Elon Musk held his first ‘all-hands’ meeting on Thursday
(Picture: REUTERS)Elon Musk has warned Twitter staff to brace for “difficult times ahead” if the social network cannot find new ways of making money.
Workers are facing growing uncertainty about their ability to keep Twitter running safely as the social media platform continues to lose high-level staff, including head of trust and safety Yoel Roth, according to the Associated Press.
It comes after a week of mass layoffs since Musk’s acquisition of the platform. An executive last week said Twitter was cutting roughly 50 per cent of its workforce, which numbered 7,500 earlier this year.
Chief privacy officer Damien Kieran and chief information security officer Lea Kissner have also quit.
On Wednesday Musk emailed all employees ordering them to stop working from home and show up in the office on Thursday morning.
He called his first “all-hands” meeting on Thursday afternoon. Before that, many were relying on the billionaire Tesla CEO’s public tweets for information about Twitter’s future.
“Sorry that this is my first email to the whole company, but there is no way to sugarcoat the message,” Musk wrote, before he described a dire economic climate for businesses like Twitter that rely almost entirely on advertising to make money.
“Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn,” Musk said. “We need roughly half of our revenue to be subscription.”
A worker told AP that Musk appeared to downplay employee concerns about how a smaller Twitter workforce was handling privacy and data security standards, saying as CEO of Tesla he knew how that worked.
Musk’s memo and staff meeting echoed a livestreamed conversation trying to assuage major advertisers. A number of well-known brands have paused advertising on Twitter.
Musk told employees the “priority over the past 10 days” was to develop and launch Twitter’s new subscription service for $7.99 a month that includes a blue check mark next to the name of paid members — the mark was previously only for verified accounts.
Musk’s project has had a rocky rollout with an onslaught of newly bought fake accounts this week impersonating high-profile figures such as basketball star LeBron James and the drug company Eli Lilly to post false information or offensive jokes.
Cybersecurity expert Alex Stamos, a former Facebook security chief, tweeted Thursday that there is a “serious risk of a breach with drastically reduced staff” that could also put Twitter at odds with a 2011 order from the Federal Trade Commission that required it to address serious data security lapses.
The FTC said in a statement that it is “tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern.”
“No CEO or company is above the law, and companies must follow our consent decrees,” said the agency’s statement. “Our revised consent order gives us new tools to ensure compliance, and we are prepared to use them.”
The FTC would not say whether it was investigating Twitter for potential violations. If it were, it is empowered to demand documents and depose employees.
