(Bloomberg) — Twitter Inc. owner Elon Musk summoned all of the social media platform’s software engineers to its headquarters for a meeting on Friday afternoon, urging employees to fly to San Francisco to be there in person.
Most Read from Bloomberg
Only those who can’t physically get to the Bay Area or have family emergencies will be excused from attending, Musk said in an email, which was viewed by Bloomberg News.
“Anyone who actually writes software, please report to the 10th floor at 2pm today,” Musk wrote in the email, sent just before 9 am local time Friday.
The engineers were told to send Musk a bullet-pointed summary of what their coding work has achieved in the past six months, along with as many as 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code. The meetings will be short, and are being held to help Musk “understand the Twitter tech stack,” he said in a follow-up email.
The billionaire, who acquired Twitter in late October for $44 billion, had already pushed out most of the previous executive team and cut half the company’s workforce, leaving it with about 3,700 employees. He had also fired many workers who spoke out against his strategy shifts and cultural changes at the company.
Earlier this week, he gave remaining staff an ultimatum: Either commit to the company’s new “hardcore” work environment or leave.
As of Thursday, many more workers than he expected declined to take the pledge, potentially putting Twitter’s operations at risk, according to people familiar with the matter. Some employees who were departing speculated that so many were leaving, along with their knowledge of how the product works, that the social network may have trouble fixing problems or updating systems during its normal operations, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing internal processes.
After the deadline passed, Twitter emailed employees that it was temporarily closing its offices, and workers speculated this was because of the confusion over who should still be allowed access to the company’s premises.
Read more: Musk Tells Staff Accept ‘Hardcore’ Twitter or Leave in Email
Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek
©2022 Bloomberg LP