Elon Musk has emailed Twitter staff, most working remotely, ordering them to return to the workplace instantly for not less than 40 hours every week and warning of “tough instances forward.”
A pair of Wednesday night time missives seen by The Related Press marked Musk’s first companywide message to staff who survived final week’s mass layoffs. Many have needed to depend on the billionaire Tesla CEO’s public tweets for clues about Twitter’s future.
“Sorry that that is my first e-mail to the entire firm, however there isn’t any solution to sugarcoat the message,” wrote Musk, earlier than he described a dire financial local weather for companies like Twitter that rely nearly completely on promoting to earn a living.
“With out important subscription income, there’s a good probability Twitter won’t survive the upcoming financial downturn,” Musk stated. “We’d like roughly half of our income to be subscription.”
Musk’s memo adopted a livestreamed dialog making an attempt to assuage main advertisers Wednesday, his most expansive public feedback about Twitter’s path since he closed a $44 billion deal to purchase the social media platform late final month and dismissed its prime executives. A variety of well-known manufacturers have paused promoting on Twitter as they wait to see how Musk’s proposals to chill out content material guidelines towards hate and misinformation have an effect on the tenor of the platform.
Musk instructed staff “the precedence over the previous 10 days” was to develop and launch Twitter’s new subscription service for $7.99 a month that features a blue test mark subsequent to the identify of paid members — the mark was beforehand just for verified accounts.
An govt final week stated Twitter was reducing roughly 50% of its workforce, which numbered 7,500 earlier this 12 months.
Musk had beforehand expressed distaste for Twitter’s pandemic-era distant work insurance policies that enabled crew leaders to resolve if staff needed to present up within the workplace. On Wednesday, he ordered all staff to return to the workplace Thursday.
Musk instructed staff within the e-mail that “distant work is now not allowed” and the street forward is “arduous and would require intense work to succeed.” He stated he would personally evaluate any request for an exception.
Twitter hasn’t disclosed the full variety of layoffs throughout its international workforce however instructed native and state officers within the U.S. that it was reducing 784 staff at its San Francisco headquarters, about 200 elsewhere in California, and greater than 400 in New York Metropolis, greater than 200 in Seattle and about 80 in Atlanta.
The exodus at Twitter is ongoing, together with the corporate’s chief data safety officer Lea Kissner, who tweeted Thursday that “I’ve made the onerous choice to go away Twitter.”
Cybersecurity skilled Alex Stamos, a former Fb safety chief, tweeted Thursday that there’s a “severe danger of a breach with drastically diminished employees” that would additionally put Twitter at odds with a 2011 order from the Federal Commerce Fee that required it to handle severe information safety lapses.
“Twitter made enormous strides in direction of a extra rational inside safety mannequin and backsliding will put them in bother with the FTC” and different regulators within the U.S. and Europe, Stamos stated.
The FTC stated in an announcement Thursday that it’s “monitoring current developments at Twitter with deep concern.”
“No CEO or firm is above the regulation, and firms should comply with our consent decrees,” stated the company’s assertion. “Our revised consent order provides us new instruments to make sure compliance, and we’re ready to make use of them.”
The FTC wouldn’t say whether or not it was investigating Twitter for potential violations. If it have been, it’s empowered to demand paperwork and depose staff.
Twitter paid a $150 million penalty in Could for violating the 2011 consent order and its up to date model established new procedures requiring the corporate to implement an enhanced privateness safety program in addition to beefing up information safety.
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AP Expertise Author Frank Bajak contributed to this report.
