UPDATE 11/18: According to The New York TimesThe New York Times, hundreds of Twitter employees decided yesterday not to commit themselves to building the new Twitter and quit instead. Elon Musk has promised each of them three months of severance.
Meetings were held ahead of the 5 p.m. deadline with employees who Musk believes are critical to Twitter continuing to function. It's unclear how well those meetings went, but so many resignations were received that Twitter decided to disable employee badge access to office buildings until Monday.
Kylie Robison, reporter for Fortune Magazine, says Twitter may have lost 88% of its employees now, such was the extent of the resignations. If accurate, it will raise questions over whether Twitter can continue to function without technical or moderation issues.
Original Story 11/16:
Twitter may be about to lose another wave of employees. The company’s new owner, Elon Musk, is demanding that staffers pledge to work “long hours at high intensity” or face termination.
Musk is asking employees to sign a form, committing themselves to building the new Twitter. If they don’t, then Musk says they’ll be fired. "Anyone who has not done so by 5pm ET tomorrow (Thursday) will receive three months of severance,” he wrote in the memo, according to CNN, which obtained a copy.
The ultimatum represents Musk’s ongoing effort to overhaul Twitter into a profitable company that he says will prioritize free speech. In the memo, Musk writes, “Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore.”
“This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade,” he adds. The document goes on to say Musk is remaking Twitter into a “more engineering-driven” company that’ll elevate software programmers who can write the best code.
The big question is how many Twitter employees will choose to remain at the company. Musk already initiated mass layoffs earlier this month that eliminated half the staff. Twitter has since lost several top executives. In addition, the company has fired several employees for using Twitter to publicly criticize Musk's actions. Others says they were dismissed after questioning Musk through the company’s internal Slack chats.
Hence, the memo from Musk may be an attempt to weed out dissent and retain employees who believe in his vision. Musk’s goal is to eventually turn Twitter into a super app like China’s WeChat, which can be used for payments and chatting with friends, along with social media. On Thursday, Musk also hinted that he's working to add end-to-end encryption to Twitter direct messages.