Elon Musk on Friday asked all of Twitter’s remaining employees who write software code to report to the 10th floor office in San Francisco in the early afternoon, according to an email reviewed by Reuters. 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. He said the engineers should report at 14:00 on Friday (22:00 GMT). The emails came a day after hundreds of Twitter employees apparently decided to leave the beleaguered social media company following Thursday’s deadline from Musk, which said employees were signing up for “long, high-intensity hours.” The exit adds to the rapid change and chaos that has marked Musk’s first three weeks as Twitter owner, during which the company’s headcount had already been more than halved by layoffs and other departures to about 3,700 workers. Twitter told its employees on Thursday that it would close its offices and cut access to the signal by Monday, according to two sources. Reuters could not immediately confirm whether the headquarters had reopened. As of midday on Friday, the company had not yet cut off access to corporate systems for employees who had refused to accept Musk’s offer, two other sources told Reuters. One of those sources also said the company planned to close one of Twitter’s three main data centers in the US, at the SMF1 facility near Sacramento, for cost savings. Amid the changes, ratings agency Moody’s withdrew its B1 credit rating for Twitter, saying it had “insufficient or otherwise insufficient information to support maintaining the rating.” A White House official also weighed in, saying Twitter should tell Americans how the company protects their data, a CNN reporter tweeted.
Musk’s orders
In his emails on Friday, 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.” He 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 exception.” “The managers will send me the exception lists for review and approval.” Musk tweeted late Thursday that he wasn’t worried about resignations as “the best people stay.”
