Willie R. Tubbs, FISM News

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Leaked audio suggests new Twitter owner Elon Musk was quite serious when he demanded his employees return to their offices and log a solid 40 hours per week. 

Friday, ABC News released audio it obtained from someone inside an all-hands meeting at Twitter the previous day. 

In the audio clip, Musk can be heard tamping down efforts by his employees to talk him out of his requirement that they work in person and for the full duration of the common American workweek. 

“Let me be crystal clear: If people do not return to the office when they are able to return to the office — they cannot remain at the company,” Musk says at one point. “End of story.”

Fair or not, Twitter has the reputation of being home to incredibly coddled workers. Beyond merely being afforded a nice work-life balance, a particular social media post from a Twitter employee suggests that a work day at the company consists primarily of food tasting, yoga, and drinking wine on tap. 

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1585395267552960512

While it is unlikely most twitter employees are as unproductive as the person in the above video, it is clear a sizable portion were content to stay at home. At least one employee is heard in the leaked audio trying to convince a clearly unimpressed Musk that there is no difference between working from an office or home.

“Even if people returned to the office, the offices are separate offices — we won’t be in person [anyway],” the male employee says in an apparent attempt to suggest people in office buildings never leave their immediate workspace. 

Musk replied, “But you can still maximize the amount of in-person activity. Tesla is not one place either, but you know, it’s basically if you can — if you can show up at an office and you do not show up at the office, resignation accepted. End of story.” He concludes, “There are plenty of people at Tesla and SpaceX that do work remotely… but it is on an exception basis for exceptional people — and I totally understand if that doesn’t work for some people, but that’s the new philosophy for Twitter.”

Not all is well for the new Twitter chief, though. For all of the back pats he’s received from disaffected observers online, particularly conservatives, he has struggled to find his bearings in terms of righting the financial woes of the company. 

In a recent company-wide email, Musk warned the company could face bankruptcy if it did not find a new revenue stream. The topic also came up in the leaked audio. 

“I think we just definitely need to … bring in more cash than we spend or if we don’t do that and there’s a massive negative cash flow, then bankruptcy is not out of question,” Musk said during the leaked meeting. 

Additionally, Musk’s reimagined “Twitter Blue,” the premium service through which users could purchase a blue check mark for $8 a month, has been paused after a rough roll-out, and the plan to place gray “official” labels on some accounts was scrapped almost immediately. 

Musk indicated Saturday that “Blue” would return in a week.