Twitter Brings In Over 50 Tesla Employees In Elon Musk’s Latest Takeover Move: Report

It seems like when Elon Musk joined Twitter as the CEO, he did not intend to make a solitary entry at the social networking company. According to a report by CNBC, Musk brought in over 50 employees from his automotive company Tesla just days after he completed the $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter. 

As per the report, more than 50 employees who were pulled in from Tesla are software engineers from the Autopilot team. This comes after he acquired Twitter on October 28 and subsequently fired top Twitter executives including former CEO Parag Agrawal and former chief financial officer Ned Segal. Furthermore, Musk also sacked legal team leaders and completely dissolved the platform’s board of directors.

Adding to the layoffs is Sarah Personette, who resigned last week from the post of ad sales head hours after Musk finalised the deal. “Hi folks, I wanted to share that I resigned on Friday from Twitter and my work access was officially cut off last night,” she announced on Twitter on Tuesday.

Musk pulls in dozens of workers from his other firms to work at Twitter

As per the internal records accessed by CNBC, several employees working in Musk’s ventures have been authorized to work at Twitter, including over 50 from Tesla, two from tunnel construction firm Boring Company, and one from neurotechnology company Neuralink. 

The Tesla employees reportedly include the director of Autopilot and TeslaBot engineering Milan Kovac, senior director of software engineering Maha Virduhagiri, director of software development Ashok Elluswamy and Pete Scheutzow, a senior staff technical program manager.

According to insider information, Musk is building an army of loyalists who are being urged to learn all that they can about Twitter, from content moderation to important policies, as the Twitter chief plans to majorly revamp the microblogging platform. The CNBC report also claims that Musk is hiring engineers from his other firms who do not have sufficient experience to work in the arena of social media, and use an entirely different language of programming. With Musk stepping in as the CEO, employees at Twitter have been reportedly told to put in more hours, with some staffers having to work 12-hour shifts for seven days a week without extra compensation or comp time to achieve tight deadlines.