Divisive CEO becomes a prisoner of his own device
Comment Following a public engineering spat, and multiple firings, Twitter CEO Elon Musk has issued an ultimatum to his employees: get hardcore or get out of my way.
It turns out he was not talking about punk rock, or road construction, but the vision of a new Twitter, the 2.0 iteration of the pioneering social media platform he was destined to make „extremely hardcore.“
„This will mean working long hours at high intensity,“ he said. „Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.“
It’s OK, though: employees who did not see being „extremely hardcore“ in their future could opt to leave the company and collect three months‘ severance pay. Those wanting to stay were told to sign a „pledge“ by 5pm Eastern time Thursday. If they didn’t sign, they were out, the missive implied.
According to reports and Twitter users, Musk emailed staff in the middle of the night to tell them of his vision.
Musk, who is also CEO of electric car company Tesla and rocket business SpaceX, has previously tweeted about the prospect of „hardcore software engineering“ at the social media platform once he took over.
