have caused a particular impact on Musk, who joked posting a meme of someone making a victory gesture before a grave at a funeral. Not only that: he also responded to another user of the platform affirming that “the best stay, so I’m not super worried.” Yes indeed: according to Bloomberg Musk has eased his telecommuting requirement a bit to avoid some of the resignations of especially critical staff whom he has managed to convince to stay.
Who is going to improve Twitter (and fix it when it fails)? That is one of the big doubts in the short term. It is not clear how affected the different departments of the company have been, but in The Verge they indicate that according to internal sources “multiple “critical” teams at Twitter have completely or almost completely resigned.” One of the employees explained that “you can’t run Twitter without this equipment” when referring to one of those groups. The service could start to fail, but it seems that there is no one or almost no one who can fix problems when they appear.
Offices temporarily closed. The massive resignation has caused those responsible for Twitter to end according to The Daily Beast closing its offices until next Monday. Cards have been disabled with which employees can access their jobs.
