Tesla CEO Elon Musk Hints At Job Cuts In First Address To Twitter Employees

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, addressed Twitter employees for the first time, said that the company “needs to get healthy” financially and also bring the cost down. This somewhere hinted at job cuts.

Elon Musk touched on growth during his virtual address to Twitter employees, saying he’d like to see Twitter reach a billion users (roughly four times its current user base) and anonymity, where he previously caused controversy by saying he wants to “verify all humans” on the service.

According to The New York Times, he clarified at the meeting that this does not mean he wants everyone on Twitter to use their real names, as they do on Facebook, because pseudonyms allow people to freely express their political views.

Trust is what trust is. I tend to be very literal in what I say. There is no (necessary) reading between the lines. According to Nola Weinstein, Twitter’s global head of brand experiences and engagement, Musk said in the meeting, “One can simply read the lines.”

According to Weinstein, one of Musk’s key points at the meeting was to make Twitter “so compelling that you can’t live without it.” According to Weinstein, Musk, who has over 98 million Twitter followers and is one of the platform’s most prolific users, also stated that while some people “use their hair to express themselves, I use Twitter.”

Musk agreed to buy Twitter in April, but he has clashed with the company numerous times since then over the number of bots, or fake accounts, on the social media platform. Musk stated that he would put the deal on hold on May 13, though it appears unlikely that he will be able to do so on his own.

Musk stated that he needed more information from Twitter about those bot accounts, despite the fact that Twitter has been reporting its bot estimates and admitting that they may be too low to investors for years.