San Francisco Elon Musk is raising the bar for Twitter. At the first question-and-answer round with employees of the US short message service, the Tesla CEO on Thursday announced the goal of increasing the number of users to at least one billion. Twitter now has 229 million. At the same time, Musk, who announced the $44 billion Twitter acquisition in April, wants to stem the growth with fewer employees.
In his opinion, a job reduction is necessary, said the richest man in the world according to Forbes at the video conference. Just like an austerity course: “At the moment, the costs exceed the revenues.“ But everyone who is relevant to the company has nothing to fear. At the end of last year, Twitter had 7,500 employees. For comparison, Facebook comes to 45,000.
It was the first time Musk answered questions from the Twitter staff. He arrived ten minutes late for the video conference and pondered the existence of extraterrestrials. Twitter should help “civilization and consciousness,” said Musk, who otherwise gave few details about the acquisition, which recently made many headlines.
However, Musk once again stressed his rejection of the home office, but said that if someone was “extraordinary”, it could probably be allowed. He explained that he wanted to stick to ads, just to make sure that they were “as entertaining as possible”. It is still unclear when the deal will go through. Many employees expressed disappointment on the internal communication channel Slack.
Twitter shares fell more than two percent in later trading, but did better than Tesla. For the paper of the world’s largest electric car manufacturer, it went down ten percent. Musk has offered $ 54.20 per Twitter share, the current price is around 37 euros. Many observers assume that Musk is still trying to push the purchase price. Most recently, the billionaire threatened to cancel the deal if the company did not provide more information about fake accounts.
