Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, has attracted more than 50 of his trusted Tesla employees, mostly software engineers from the Autopilot team, in his purchase of Twitter, CNBC has learned.
Musk, CEO of automaker Tesla and reusable rocket maker SpaceX, finalized the $44 billion acquisition of Twitter on Oct. 28 and made his mark there. He fired the company’s chief executive, chief financial officer, heads of the company’s legal and policy teams, and also dissolved Twitter’s board.
According to internal records reported via CNBC, artists from Musk’s other corporations can now work on Twitter, adding more than 50 from Tesla, two from Boring Company (which builds underground tunnels) and one from Neuralink (which develops a brain computer). interface).
Some of Musk’s friends, advisers and backers, including the head of his circle of family in the office, Jared Birchall, investor angel Jason Calacanis and PayPal’s founding chief operating officer and venture capitalist, David Sacks, are also involved. The same goes for two other people who share Musk’s involvement. surname, James and Andrew Musk, who worked at Palantir and Neuralink, respectively.
Among the dozens Elon Musk has hired on Tesla components are: director of software progression Ashok Elluswamy, director of Autopilot and TeslaBot engineering Milan Kovac, senior director of software engineering Maha Virduhairi; Pete Scheutzow, head of the technical program for the senior body of workers, and Jake Nocon, who is part of Tesla’s surveillance unit, as senior security intelligence officer.
Nocon worked in the past for Uber and Nisos, a security firm that had a multibillion-dollar contract with Tesla to identify insider threats and monitor company complaints.
On Twitter, Musk relies on his lieutenants and loyalists to whom and what to cut or stay on the social network.
It also urges them to inform themselves as much as they can about Twitter as temporarily as possible, from source code to content moderation and knowledge privacy requirements, so you can reconsider the platform, several Twitter workers told CNBC over the weekend.
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Musk has presented himself as a loose-speech absolutist, but he will have to balance those desires with legislation and business realities. He said in an open letter to advertisers last week when he took over the company: hell for everyone, where everything can be said without consequences. “
It’s not apparent without delay how Tesla workers divide their schedules between the automaker and Twitter.
Usually, when Tesla painters paint for other Elon Musk companies, usually SpaceX or Boring Company, they can be paid through the other company as consultants. Some of Musk’s painters hold full-time positions at several of his companies. For example, Tesla’s vice president of materials, Charlie Kuehmann, is vice president of SpaceX.
On other occasions, two Tesla employees told CNBC that employees of the electric car maker are forced to participate in projects in their other corporations without additional pay, because it is smart for their careers or because paints are considered to help a similar operation. or project.
Tesla is under scrutiny from the generation built and maintained through its Autopilot equipment, namely its motive force assist systems, which are advertised as Autopilot, FSD and FSD Beta.
The Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice and the California Department of Motor Vehicles are investigating whether Tesla or Musk violated legislation and misled consumers about Tesla’s motive force assistance systems, which are still in progress and cause the company’s cars to drive themselves. .
Meanwhile, the federal vehicle protection authority, NHTSA, continues to investigate whether Tesla’s motive force assistance systems could have contained defects that contributed to or caused collisions. How Tesla announced those systems on social media, adding Twitter, is within the scope of minus NHTSA investigation.
Several Twitter workers told CNBC over the weekend that Tesla workers lately at Twitter were worried about reviewing code on the social network, though their skills learned from running Autopilot and other Tesla software and hardware don’t directly overlap with the languages and systems used to build and the social network. These workers have asked not to be appointed because they are not allowed to speak to the press about internal problems and fear reprisals.
For example, engineers at most automakers, even the forward-thinking Tesla, don’t enjoy designing and operating search engines and platforms that are widely available to the public.
Twitter has codebases with millions of lines of code in each, and a myriad of 10 million or even a hundred million or more requests consistent with the current systems (RPS) that underpin it. In Tesla, Python is one of the preferred scripting languages, and on Twitter, programmers have used Scala extensively.
Twitter is also more exposed to foreign regulations related to hate speech and privacy of knowledge, for example, specifically, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.
Twitter painters who were there before Musk took office said they were asked to show their groups all sorts of technical documentation, justifying their paintings and those of their groups, and their price inside the company. The risk of dismissal looms if they don’t impress, they said.
Employees said they worried about being fired without cause or warning, than being fired on severance pay. Some worry they won’t be able to reap the benefits of inventory features scheduled to harvest in the first week of November, according to documents reported by CNBC.
Meanwhile, Twitter workers said they had yet to get express plans from Musk and his team and were largely unaware of the imaginable reduction within their groups, budgets and long-term strategies.
However, Musk has set almost deadlines for a few things to do.
An immediate task is to reconsider the company’s subscription software, dubbed Twitter Blue, and the company’s verification formula (sometimes referred to as “blue checks” for the way they are indexed on the service). Employees say Musk needs these jobs done during the first week of November. The Verge previously reported that Musk was looking to rate $20 per user per month, and only give checkmarks to the accounts of users who are paid followers, and would remove verification of accounts that don’t pay for Twitter Blue.
Twitter officials have asked some painters to work 12-hour, seven-day-a-week shifts to meet Musk’s competitive deadlines, according to internal communications. Responsibilities before the early November deadline is considered a critical factor for their careers on Twitter.
In an environment of concern and distrust, many Twitter workers have stopped communicating with others in internal systems about office issues. In addition, some of Twitter’s Slack channels have gone almost silent, several workers told CNBC.
Meanwhile, Musk and his entourage have introduced archived messages into the systems, apparently for other people to fire them and cut budgets or projects.
On Sunday night, in a demonstration of his unlimited access to the company’s internal information, CEO Elon Musk (who calls himself “Chief Twit” but is officially CEO and sole director) posted a screenshot for his 112 million indexed followers on Twitter.
The screenshot illustrated comments by Twitter’s lead security and integrity officer, Yoel Roth, in May 2022. At the time, Musk was looking to pull out of his deal to buy Twitter for $54. 20 according to the stake.
In court and in public, Musk strongly accused Twitter of manipulating the measures, minimizing the amount of spam, fake accounts and destructive bots that exist on the platform.
In the internal message Musk made public, Roth wrote disparagingly about a company user named Amir, and also commented that if Amir continued “BS” about him or others about key goals and results, Twitter would be “literally doing what Elon accuses. “we do. “
Musk alleged in a tweet that “Wachtell’s board and Twitter intentionally withheld this evidence in court. “He also gave the impression of threatening further legal action, writing: “Stay tuned, more to come. . . “
Representatives of Twitter, Tesla and the company Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen
Fixed: Update to explain that Twitter’s systems are capable of receiving 10 million to one hundred million requests or more according to the second.
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