Elon Musk, who is reportedly on track to complete his purchase of Twitter this week, doesn’t actually plan to cut the social network’s workforce by 75%, according to a new report from Bloomberg news. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be significant problems in the social media community after Musk invests $44 billion in the wildly popular business.
Musk personally denied to Twitter employees on Wednesday a report of a planned 75 percent layoff, which first appeared in the Washington Post last week, according to Bloomberg. Musk showed up at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco carrying a sink and even tweeted a video of his entrance.
“I met so many cool people on Twitter today!” He said Musk.
Why the sink? Musk was apparently referring to “let this sink in,” a sort of cliché on the social media platform that is expressed when someone thinks they’ve tweeted something profound or disturbing. Personally, we’d go with “overpaying Twitter cost me everything and the kitchen sink,” but we’re not masters of comedy like Mr. Musk.
Musk will almost certainly continue to lay off some of Twitter’s staff, as Bloomberg points out, but there is an expectation that many employees will leave on their own. Musk, who had two children with one of his employees and allegedly exposed his erect penis second, it is known that a authoritarian boss and will likely require all employees to report to work in person, although many companies have been moving to more flexible work hours, work-from-home policies and hybrid work schedules since the start of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
“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 wanted to work from home should “pretend to work somewhere else”.
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One of Musk’s friends, tech investor Jason Calacanis, said earlier this year that he could force people to quit if he ordered them to work in person in the office, according to reports. 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 management style is that the people most likely to leave are the most talented and able to quickly find work elsewhere. The text messages also show that Musk offered Calacanis a job for him if the Twitter deal is finalized.
And while you may or may not agree with Musk’s new personal work policy on Twitter, it’s a bit odd for a man with so many titles to think you can’t work if you’re not physically in the office. Should Tesla shareholders be concerned that he’s not working on Tesla while he’s at SpaceX’s Los Angeles office or Twitter’s San Francisco office? Maybe they should. This is a man who has collected enough hours playing a video game that we can’t be sure works 40 hours a week with any consistency.
Musk is expected to close the deal with Twitter on Friday. But there’s no timeline yet for layoffs, let alone when this guy will be allowed back on the platform in the name of free speech.