This week commemorates the one-year anniversary of Elon Musk's acquisition of X, once known as Twitter, which he secured for a staggering $44 billion back in October 2022. To mark this milestone, the company organized an all-hands meeting with its staff, although both Musk and the new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, were notably absent from the headquarters for the event. Instead, the two leaders conferenced in from Austin and New York City respectively.
At the company's San Francisco headquarters, X employees huddled around screens to witness their top executives showering praise on the new features that had emerged on Musk's watch including the ad revenue share program for the creators, video calls in direct messages, improved livestreaming quality and more. The event in San Francisco was catered with sandwiches from upscale food chain Mendocino Farms.
According to a source at X, Musk informed staff that future all-hands meetings would occur quarterly, with the next one relying on X's newly developed video call feature—a decision that is sure to place significant pressure on the engineers tasked with working on the tool. Musk later tweeted that future internal company all-hands meetings would be livestreamed so the public can watch too.
Before the meeting, the staff was sent an email from a shared Musk and Yaccarino account under the name "Elon & Linda," according to a copy of the email viewed by Fortune. The email outlined their vision of building an "everything app" and underscored the team's resilience and determination. It spotlighted their common principles focused on advocating for free expression and their hustle to innovate. The email also outlines the accomplishments of the past year, including infrastructure upgrades, serving half a billion users, and developing numerous new capabilities.
Missing was any mention of the frequent technical glitches that have occurred over the past year, including several outages that prevented users from tweeting, and most famously, a livestreamed "Spaces" event with U.S. Presidential candidate and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis that many users were unable to access and which crashed.
A blog by Yaccarino was published on X's corporate side once the meeting ended that largely repeated the comments in the internal email ( and was briefly deleted before re-uploading).
In the internal email, Musk and Yaccarino also stressed a company commitment to safeguarding freedom of expression in tandem with maintaining safety, broadening user functionalities, fostering greater economic prospects for content creators, and establishing X as a townsquare for open dialogue and important discussions. It's worth noting that Musk threatened legal action in July against a group of independent researchers who had conducted studies revealing a rise in hate speech on the platform since the acquisition.
The meeting ended without a Q&A, as promised on X by Musk.
