Musk Meets Twitter Employees for the First Time: "Exceptional" Staff Can Work Remotely

[Image source=Reuters Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Jeong Hyunjin] Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, held his first conversation with Twitter employees since initiating the acquisition of the social networking service (SNS) Twitter.

According to Bloomberg News and others on the 16th (local time), CEO Musk spoke with Twitter employees via video call for about an hour. He appeared about 10 minutes later than the scheduled time wearing a white shirt and answered more than 100 questions submitted in advance by Twitter employees.

The answer from CEO Musk that employees paid the most attention to was related to remote work. In March, Parag Agrawal, Twitter CEO, announced that the remote work policy would continue, but since CEO Musk recently expressed strong opposition to remote work by telling Tesla employees to quit if they did not want to work in person, there was keen interest in what policy he would set for Twitter.

CEO Musk replied, "'Exceptional' employees can work remotely." While emphasizing that he has a bias toward in-person work, he said, "If an exceptional person can only work remotely, it makes no sense to fire them." Although he evaluates in-person work more positively than remote work, this is interpreted as a message that remote work can be exceptionally allowed to prevent losing talent for that reason.

Regarding the possibility of layoffs at Twitter, CEO Musk did not give a clear answer but said, "Currently, costs exceed revenue. This is not a good situation," hinting at the possibility of future workforce adjustments. He added, "Employees who play a definitely important role need not worry," and "I will not engage in destructive behavior toward the company."

Regarding Twitter’s business, CEO Musk emphasized that advertising, the current core business model, remains important, but there is a need to diversify the business through subscription models and others. He stated that his goal is to increase the number of Twitter users from the current 230 million (daily active users) to at least 1 billion. He had previously proposed to investors that Twitter’s revenue scale would increase fivefold to $24.6 billion by 2028.

CEO Musk has warned of the possibility of terminating the acquisition contract if Twitter does not provide information about fake accounts such as spam bots. Twitter is expected to hold a shareholder vote on the plan to sell the company to CEO Musk as early as the end of next month.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.