It’s clear that Twitter owner and supreme ruler Elon Musk has no problem bombarding his employees with bad news. In his first email to the remaining staff he didn’t lay off on Wednesday, Musk purportedly ended Twitter’s permanent remote work policy and said that employees would be expected to be in the office at least 40 hours per week.
Musk’s move to end remote work was reported by Bloomberg, which obtained access to the email. While the decision from Twitter’s owner is not surprising — he previously told Twitter staffers he was against remote work and famously fought to keep Tesla factories open at the height of the pandemic — it’s yet another blow to the company’s battered staff, which has weathered months of uncertainty, massive layoffs, and, most recently, Musk’s haphazard management style.
Twitter’s previous CEO and cofounder Jack Dorsey, who has recently quibbled with Musk on the platform over changing the name of its community fact-checking system from “Birdwatch” to “Community Notes,” announced that staff could work from home “forever” in the early months of the pandemic back in May 2020. However, Twitter had begun to work on offering a more flexible work-from-home policy, at Dorsey’s request, since 2018.
As told by Bloomberg, Musk said that the ban on remote work would be effective immediately. Remote work would only be allowed if he personally approved it. This isn’t the first time Musk has shown frustration over Twitter’s work culture. Earlier this month, he scrapped the company’s monthly “day of rest” for workers, which it introduced during the pandemic.
Gizmodo reached out to Twitter on Thursday morning to confirm whether the information reported about Musk’s email to workers was accurate but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
“The road ahead is arduous and will require intense work to succeed,” Musk said in his email to staff, according to Bloomberg.
Besides addressing the company’s remote work policy, Musk also reportedly shared some of his long-term goals with employees. He stated that he wants subscriptions to make up half of Twitter’s revenue. When it comes to priorities over the next few days, “the absolute top priority is finding and suspending any verified bots/trolls/spam,” the Twitter owner said.