Musk tells Twitter staff: be ‘extremely hard-core’ or leave

Twitter’s new chief executive Elon Musk has told the social media platform’s staff to commit to being “extremely hard-core” or leave the company with a three-month severance package.

In an email to staff seen by The Irish Times, Mr Musk said employees had until Thursday at 5pm US east coast time to commit to working long hours at “high intensity” by clicking a link. Those who do not will get three months’ severance pay.

The billionaire said he is building “Twitter 2.0″. “Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade,” he wrote, noting that the new organisation would be “much more engineering-driven”.

“Design and product management will still be very important and report to me, but those writing great code will constitute the majority of our team and have the greatest sway,” he said.

An Post named most reputable organisation over last 15 years as RTÉ suffers greatest decline

---

Vast majority of anti-immigration posts relating to Wicklow protests came from non-Irish accounts

---

Age checks for social media aimed at protecting primary schoolchildren are ‘broken’, says Norma Foley

---

Emer McLysaght: The ‘cry laughing’ emoji has been my nemesis for as long as I can remember

---

The email was first reported on by the Washington Post.

The latest move follows Mr Musk’s cull of Twitter staff, which saw around 50 per cent of employees leave. He has also reportedly cut more than 4,000 contractors, and sacked staff who criticised him on an internal Slack channel.

The Financial Times reported on Wednesday that Twitter is on a “collision course” with Brussels, as the social media platform faces new scrutiny under landmark EU laws to police Big Tech that came into force on Wednesday.

European regulators have grown particularly concerned following Musk’s chaotic roll-out of the flagship premium subscription service Twitter Blue, according to three people with knowledge of their thinking, which saw its “blue tick” feature abused by impersonators on the platform.

Officials are also worried about the number of Twitter executives who have left the company and had a key role in dealing with regulators and the platform’s implementation of the EU’s new rules aimed at curbing the spread of illegal content online.

The Digital Services Act, which sets for the first time the rules on how Big Tech should keep users safe online, came into force on Wednesday in the first big overhaul of the laws governing their operation in more than two decades.

Separately, Mr Musk told a Delaware judge he had no role in setting up his $55 billion (€52 billion) pay deal to run Tesla in 2018 and he was focused instead on solving the complex problem of creating a sustainable electric-vehicle company.

Mr Musk, the world’s richest person, said he never discussed his compensation with board members or dictated the terms of the deal.

However, court filings in the case show the entrepreneur was asked in a text by his friend, Ira Ehrenpreis, a Tesla board member, on April 8th, 2017, about how to structure his future compensation.

He replied that he should end up “owning 10 per cent of the company” in a performance plan built around a progression of targets that would each grant him 1 per cent of Tesla’s outstanding shares, filings show. – Additional reporting the Financial Times Limited 2022