A new wave of Twitter Inc. employees began posting farewells Thursday, after the deadline passed on an ultimatum Elon Musk issued for them to commit to “long hours at high intensity” or leave.
Many staffers spent the past day weighing their options, after waking up Wednesday to an overnight email in which Musk told them to fill out a form by Thursday, 5 p.m. ET, to indicate if they want to remain at the company and are willing to be “extremely hardcore.” Employees who don’t opt in will be given three months of severance, Musk said.
The full scope of the departures wasn’t immediately clear. After the Thursday deadline passed and resignations became apparent, Twitter emailed employees saying that the company was temporarily closing its office buildings effective immediately. The offices will reopen Monday, the email said.
As the deadline approached Thursday, some employees posted farewells to the company’s internal Slack messaging platform, according to screenshots viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Some posted the “saluting face” emoji, which many employees had adopted as a symbol of the end of Twitter’s pre-Musk era following mass layoffs earlier this month.
Online, several said they were leaving after years of service and with a heavy heart. “I resigned today from my job at Twitter. I have nothing but love and admiration for the incredibly kind and talented people I have worked with over these past 4 years,” one departing employee wrote on the platform.
With all that ongoing, and a week after raising the specter of bankruptcy, Musk took to Twitter on Thursday to joke, “How do you make a small fortune in social media? Start out with a large one.”
An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.
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