Mr. Musk’s team has also been reflecting on the benefits of not paying severance payments to the thousands of people who have left the company since he took over, when there were about 7,500 full-time employees. While Mr. Musk and his advisers had previously considered waiving any severance pay when discussing budget cuts in late October, the company ultimately decided that US-based employees would receive at least two months’ pay and one month’s severance pay, so the company would be in line with federal and state labor laws.
Mr Musk’s team is now reconsidering whether it should pay for some of those months, according to two people familiar with the discussions, or whether it should only be sued by disgruntled former employees. Many former employees still have not received paperwork formalizing their separation from Twitter, five people said. Mr Musk has already refused to pay millions of dollars in exit packages to executives he claims have been fired “with good reason”.
With Twitter downsizing, Mr Musk’s team hoped to renegotiate the terms of leases, two people familiar with the discussion said. The company has received complaints from real estate investment and management firms, including Shorenstein, which owns the San Francisco buildings Twitter occupies.
A Shorenstein spokesperson declined to comment.
In other money-saving measures, Twitter has laid off its kitchen staff and has begun auctioning off office supplies, industrial kitchen equipment and electronics from its San Francisco office.
Mr. Musk is also continuing to cut staff and leaders, including Nelson Abramson, Twitter’s global head of infrastructure, and Alan Rosa, global head of information technology and vice president of information security, according to four people familiar with the moves.
On Sunday evening, Mr. Musk sent two emails to Twitter staff with advice on how to work for him that he had previously shared with SpaceX and Tesla employees. One message focused on first-principles thinking, a worldview based on Aristotle’s teaching of reducing assumptions to basic axioms, which Mr. Musk said helped him make tough decisions. The other argued against hierarchies in the workplace.
On Monday, Twitter notified members of its Trust and Security Council, an advisory group founded in 2016, that it would be disbanded immediately. Created to guide Twitter through challenging security and content moderation issues, the council was made up of organizations concerned with civil rights and child safety.
