Elon Musk is once again reversing course on a policy in his very public struggle to adequately run his newly acquired company, Twitter.
Apparently, a meeting amongst employees in the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco was called by Musk just one day after he reportedly suspended access to the building. As New York Times tech reporter Kate Conger explained,
“Musk just asked all software engineers to come to an in person meeting today. Beforehand, they’re supposed to email him screenshots of their recent code.”
Conger continued in a thread on Twitter itself: “This comes, of course, after last night’s announcement that Twitter’s offices would be closed today and badge access would be suspended […] In a follow up email, Musk encouraged people to fly to SF for this.”
On Thursday, We Got This Covered reported that Musk revoked employee badge access to the building which was supposed to be in effect until Monday, Nov. 21.
This all comes after Musk took over Twitter late last month and brought with that regime change a fast pace of announcements, reversals, and seemingly knee-jerk policies, all of which often played out on Twitter itself via Musk’s own rapid-fire tweets. For instance, Musk announced that the blue checkmark normally used for verifying accounts would now be a paid subscription called Twitter Blue. After horror author Stephen King announced he would leave the platform should he be asked to pay $20 per month for Twitter Blue, Musk seemed to haggle with him in a reply tweet by knocking down the cost to $8 per month.
Later, Twitter implemented a secondary monochromatic verification badge with the word “Official” next to it, which was quickly abandoned within the same day, which of course Musk also tweeted about. What’s more, Musk has been clamping down on a surge of impersonator accounts that have intentionally exploited the paid checkmark policy to lampoon everyone from Musk himself to Nintendo of America. This has caused Musk to announce all satirical Twitter accounts must now clearly say “parody” in the name.
After a recorded surge in hate speech occurred on Twitter immediately after Musk’s acquisition, which the tech mogul has claimed to have addressed, Musk blamed “activist groups” for advertisers abandoning the platform en masse. Musk has also fired about half of Twitter’s original workforce, with even more employees choosing to quit the company thereafter.
Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion and tried to back out of that deal after doing so. But when Twitter threatened to sue Musk in order to make him follow through on the purchase, he reluctantly took the reigns of the social media site at the end of October.
