Hundreds of Twitter employees today resigned from the company rather than opting in to be part of "Twitter 2.0" under Elon Musk, according to The Verge. Musk earlier this week told workers that Twitter will be "extremely hardcore" going forward, with employees expected to put in long hours at high intensity. "Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade," he said.
Musk on Wednesday sent out a Google form and asked employees to respond "Yes" by 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday if they wanted to stay at the company. Hundreds decided not to, and have said their goodbyes in Slack and on Twitter. Departing employees will receive a severance package.
When he took over Twitter, Musk laid off approximately half of the 7,500 employees that were at the company at the time, and since then, he has continued firing employees who have been critical of him, including longtime engineers.
Twitter employees that spoke to The Verge said that given the number of people that have left, Twitter could "start breaking soon" and that it will be "extremely hard for Twitter to recover."
With the exodus of employees, Twitter temporarily closed all office buildings and suspended badge access. According to Zoë Schiffer, Musk and his team are "terrified employees are going to sabotage the company."
In the final hours ahead of the deadline, Musk reportedly attempted to convince employees to stay. Bloomberg says that key staff were brought into meetings and Musk also walked back his in-office work demands. He had said that all employees needed to work from the office 40 hours a week, but today he said that working from home was allowed with monthly in-person meetings and managerial approval.
At the current time, Musk's first initiative is on pause as Twitter makes changes. Last week, Twitter introduced a more expensive $8 version of Twitter Blue that included a verification badge, and it turned out that debuting widespread verification led to account impersonation that impacted numerous companies.
