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Elon Musk at an event organized by his space company SpaceX
Photo: MIKE BLAKE / REUTERS
Three and a half weeks after Elon Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion, there are now 2,700 to 2,300 left of the 7,500 employees, depending on who you ask.
The company itself does not provide any information on this.
The billionaire, who describes himself as “Chief Twit”, either fired the rest or let them go more or less voluntarily.
The majority of the approximately 5,500 external contract workers were also thrown out.
But now, according to The Verge, Musk is apparently preparing the remaining employees for new hires – and is asking for their help.
At a staff meeting, the company boss said the company was done with the layoffs and would start looking for new engineering and sales staff.
The announcement follows the layoff of more employees from the same department, which the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
The head of the French Twitter branch, Damien Viel, confirmed to the Reuters news agency that he was also leaving the company.
He declined to comment on the circumstances of his departure.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk asked the remaining Tweeps, as Twitter employees call themselves, to help him recruit new employees by recommending potential candidates.
While there are currently no vacancies posted on Twitter's job portal, Musk said at the staff meeting, according to The Verge, "People who can write software well are the top priority."
The Signal founder should help
That fits with the plans Musk has for Twitter's future, according to another report by The Verge.
According to the journalists, a recording of a meeting in which the billionaire outlined his vision for a “Twitter 2.0” was leaked to the journalists.
Accordingly, he wants to drastically expand the functionality of the service, for example by offering end-to-end encrypted direct messages as well as encrypted voice and video chats.
Long before Musk took over the company, there had been attempts to encrypt direct messages, and now the issue should be given top priority.
The chat app Signal has implemented this in an exemplary manner.
Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike (real name Matthew Rosenfield), who years ago worked as security chief at Twitter, was "potentially willing to help out," Musk said.
hackers on board
Another new signing for Twitter is a man who, according to "TechCrunch", was hardly expected in a Twitter remake: George Hotz.
He made headlines as a teenager when, in 2007, he cracked the code that exclusively linked Apple's first iPhone to AT&T's mobile network.
In the years that followed, he repeatedly made a name for himself.
For example, in 2008, within 24 hours, he developed a method to overturn the network lock that Apple used to connect its iPhones to certain providers at the time.
He later used similar methods to turn off lock functions on iPads and Sony's Playstation 3, getting himself into a lot of trouble.
Hotz is now developing autopilot software for cars.
In 2015, Musk tried to hire Hotz for his car company Tesla, TechCrunch reports.
Ultimately, however, there was a dispute between the two, which ended with Hotz taking it upon himself to prove that his autopilot was better than Tesla's.
It may come as a surprise that Musk has hired this man of all people.
He wrote on Twitter last week, "For the cost of living in San Francisco, I'm ready for a 12-week internship at Twitter."
Musk immediately replied, "Sure, let's talk."
According to Hotz, the billionaire has now hired him to overhaul Twitter's search function.
He was given twelve weeks to do this and will do his best to solve the task within this period.
His first official act: he asked via Twitter how the search function had to be changed so that Twitter users use it instead of Google, which sounds as if Musk had given him the goal as a one-man squad to convert Twitter into a Google competitor.
One Twitter user commented, "No way this guy could come and fix Twitter's useless, broken search function in a month when thousands of people haven't done it in years".
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