At his other companies, including electric car maker Tesla and rocket maker SpaceX, Mr. Musk has sometimes appointed a key adviser to run the company in his absence. At SpaceX, the job fell to Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer.
At Twitter, Mr. Musk chose to run the company himself. He has borrowed employees from his other companies, including Tesla and the Boring Company, a tunneling start-up, to join him. Boring Company president Steve Davis has led several cost-cutting initiatives at Twitter. Mr. Musk has had people rotate to advise him on legal and financial matters, including investor Antonio Gracias, a former Tesla board member, and Alex Spiro, his personal attorney.
Mr. Musk also relied on Tesla and SpaceX employees to handle tech matters, as layoffs and layoffs have decimated Twitter’s tech ranks. While at least one Tesla board member said he believed the automaker’s employees would only be deployed to Twitter for a short time, Musk continued to use them, including Sheen Austin, a Tesla engineer who heads Twitter’s infrastructure organization.
Some of Mr. Musk’s advisers have lobbied to lead Twitter. On Sunday, Jason Calacanis, an investor in Mr. Musk’s Twitter, asked his own followers on the platform if he or venture capitalist David Sacks became Twitter’s CEO, or shared the position.
Mr Musk, who was in Qatar this weekend with Jared Kushner for the World Cup final, is also looking to invest in Twitter again. After selling $3.6 billion in Tesla stock last week, his finance team, led by Jared Birchall, the head of his family office, sent emails to potential investors, said one person approached to invest and who was not authorized to speak in public.
The emails to potential lenders invited them to invest at the $54.20 share price Mr. Musk paid to buy the company, the person said. But Musk has since said publicly that the price he paid for Twitter was more than double what it was worth. The possible fundraising was previously reported by Semafor.
Mr. Musk has continued to aggressively cut costs on Twitter. On Friday night, the company began a new round of layoffs, according to four people with knowledge of the actions and documents The New York Times saw. About 50 employees, mostly from the company’s infrastructure division, were cut, the people said. It was unclear how other divisions were affected.
