Elon Musk gave Twitter employees a deadline of 5 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday to decide if they wanted to work for him, and he asked those who did not share his vision to leave their jobs, in his latest shock treatment of the social media company.

Mr. Musk made the announcement in an early-morning email to employees on Wednesday; The message had the subject line “A Fork in the Road.”

In the note, Mr. Musk reiterated that Twitter faced a difficult road ahead and offered employees three months of severance if they did not want to continue working there “to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0.”

Giving remaining employees a deadline to leave has the dual effect of allowing Mr. Musk to further cut costs and purge the company of disgruntled workers. Mr. Musk has brought in a circle of confidants and employees from some of his other companies, such as the electric carmaker Tesla, to advise him at Twitter.

In his note to Twitter employees on Wednesday, Mr. Musk said they would need to work hard — very hard. “In an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hard core,” he wrote. “This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”

Engineering will be the primary focus, Mr. Musk added, with design and product management taking a back seat. He included a link to an online form asking employees to confirm their interest in working at Twitter.

Many Twitter employees have openly balked at Mr. Musk’s leadership, and the company’s work force could be further reduced if many workers accept the offer to leave. On Tuesday, Mr. Musk fired nearly two dozen workers who had been critical of his leadership in posts on Twitter or on the company’s internal messaging service, Slack.

Departing staff members have questioned whether Mr. Musk can keep Twitter operating effectively with a drastically reduced work force. During the mass layoffs this month, Mr. Musk’s team made deep cuts to the group that maintained Twitter’s core infrastructure. Top executives overseeing product, security and ad sales have resigned. And the reductions of the contract work force included the dismissals of people working on content moderation and child safety issues.

Twitter could face a test of how well it runs as soon as next week, when the World Cup is expected to bring a flood of visitors to its service. The additional strain on infrastructure could cause problems.

Features that are priorities to Mr. Musk have also been delayed. As advertisers have shied away from his leadership, he has focused on adding new revenue from subscriptions through products such as Twitter Blue, which would include selling verification check marks for $8 a month. The paid verification feature debuted this month, but was paused after impersonators used it to mimic major brands and spread misinformation.


Elon Musk surround himself with loyal and smart advisors. Maybe their advices are not the best for internet-based and media-leader company such as Twitter, but they have strategic view, experience and genuine loyalty to Musk and therefore to Twitter.

What Musk miss is an internet and mass online media expert that can add important and missing perspective to the good advices that his close circle gives.

Twitter is one of the most important and influential news platform nowadays. It had the potential to become the worlds most important and popular news source. Therefore, the traditional media will be happy to see Twitter and Musk fail, bankrupt, finished.

The public hope that Musk will win his bid to invest so much in order to democratize the internet and make news, honest news, great again.