Musk to Twitter employees: Commit to ‘hardcore’ hours or leave

Elon Musk gave remaining Twitter employees a Thursday deadline to respond to an ultimatum: staff can commit to working with a “hardcore” company or leave with three months of severance pay, multiple outlets are reporting.

Musk gave his employees until 5 p.m. Eastern on Thursday to make the call and accept an online form, signing a pledge of allegiance to the revamped version of the social media platform, according to The Washington Post.

Musk told staff at the company he recently acquired they will need to commit intensely to their roles in order to mesh with “Twitter 2.0,” according to an email to employees first reported on by the Post.

“Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade,” Musk said in the email, according to the Guardian. 

The Hill has reached out to Twitter for more information.

Twitter has already laid off nearly half its workforce, cutting thousands of employees, including staff involved in the platform’s content moderation, and the ultimatum could mean an even smaller head count for the company. 

Musk sealed the high-profile, $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter at the end of last month, and has since moved to make a slate of controversial changes to the platform.

Musk unveiled new Twitter rules that don’t include any misinformation policies, and the lack of content moderation has reportedly caused a surge of racist and antisemitic tweets on the site and spurred concerns about misinformation.  

Lowered staff counts after the layoffs are also causing issues with curbing misinformation surrounding the midterm elections.

In another controversial move, Musk put Twitter’s blue verification check marks, which were previously only available to users who met credibility requirements, behind an $8 monthly paywall, letting any user subscribed to the service get a verified check mark.