by On Wednesday, Elon Musk visited Twitter headquarters with a sink in his hand, conveying a willingness to sink in, and later in the day had a friendly chat with employees. Musk had previously told investors that he planned to lay off about three-quarters of Twitter’s roughly 7,500 employees after the acquisition, but on Wednesday he told employees there were no plans for large-scale layoffs. Musk completed the acquisition of Twitter on Thursday, immediately firing key executives including the CEO, CFO and chief legal officer. On Friday, employees anxiously awaited Musk’s next steps, scouring the company’s Slack channel for information on who might be fired and how their jobs might change, but found nothing. The remaining executives held closed-door meetings with Musk’s team. An anonymous employee said it was a chaotic day. Musk started by asking programmers to print out code written in the past 30 to 60 days for Tesla engineers to check. Then it was told not to print, just have the most recently written code ready on the machine when Musk assessed it. One former Tesla engineer who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that Tesla engineers may have difficulty evaluating code written by Twitter engineers, because Twitter’s distributed systems are not the forte of automotive engineers. He thought the whole thing was ridiculous. One Twitter employee described the feeling as “a creepy optimism.” Angry and confused on the first day at Musk-controlled Twitter, some employees were completely clueless.
