The latest memos sent to staff by Twitter’s new CEO Elon Musk revealed that many employee benefits will be cut as the billionaire continues to cut costs across the company.
Allowances for child care, home internet, wellness, personal and professional development, and quarterly team activities have all been gutted.
How organisations drive employee empowerment and business results with leading digital technology
What you can achieve with a leading approach to digital work
Musk said the benefits may return when the company starts demonstrating a better financial situation.
The revelations come in the latest round of internal leaks made by employees who remain at the company, as seen by The Verge.
All Twitter staff will also be required to provide the CEO with weekly updates on their work. According to the memos, every Friday staff will be required to send a concise update on what they have been doing throughout the week.
Software engineers and other relevant technical departments will be required to provide examples of code where relevant. Staff in other departments will have to provide written summaries of their respective progress.
At the end of last week, Musk also reportedly required all software engineers to update him personally and provide screenshots of their ten “most salient lines of code”.
The latest overhauls at the platform come after Musk said he would be thrusting an “extremely hardcore” working culture on its remaining staff.
In his short time in charge at the company, the CEO has ordered swathes of layoffs and other policies have prompted remaining staff to resign en masse.
Hundreds of staff walked out on the company last week, rejecting Musk’s ‘Twitter 2.0’. The CEO set a 17 November deadline for staff to agree to his new vision for the company or be fired while receiving three months’ worth of severance pay.
In addition to the mandatory weekly reports and massive personnel cuts - around 50% (around 3,700 total) were fired earlier this month by email - Musk also promised longer working days at a higher intensity.
Next steps for paid verification
Elon Musk confirmed in a Tuesday tweet that one of his first acts as Twitter CEO, implementing $8 paid verification, would be put on hold due to rampant impersonations.
The paid verification feature, called Twitter Blue, was introduced at the start of November and was paused less than a week after its launch.
Numerous accounts impersonated high-profile figures, including Musk, and posted tweets that aimed to damage the genuine individual’s reputation.
Twitter Blue allowed anyone to pay a monthly fee for the platform’s heralded ‘blue tick’ - a symbol applied to an account, previously only available via Twitter’s in-house vetting process.
It meant any account could be ‘verified’ and organisations like news outlets would receive separate ‘official’ badges to demonstrate their legitimacy.
Musk introduced the feature to combat the rampant use of bots and other fake accounts on the platform used to spread misinformation and scams.
