Since Elon Musk took control of Twitter, the overriding theme has been job cuts. Thousands were fired directly, while others were let go after declining to sign up for Musk’s “extremely hardcore” Twitter 2.0. Now it seems the social media company is changing its tune, and staffing back up to replace at least some of the employees it’s shed.
Musk didn’t specify the kinds of engineering or sales roles Twitter was hiring for, and the company doesn’t currently have any open roles listed on its website. “In terms of critical hires, I would say people who are great at writing software are the highest priority,” he said during the meeting.
According to The Verge, new hires include George Hotz, a notable hacker who jailbroke the iPhone and PlayStation 3, and who has a pretty interesting history with Tesla and its advanced driver assistance technology. He’s just an intern mind, and it sounds like he’s only committing to 12 weeks, so far.
Monday’s all-hands meeting was the first time that Twitter’s employees heard from Musk since he required them all to opt into staying for his “extremely hardcore” cultural reset, which led to roughly 1,000 resignations last week. While fielding employee questions for about a half-hour from Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, Musk said there are “no plans” to move Twitter’s headquarters to Texas like he did with Tesla, but that it could make sense to be “dual-headquartered” in California and Texas.
Musk went on to say that, “to be the digital town square, we must represent people with a wide array of views even if we disagree with those views.” However, he didn’t address his firings of dozens of employees for posting tweets and Slack messages criticizing him over the last couple of weeks.
He acknowledged that his ongoing reorganization of the company will “have a lot of mistakes” but “stabilize over time.” In response to one employee question, he said that “significant portions of the technology stack need to be rebuilt from scratch,” and at another point in the meeting he suggested it would be a good idea to “somewhat decentralize[] things” by setting up engineering teams in Japan, India, Indonesia, and Brazil.
At the Monday meeting, in response to a question about employee compensation, Musk reiterated that employees will be given stock options in Twitter and be able to cash them out regularly like at SpaceX, his other company that is also privately held. “The way things work at SpaceX to get liquidity is that every six months there’s a liquidity event where the company buys back shares and we also invite new investors to buy shares,” he said. “And we’ll be able to operate Twitter in the same way.”
Anyone entering Twitter now will work in a much smaller company than it was before Musk took over. While the exact number of departures under his watch is unclear, according to The Verge, there were nearly 7,400 people with access to Twitter’s internal systems before he laid off about half the company. That number, which excludes the thousands of outside contractors Musk also cut, has since fallen to just over 2,700 people as of press time, according to two people who have seen the numbers.
The departures have included long-tenured engineers, some with more than a decade of experience at the company, as well as a growing list of corporate leaders. Twitter’s CEO, CFO, and chief legal officer were all removed on Musk’s first day. Twitter’s top advertising and content partnership leaders have either resigned or been fired. And multiple “critical” teams were completely gutted by the layoffs and resignations, according to current and former employees.
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