Tesla CEO Elon Musk, on Saturday, reacted to a Twitter poll he had posted earlier where he asked the users to vote on whether former US President Donald Trump, who was banned from the microblogging site by its previous owners, should be reinstated to the social media site and said that the Trump poll is getting around 1M votes per hour. “Trump poll getting ~1M votes/hour!,” Musk tweeted. Trump was permanently banned from Twitter in 2021 “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”
With 14 hours left, the poll has already had more than 8 million votes with about 52 percent of respondents voting yes. Around 48 percent of respondents voted no.
Twitter employees are exiting the company in numbers after they reportedly received an ultimatum from Elon Musk to either commit to working in an "extremely hardcore" fashion at the company or leave the job. The new Twitter chief called for working long hours at high intensity. “Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade," he added. Employees had until 5 pm ET Thursday to decide.
Going by the internal Slack messages, engineers and other employees started bidding adieu to a “watercooler” chat group in the run-up to the 5 pm ET Thursday deadline Musk enforced on Wednesday.
The group was flooded by salute emojis (which convey the message “thank you for your service”) along with dozens of goodbye messages, the report added. It’s not clear as to how many employees had resigned so far, the report noted. “The train has started in #social-watercooler,” said one of the employees in reference to a Slack room that employees are taking to in the last weeks to notify others that they are leaving.
In his follow-up emails, Musk said managers said must meet with employees in person once a week or at least monthly and that managers could be sacked for allowing employees to work remotely if those employees do not prove, in his view, to be “excellent” or “exceptional.”
"If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below by Thursday evening," he said, directing to an online form. "Whatever decision you make, thank you for your efforts to make Twitter successful," Musk added. Since Musk took the reins of the company, he fired at least 20 employees at Twitter who criticised his actions either on Twitter or on the internal messaging platform Slack and some were sacked just for retweeting posts slamming the new Twitter CEO.