Elon Musk sent an email to Twitter employees, most of whom work remotely, ordering them to immediately return to the office to spend at least 40 hours a week there and warning them of “difficult times ahead”.
Posted at 2:48 p.m.
A pair of missives transmitted Wednesday night, which The Associated Press has obtained a copy of, marked Mr. Musk’s first company-wide communication to employees who survived last week’s mass layoffs. Many had to settle for public Twitter messages from Tesla’s billionaire boss for clues about the future of the social network.
“I’m sorry this is my first company-wide email, but there’s no way to water down the message,” Musk wrote, before describing a dire economic climate for companies like Twitter, who depend almost entirely on advertising to make money.
“Without significant subscription revenue, there’s a good chance Twitter won’t survive the next economic downturn,” Musk said. We need to get about half of our revenue from subscriptions. »
Musk’s memo followed Wednesday’s airing of a chat with top Twitter advertisers that featured the billionaire’s most extensive public comments about where Twitter should go since it acquired the company. platform for US$44 billion at the end of last month and fired its top executives.
Last week, an executive said Twitter cut about 50% of its workforce, which was 7,500 employees earlier this year.
Mr. Musk had previously expressed his distaste for Twitter’s telecommuting policies, inherited from the pandemic. In particular, these allowed team leaders to decide whether employees should report to the office. On Wednesday, he ordered all employees to return to the office by Thursday.
Mr Musk told employees in the email that “remote work (was) no longer permitted” and that the road ahead would be “arduous and (require) hard work to be successful”. He said he would personally review any request for an exception.