The billionaire said in a follow-up email, “If possible, I would appreciate it if you could fly to SF to be present in person,” adding that he would be at the company’s headquarters by midnight and return Saturday morning, it said Reuters. He said the engineers should report at 2pm on Friday. The emails came a day after reports said between 1,000 and 1,200 Twitter employees were estimated to have decided to leave the beleaguered social media company after Musk’s Thursday deadline that staff members sign up for “long, high-intensity hours” or they leave. The New York Times also reported on email and employee decisions. In true Twitter fashion, dozens of employees tweeted their resignations with a version of the internal company slogan #lovewhereyouworked. “I may be #excellent but my god I’m not #hardcore,” tweeted Andrea Horst, who worked in supply chain and capacity management at Twitter. The company had told its employees it would close its offices and cut access to the signal until Monday, Reuters reported, citing two unnamed sources, and it was not immediately known whether the headquarters had reopened. Musk ordered employees to email him a summary of what their software code “achieved” over the past six months, “along with up to 10 screenshots of the most important lines of code.” “There will be short, technical interviews that will allow me to better understand Twitter’s technology stack,” Musk wrote in one of the emails. Musk said earlier this week that some Tesla engineers were helping to evaluate Twitter’s engineering teams, but said it was on a “volunteer basis” and “after hours.” The loss of workers in critical engineering roles comes just days before the World Cup, when the agency normally expects a surge in traffic. The high-traffic event could be an important test of the new Twitter 2.0, Musk said, and how the company expects to operate with a reduced workforce. Musk said he would try to talk to remote employees via video, and that only those who couldn’t physically make it to the company’s headquarters or had a family emergency would be excused. In his first email to Twitter employees this month, Musk said, “We’re also changing Twitter’s policy so that remote work is no longer allowed unless you have a specific exemption.” “The managers will send me the exception lists for review and approval.” The remote work policy led to a class-action lawsuit filed by Dmitry Borodaenko, a Twitter employee who said he was fired for not reporting to the office. Borodaenko, who has a disability that makes him vulnerable to Covid-19, claims the telecommuting policy as well as the requirement for long, intense work hours violate the Americans with Disabilities Act, according to the complaint. Musk’s first three weeks as Twitter owner have been marked by rapid change and chaos. It quickly fired Twitter’s previous CEO and other senior executives, then laid off half its staff earlier this month. Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and security who was tapped to ease concerns advertisers had about the platform, said in a New York Times op-ed that he chose to step down last week because it was clear Musk would he was the one who would unilaterally call all the shots. “A Twitter whose policies are set by unilateral decree does not need a trust and security function dedicated to the development of its principles,” Roth wrote. Musk tweeted late Thursday that he is not worried about resignations as “the best people stay.” “So where does Twitter go from here?” wrote Roth. “Some of the company’s decisions in the coming weeks and months, such as the near certainty of Donald Trump’s account returning to service, will have an immediate, tangible impact. But to really understand the shape of Twitter going forward, I’d encourage looking not only at the choices the company is making but also at how Mr. Musk is making them.”
