Twitter employees returning to work this week were met with a homey reminder of the residences they’d only left hours before arriving in the San Francisco office: a bed.
Elon Musk has taken his lofty goal of only retaining the most “hardcore” employees at the social media company by remodelling the payroll (read: firing at least half of the staff) and trying his hand at home improvement, according to a new report from Forbes magazine.
One employee, who was granted anonymity by the magazine, shared a picture of the newly outfitted conference rooms that workers were greeted with when they walked through the doors of the Market Street headquarters in California.
Showcased in one of the conference rooms was a queen-size bed, alongside a wooden bedside table and two office armchairs with a lamp. One of the new rooms has a plant, while another one was observed to have already been used by someone as trash was seen in one of the garbage bins, Forbes reported.
“It’s not a good look,” another source, also granted anonymity by Forbes, said about the sleep pods, of which they were unsure how many had been added. The source claims that there had been no formal announcement or even email sent out to alert employees about their presence. “It’s yet another unspoken sign of disrespect. There is no discussion. Just like, beds showed up.”
Another anonymous source told Forbes that they estimated there was somewhere between four to eight of these conference room-style bedrooms, and noted that the cozy abodes appear to “look comfortable”
Musk, who has been at the helm of the San Francisco-based company for a little more than a month, has not been shy when it comes to freely admitting that he expects to extract the most from his employees. At the beginning of the takeover, he announced – in a since deleted tweet – that he was planning to pull all-nighters at the San Francisco offices “until the org is fixed.”
Shortly after the mass layoffs at the company, which saw 3,700 employees get booted with little explanation for their departure, the controversial new owner began etching his plans for a “Twitter 2.0. Included in that blueprint was the option for workers to leave the already depleted company should they not view themselves as being “extremely hardcore”.
That offer, which if employees opted into meant they too would be included in the voluntary layoffs and receive three months’ severance, was met with perhaps more enthusiasm than the new owner anticipated. Less than half of the company’s remaining 4,000 staff chose to stay on.
While the inside of the Twitter offices has reportedly received a facelift, so too has the platform itself – or at least, that’s what its new owner hopes to achieve in taking over the social media app that currently counts just 238m users in the second quarter of this year, according to Reuters.
Musk announced his vision for Twitter 2.0 last month, sharing slides from his “Twitter company talk” to all 120m of his users on the social media app.
“I think I see a path to Twitter exceeding a billion monthly users in 12 to 18 months,” wrote the Tesla founder.
Outside of the herculean task of rebuilding the flailing platform to 1bn users in a little over a year, Musk is also having to contend with multiple lawsuits from disgruntled former Twitter employees.
Lisa Bloom, a prominent Los Angeles-based attorney, announced in a press conference on Monday that she is representing three ex-employees at the social media company in arbitration claims, Forbes reported.
“Elon, you broke your promises and you violated the law, we are coming after you,” said Ms Bloom in a live stream from her offices, while trolling the tech titan by holding up her own sink – a sly nod to the Twitter owner’s own publicity stunt during which he showed up at Twitter HQ carrying kitchen sink after he closed the $44bn purchase. “Let that sink in,” she quipped, using Musk’s own line.
