11-21-2022
Elon Musk told Twitter employees last week they had until November 17th to decide whether they wanted to stay. Calling his email "A fork in the road," Musk said,
"Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade."
The email comes right after Musk cut half of the workforce. The New York Times reported that Musk reviewed internal communications and tweets by employees; he then fired the vocal critics. Elsewhere in the email, Musk told employees that Twitter going forward would be "much more engineering-driven." He gave employees a Google form to indicate their choice: stay or go. Employees choosing to leave will receive three months of severance. The company allegedly suspended office access for employees "effective immediately" until Monday.
According to various reports, up to 1200 of Twitter's remaining employees resigned in response to Musk's ultimatum. Many employees posted farewell messages and salute emojis on Twitter's Slack. The Verge reported many employees believe that Twitter may not recover from the loss of some of these employees. Critical engineering teams have purportedly been decimated by layoffs and resignations. Twitter recruiters are reportedly reaching out to engineers at other companies. Musk tweeted that he was not worried about the resignations as “the best people are staying.”