Hundreds of Twitter Employees Want to Resign After Elon Musk’s Ultimatum: Report

Just three weeks after acquiring social media giant Twitter, Elon Musk has triggered a mass exit at the company.

Within the first week, the billionaire fired top executives, including the CEO and CFO, and eliminated over 3,500 job positions. He has now been given an ultimatum for the remaining employees to sign up for “long hours at high intensity” or leave.

According to Reutershundreds of Twitter workers plan to walk away from the company.

Hundreds to Leave Twitter

“Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore,” Musk told Twitter employees in an email on Wednesday, asking them to click “yes” if they choose to stay.

Employees who failed to respond by 5 pm ET on Thursday would be considered to have quit and given a severance package.

A poll on the workplace app Blind asked workers to estimate the percentage of staffers that would leave based on their perception, and over half of the respondents replied 50%.

Blind verifies staffers through their work email addresses and enables them to engage anonymously.

In another poll, 42% out of 180 respondents chose the “Taking exit option, I’m free!” answer; a quarter chose to stay “reluctantly,” while only 7% said they clicked “yes to stay, I’m hardcore.”

A former employee noted that in a private chat on messaging app Signal, about 40 workers out of 50 staff said they chose to leave. Another private Slack group for Twitter’s current and former employees saw over 360 join a new channel called “voluntary layoff,” according to a person with knowledge of the Slack group.

Musk Asked Some Top Employees to Stay

Furthermore, one employee disclosed that Musk was meeting some top employees, trying to convince them to stay with the company. Another recently-departed staffer, who has been in touch with Twitter colleagues, confirmed the information.

Although the number of departed is uncertain, an employee said security officers began sending workers out of the office on Thursday evening. The company also informed staffers that it would close its offices and cut badge access until Monday.

Employees that have departed include several engineers who take care of bugs and prevent service outages, which has raised concerns about the platform’s stability. Workers are already complaining that their version of the Twitter app is slowing down, estimating the public version to break down soon.