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