Musk ends remote work at Twitter, warns of troubles ahead

Elon Musk has emailed Twitter workers, most working remotely, ordering them to return to the workplace instantly for at the least 40 hours every week and warning of “tough occasions forward.”

A pair of Wednesday evening missives seen by The Related Press marked Musk’s first companywide message to workers who survived final week’s mass layoffs. Many have needed to depend on the billionaire Tesla CEO’s public tweets for clues about Twitter’s future.

The video within the participant above is from a earlier report.

“Sorry that that is my first e mail to the entire firm, however there isn’t a technique to sugarcoat the message,” wrote Musk, earlier than he described a dire financial local weather for companies like Twitter that rely nearly completely on promoting to generate profits.

“With out important subscription income, there’s a good probability Twitter won’t survive the upcoming financial downturn,” Musk mentioned. “We’d like roughly half of our income to be subscription.”

MORE: Twitter’s chief data safety officer quits amid firm turmoil

Musk’s memo adopted a live-streamed dialog attempting to assuage main advertisers Wednesday, his most expansive public feedback about Twitter’s route since he closed a $44 billion deal to purchase the social media platform late final month and dismissed its high executives. A lot of well-known manufacturers have paused promoting on Twitter as they wait to see how Musk’s proposals to chill out content material guidelines in opposition to hate and misinformation have an effect on the tenor of the platform.

Musk informed workers the “precedence over the previous 10 days” was to develop and launch Twitter’s new subscription service for $7.99 a month that features a blue verify mark subsequent to the title of paid members – the mark was beforehand just for verified accounts. Musk’s mission has had a rocky rollout with an onslaught of newly purchased pretend accounts this week impersonating high-profile figures corresponding to basketball star LeBron James, former U.S. President George W. Bush and the drug firm Eli Lilly to put up false data or offensive jokes.

In a second e mail to workers, Musk mentioned the “absolute high precedence” over the approaching days is to droop “bots/trolls/spam” exploiting the verified accounts. However Twitter now employs far fewer individuals to assist him try this.

MORE: Twitter briefly rolled out grey ‘official’ verify marks earlier than Elon Musk modified his thoughts

An govt final week mentioned Twitter was chopping roughly 50% of its workforce, which numbered 7,500 earlier this yr.

Musk had beforehand expressed distaste for Twitter’s pandemic-era distant work insurance policies that enabled workforce leaders to determine if workers needed to present up within the workplace. On Wednesday, he ordered all workers to return to the workplace Thursday.

Musk informed workers within the e mail that “distant work is now not allowed” and the street forward is “arduous and would require intense work to succeed.” He mentioned he would personally overview any request for an exception.

Twitter hasn’t disclosed the overall variety of layoffs throughout its international workforce however informed native and state officers within the U.S. that it was chopping 784 employees at its San Francisco headquarters, about 200 elsewhere in California, greater than 400 in New York Metropolis, greater than 200 in Seattle and about 80 in Atlanta.

MORE: This is how Twitter workers are discovering out they have been laid off as almost 50% of workforce minimize

The exodus at Twitter is ongoing, together with the corporate’s chief data safety officer Lea Kissner, who tweeted Thursday that “I’ve made the onerous resolution to go away Twitter.”

Cybersecurity skilled Alex Stamos, a former Fb safety chief, tweeted Thursday that there’s a “critical threat of a breach with drastically lowered employees” that would additionally put Twitter at odds with a 2011 order from the Federal Commerce Fee that required it to deal with critical knowledge safety lapses.

“Twitter made big strides in direction of a extra rational inside safety mannequin and backsliding will put them in bother with the FTC” and different regulators within the U.S. and Europe, Stamos mentioned.

The FTC mentioned in a press release Thursday that it’s “monitoring latest developments at Twitter with deep concern.”

“No CEO or firm is above the legislation, and corporations should comply with our consent decrees,” mentioned the company’s assertion. “Our revised consent order offers us new instruments to make sure compliance, and we’re ready to make use of them.”

MORE: Layoff tracker: Mass layoffs by tech corporations massive and small hit the Bay Space

The FTC wouldn’t say whether or not it was investigating Twitter for potential violations. If it had been, it’s empowered to demand paperwork and depose workers.

Twitter paid a $150 million penalty in Might for violating the 2011 consent order and its up to date model established new procedures requiring the corporate to implement an enhanced privateness safety program in addition to beefing up data safety.

These new procedures embody an exhaustive listing of disclosures Twitter should make to the FTC when introducing new services – significantly once they have an effect on private knowledge collected on customers.

Musk is, after all, basically overhauling platform choices, and it isn’t identified if he’s telling the FTC about it. Twitter, which gutted its communications division, did not reply to a request for remark Thursday.

Musk has a historical past of tangling with regulators. “I don’t respect the SEC,” Musk declared in a 2018 tweet.

MORE: Activists put stress on advertisers to drop Twitter advertisements over Musk takeover, worker layoffs

The Securities and Trade Fee not too long ago examined for potential tardiness his disclosures to the company of his purchases of Twitter inventory to amass a serious stake. In 2018, Musk and Tesla every agreed to pay $20 million in fines over Musk’s allegedly deceptive tweets saying he’d secured the funding to take the electrical automobile maker non-public for $420 a share. Musk has fought the SEC in court docket over compliance with the settlement.

The results for not assembly FTC’s necessities could be extreme – corresponding to when Fb needed to pay $5 billion for privateness violations.

“If Twitter a lot as sneezes, it has to do a privateness overview beforehand,” tweeted Riana Pfefferkorn, a Stanford College researcher who mentioned she beforehand supplied Twitter exterior authorized counsel. “There are periodic exterior audits, and the FTC can monitor compliance.”

Twitter was fined in Might for the alleged business exploit of consumers’ knowledge – cellphone numbers and e mail addresses – that it had claimed it wanted for safety functions, corresponding to enabling multi-factor authentication.

AP reporters Frank Bajak and Marcy Gordon contributed to this report.