Speaker 1: Recently, Elon Musk, the new CEO of Twitter, told employees
Speaker 1: to either commit to the company's new hardcore work environment
Speaker 1: or leave. Well, now it appears as though Mr Musk
Speaker 1: is taking a software approach in an effort to convince
Speaker 1: workers to remain at the company. We're going to take
Speaker 1: a closer look now with Bloomberg's Kurt Wagner joins us
Speaker 1: from our studios in San Francisco, looking at all things Twitter. Kurt,
Speaker 1: thanks for being with us. It looks like the notion
Speaker 1: of my way or the highway is has softened just
Speaker 1: a bit, don't you think. Yeah, it's it feels a
Speaker 1: little bit like it backfired or perhaps he uh, you know,
Speaker 1: underestimated exactly how many people would take him up on
Speaker 1: the ability to leave the company with three months severance.
Speaker 1: What we're hearing was that today is this deadline was approaching.
Speaker 1: You know, there were a handful of group meetings internally
Speaker 1: where they were sort of trying to convince people that
Speaker 1: day the Twitter was the right idea. We saw an
Speaker 1: all hands email that was send out. It's sort of um,
Speaker 1: you know, I didn't walk back the work from home
Speaker 1: policy necessarily, but it definitely had a different tone. Someone'll relax,
Speaker 1: sort of like, hey, you know, as long as your
Speaker 1: managers says it's cool, don't worry about it, which is
Speaker 1: not the tone he was putting out last week, and
Speaker 1: so really gets you know, to the heart of this problem,
Speaker 1: which is like, has been trying to cut costs, but
Speaker 1: he has now cut so many people at Twitter, there's
Speaker 1: some concern that there might not be enough people working
Speaker 1: there next week to you know, keep this thing up
Speaker 1: and running. Yeah, that's it, right, brain drain. I mean,
Speaker 1: these are the technocrats that are familiar with this platform,
Speaker 1: and it's essential that they remain there to keep it operational, right,
Speaker 1: and I would imagine that they're trying to do that
Speaker 1: in this environment where where maybe people are feeling a
Speaker 1: little of I don't want to say depressed necessarily, but
Speaker 1: as you point your finger on the fact that probably
Speaker 1: close to half the number of employees the company had
Speaker 1: when Musk took over have been let go. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: more than half, right, because he laid off half himself,
Speaker 1: and then a week later he made this kind of
Speaker 1: ultimatum to people, and we have been unable to put
Speaker 1: an exact number on it, but everyone we're talking to
Speaker 1: is like, man, the number of people who took this
Speaker 1: buyout is way bigger than expected, and so, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: we're we're looking at now being down again. I would
Speaker 1: be totally guessing, but you know, well over half of
Speaker 1: the staff that he had when he first took over.
Speaker 1: And you know, this is maybe the size of a
Speaker 1: company that could work if you started from zero and
Speaker 1: built your way up. The challenges. You know, there's going
Speaker 1: to be people and when things start to go wrong,
Speaker 1: there might not be someone there to to fix it right,
Speaker 1: and they're going to be scrambling to try and kind
Speaker 1: of sell these seats that they didn't even know are empty.
Speaker 1: And I think that's where it becomes really complicated is
Speaker 1: in the short term. So it's the struggle for the
Speaker 1: people that have tried to remain this this culture of
Speaker 1: you know, everybody's got to be in the office working
Speaker 1: more than forty hours a week. There is no more
Speaker 1: remote working. Is that really the problem or is it
Speaker 1: more than how the culture of the company has changed
Speaker 1: under Musk. I think they're they're both issues for a
Speaker 1: lot of people on Twitter. You know, on the one hand,
Speaker 1: there was a lifestyle that came with working at a
Speaker 1: lot of tech companies, but Twitter in particular, they've had
Speaker 1: remote work for a couple of years now. That was
Speaker 1: a big part of it. Right, Some people move their families,
Speaker 1: they built their whole life around this idea that they
Speaker 1: could work from anywhere, and suddenly they're being told they
Speaker 1: have to be in the office forty hours a week.
Speaker 1: That's that's the kind of thing that makes someone want
Speaker 1: to get a new job. And then on top of that,
Speaker 1: Ellen is just a really hard person to work for.
Speaker 1: Right He's incredibly demanding, his his standards are very high.
Speaker 1: He kind of you know, it feels that you need
Speaker 1: to be in the office to work, which kind of
Speaker 1: makes more sense with the company like Tesla that I
Speaker 1: think than it does with a software company like Twitter.
Speaker 1: And so I think there's a lot of people who
Speaker 1: are saying, Okay, do I want to work for this
Speaker 1: type of person and I'm willing to do all of
Speaker 1: these other things that you know, our actual life changes
Speaker 1: for me and possibly my family. And I think there's
Speaker 1: a lot of people that are just saying, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm willing to go look elsewhere. Thanks Kurt for helping
Speaker 1: us understand uh the new adoption on the part of
Speaker 1: Elon Musk to maybe use a software approach in trying
Speaker 1: to convince UH workers on Twitter to remain with the company.
Speaker 1: Kurt Wagner, Bloomberg's tech reporter from San Francisco here on
Speaker 1: day Break Asia,