There still might be severe doubts about whether his takeover of Twitter will happen or not but that hasn’t stopped Elon Musk sharing his plans for the social media platform. In a recent interview with Recode, Musk addressed Twitter employees in a Q&A session. The Tesla CEO took questions previously submitted by Twitter employees where they’d asked him about his stand on remote work, how he plans to handle the company after taking over and if he has any plans for layoffs.
On his stand on remote work, Musk reiterated what he has said earlier, and added that maybe software and design roles at Tesla can be managed remotely but to avail it, people in those roles should be exceptional at their job, so that it is possible for them to be effective when they are working remotely. As for the other departments, especially the ones that involve work that cannot be done remotely like bringing in the car parts, assembling the car and then transporting it to the owner, remote work is not something to be considered. And even when someone is working remotely, they have to show up at the office “occasionally”.
Musk added: “So with Tesla, I have simply asked for a list — that the manager has to confirm — that they’re an excellent contributor, and if they do, they’re allowed to work remotely.”
On layoffs and other Twitter plans
As for layoffs at Twitter, Musk said that anyone who is a significant contributor need not worry about them and that he does not take actions “which are disruptive to the health of the company.” He also said that the costs exceeding the revenue is not a great situation to be in. In his own words, “And so there would have to be some rationalization of headcount and expenses to have revenue be greater than cost. Otherwise, Twitter is simply not viable or can’t grow.”
When asked to share his thoughts on how he compensates employees at SpaceX as a private company and what approach he plans to take at Twitter as a private company, Musk had this to say: “Yeah. So SpaceX, I think, operates in the best of both worlds, where stock and options are issued to everyone. But we don’t have all the challenges of being a publicly traded company with a stock that can be up and down from one day to the next — it can be quite a distraction — and where one is at the mercy of short sellers and class action lawsuits. … It’s like being in the public stockade in which they just throw tomatoes at you all day. SpaceX still allows liquidity, so every six months, there’s a liquidity event at SpaceX, and people have the opportunity to sell their shares. And that’s worked very well for the whole lot of the company. So I think something like that would make sense at Twitter. So it would still be stock and options and every day, and it would just be liquidity events twice a year.”
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