Extremely Hardcore

Elon Musk Locks Twitter Employees Out Office, Then Asks Them to Meet Him on the 10th Floor

What's going on over there?
Noor Al-Sibai Avatar
Elon Musk's ownership of Twitter is somehow going even worse than expected amid reports that he's locked employees out of the company's office buildings.
MYKONOS, GREECE - JULY 16: Elon Musk seen on a speedboat in Mykonos, Greece. 16 July 2022. (Photo by MEGA/GC Images) Image: Getty Images

Worst Case Scenario

Elon Musk’s Twitter-buying experiment is somehow going even worse than expected, amid reports that he’s locked employees out of the company’s office buildings.

As reported by Platformer‘s Zoë Schiffer, an email sent to Twitter staff yesterday evening informed them out of the blue that they wouldn’t be able to get into their offices for the rest of the week.

“We’re hearing this is because Elon Musk and his team are terrified employees are going to sabotage the company,” Schiffer wrote . “Also, they’re still trying to figure out which Twitter workers they need to cut access for.”

Then, the saga somehow got even stranger today when Musk emailed staff asking them to come to the 10th floor of Twitter’s headquarters — which, remember, they’d just been told they were locked out of — for a meeting on the 10th floor.

Ultimatums

All told, the aura of chaos surrounding Twitter since Musk’s acquisition late last month has deepened to a comical degree.

News of the office closure, you’ll recall, comes not long after Musk issued an ultimatum to the staff who survived his first purge the company’s employees, in which he said that if “tweeps” didn’t come into the office, they would be effectively tendering their resignations.

Just before the office closure announcement, Musk gave his new employees another apparent threat: that if they are not prepared “to be extremely hardcore” and work long in-office hours, they can cut and run with three months severance.

Unsurprisingly, many Twitter employees have chosen the latter — a move that some described to CNN‘s Darcy as a “mass exodus.”

And in the face of all this contradiction and whiplash, who could blame them?

More on Musk: Panicked Elon Musk Reportedly Begging Engineers Not to Leave

Noor Al-Sibai Avatar

Noor Al-Sibai

Senior Staff Writer

I’m a senior staff writer at Futurism, where my work covers medicine, artificial intelligence and its impact on media and society, NASA and the private space sector.