Reports of events at Twitter headquarters were not officially confirmed, but were verified by an anonymous Twitter employee.
Photo by Julia Wong
Recently, Elon Musk finalized his deal to acquire Twitter for $44 billion. This deal has saddled Twitter — a company already losing hundreds of millions of dollars every year — with $12.5 billion in loans. Musk took the reins of the company and declared that “making Twitter profitable is easy. Profit is just revenue minus costs. So all we need to do is bring down costs, and bring up revenue. It can’t be that hard?”
Musk’s first plan to increase revenue was to charge for verification, removing the previous qualification of being a “notable person.” Now, the only requirement is a fee of $8/month. An additional feature of this new service is the replacement of half of all advertisements with “uber fresh and dank” memes hand-picked by Musk himself. The remaining ads will exclusively endorse Tesla, Homescapes, and conservative political news sites meeting Twitter’s new standards for misinformation.
“I’m excited about this feature,” said @notarussianbot. “Everything I say is real and true and the blue checkmark will finally convey that to all people who read my tweets.” Other users were similarly satisfied by the new verification system, putting their newfound influence to use in a variety of ways — including successfully reducing the price of insulin to $0, impersonating celebrities, and cyberbullying Elon Musk. “I actually just don’t care at all,” said Musk. “I mean, I’ll suspend them, but it’s absolutely not because they made me cry while I was scrolling through Twitter on the toilet, because I didn’t.”
In response to Musk’s promises to restore “free speech” to Twitter, there has been an increase in hate speech and cries to unban controversial figures. This claim was quickly walked back. “According to both The Coca-Cola Company and our moral code, we can’t allow hate speech on Twitter,” said Musk in an Apple Notes app screenshot shared on his Twitter.
“The first day, he sat all the programmers down and turned on Rick and Morty for two hours as we sat in a silence broken only by Elon’s occasional outbursts of laughter,” said an anonymous Twitter employee. “When the episodes were done, he looked at us and said, ‘That’s what I want you to do.’ We all asked what that meant and he just said ‘make it funny.’ No one asked for clarification because we were all too stunned. What does he think engineers do?”
The anonymous employee went on to say that Musk’s threat to fire most of Twitter’s employees came after their failure to finish this project on the tight deadline even after he pushed them to pull an “all-nighter” to get it done. “No, we weren’t paid for the overtime,” said the whistleblower.
After one Twitter engineer publicly corrected Musk’s claim that “Twitter has too many lines of code; we need to reduce it to the original 140 lines, back when the website was good,” Musk fired the next 56 Twitter employees to interact with him in any capacity. The day following this mass layoff, employees received an email requesting all Twitter employees to “affirm their undying loyalty to Twitter and promise never to show any degree of disrespect towards Chief Twit Elon Musk” by clicking a link, lest they be subject to termination in 24 hours.
Yesterday, the anonymous Twitter employee leaked an internal memo where top engineers chastised Musk for his handling of the company. While the memo was posted online, it gained very little traction. “We didn’t need this memo leaked,” tweeted @tomfoolerygoose. “Musk’s been posting this all online himself.”
