Elon Musk Waste No Time Changing Twitter

Less than 24 hours after completing Twitter's $44 billion acquisition, Elon Musk decided to change his homepage.

He requested that logged out users visiting Twitter.com be redirected to the Explore page, which shows trending tweets and news, according to employees familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity without the company's permission. was. Previously, logging out only showed a sign-up form by visiting Twitter's homepage, encouraging the creation of an account to view Tweets. Musk's directive, which took effect late Friday, required VP's involvement to override the code freeze to prevent fake employees from making changes during the acquisition process.

Although Musk didn't elaborate on the reason for the change, the message to the staff watching it was clear: No more holy cows. Teams battled for weeks over such a decision within old Twitter. But this was the new Twitter. As one former executive told me: "It's definitely a way to make it clear that you're in charge now."

The changing of Twitter's homepage is an example of how Musk has begun to rapidly transform the company from the inside out, less than three days into his reign as "main tweeter." Even as it prepares to lay off a significant portion of employees in the coming days, it has swiftly made changes to Twitter itself, such as renaming its paid membership feature, Super Followers. "Subscribe". Twitter's mobile app. They have also discussed using their satellite-based Internet service, Starlink, at SpaceX to make Twitter available in countries where it is currently difficult to access.

The employees who complete Musk's tasks work late nights and weekends, while his manager compiles a list of team members. When Musk fired former CEO Parag Agarwal and other top executives last week, he did so "for a reason" to avoid paying millions in stock, a person familiar with the situation said. (The Information first reported that Musk fired Amal on Twitter for this reason.)

Now employees fear layoffs will begin before November 1, when a significant percentage of them are set to receive stock grants paid in cash at $54.20 per share. Shortly after this story was published, Musk tweeted "this is wrong" in response to a tweet containing another story, which claimed layoffs would take place before that date.

Meanwhile, Musk is relying on his inner circle to help him understand what he just bought. They are hiding in a block-locked area of Twitter's San Francisco headquarters, with a fleet of Teslas standing outside and new security guards at the entrance. Dozens of people from his family office, other companies and social circles have been added to Twitter's employee directory and given company email addresses, according to employees and internal correspondence seen by The Verge.

These include Musk's personal lawyer, Alex Spiro, who is acting as Twitter's de facto general counsel; Andrew Musk, a relative who works for his brain-interface startup Neuralink; Jane Balajadia, COO of The Boring Company; David Sachs, an influential political donor and fellow "PayPal Mafia" member; Jason Calacanis, a VC and longtime friend of Musk; and Sriram Krishnan, a former Twitter product leader and current VC at Andreessen Horowitz, who is also a friend of Musk. (The New York Times first reported that some of these people were meeting Twitter employees.)

Twitter's former product chief Kayvan Becpour, who was fired by Agarwal in May, was also seen in office last Friday, sparking rumors that he may return. Complicating that idea is the fact that Twitter's current head of product Jay Sullivan is still at the company.

On Saturday, Calacanis, who co-hosts the popular all-in podcast Musk, tweeted as a guest earlier this year that he had met with Twitter's security chief Joel Roth, and was "impressed by his dedication and approach." There were security issues." The tweet quoted a Roth source as describing how the company is banning accounts involved in a "trolling campaign" of tweeting racial slurs. “Twitter will be laser-focused on identity and security in the coming weeks,” Calacanis followed in another tweet.

Musk's first order of business has been figuring out who he wants to hire in Twitter's engineering organization. On Friday, engineers were asked to print out their most recent code contributions from the past 30 to 60 days and bring them in for review by Musk and Tesla engineers. They were then asked to quickly cut out their prints and show the code on their computers instead, as platformer Casey Newton first reported. Some engineers have been glued to a Twitter account that tracks the whereabouts of Musk's private jet, with hopes that he and Tesla engineers will visit the company's New York City office on Monday to continue the code review.

Managers have been told that the review is for Musk to see who can do the work at the speed and efficiency he demands, and that he wants to weed out engineering managers who don't write code regularly. . "Managers in software must write great software or it's like being a cavalry captain who can't ride a horse!" He tweeted in May.

Twitter's communications division, which has ceased to respond to press inquiries since its acquisition of Musk, did not respond to a request for comment for this story.