- Musk formally acquired Twitter late Thursday and has yet to address his new staff.
- He and his transition team are said to be planning "aggressive" layoffs, likely to begin very soon.
- Twitter VPs are said to have worked since Friday to compile lists of who to keep.
Twitter employees expect Elon Musk to begin layoffs very soon because performance evaluations and code reviews have been progressing swiftly inside the company.
The billionaire closed on his deal to acquire Twitter late Thursday. Musk and his team, made up of people from his family office, Excession, and his personal lawyer Alex Spiro, along with some other Twitter leaders, are working on a transition of power this weekend at Twitter HQ in San Francisco.
Team leaders and vice presidents at Twitter started stack ranking employees late Friday, two people familiar with the process told Insider. This is a common type of performance review in tech where employees are compared to one another continued into Saturday.
By Saturday afternoon, the team leaders and VPs handed over lists of employees "to keep" to Musk and the team he has working with him to take over operations, the people said. They asked not to be identified discussing private matters. Representatives for Twitter did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday.
On Thursday and Friday, Musk also brought into the Twitter office several engineers from Tesla to undertake "code reviews," where Twitter engineers showed the code they'd been working on. They were even asked on Friday to "print out" their recent code so Musk could read it, a decision that was quickly reversed. Several engineering teams met with Tesla engineers.
Those meetings covered who among Twitter's engineers had made contributions and changes to code recently. The quality of those changes was also evaluated, and the "top" or best performers were identified, one of the people familiar with the process said. Overall, the point of the meetings and discussions was to "ask for who to cut, who to keep and what orgs are bad," this person added.
Similar overviews and conversations took place throughout the company on Friday, the other person said. There is no exact percentage of employees to be cut, this person added, but layoffs are expected to be "aggressive."
Given the pace at which the stack ranking happened, employees expect layoffs to begin very soon, both of the people familiar with the process said. The New York Times reported that job cuts could start as soon as Saturday.
Tuesday is the next equity vesting event at Twitter and, as the company is now private, this tranche of stock will convert automatically to cash. If employees get laid off on Monday, they could miss this vesting.
There's been little to no internal communication from Musk since his closed the acquisition late Thursday
Back in June, Musk met with Twitter workers and told them he would enact layoffs to improve the financial health of the company. On Wednesday, Musk spoke to employees who gathered around him at a company cafe. He was asked about a report by The Washington Post that his plan was to layoff 75% of the company, or about 6,000 people. "I don't know where that story came from," Musk said.
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