Thread by @alexeheath

Elon Musk showed up 10 minutes late to his first meeting addressing Twitter employees, which is still ongoing. He dialed in from his phone handheld like this

When asked why he loves Twitter, Elon says: "Some people use their hair to express themselves. I use Twitter"

People should be allowed to "say pretty outrageous things within the law," but it shouldn't be amplified. Repeats the mantra that freedom of speech isn’t the same as freedom of reach.

Elon says that if the company wants more people to use Twitter, they should mimic the approach of the super app WeChat in China. “you basically live on WeChat in China….if we can recreate that with Twitter we’ll be a great success”

Other Twitter product ideas Elon is into: have people pay to be verified and subscriptions/payments. Seems very into the WeChat approach

Question about layoffs: “Right now costs exceed revenue. That’s not a great situation.”

On working remote: “If someone can only work remotely and they’re exceptional, it wouldn’t make sense to fire them.” But strong bias to working IRL”

Here’s our quick stories on what Elon told Twitter employees today on cost cutting / working remote:

theverge.com/2022/6/16/2317…

theverge.com/2022/6/16/2317…

(Meeting ended, but threading over relevant tidbits here. Reminder that this meeting wasn’t public - this is based on what people who listened tell me)

Musk spent a lot of time talking about Twitter’s bots/spam problem, says it should financially hard to operate a bot farm

Asked about his political views, Musk says he likes moderates and voted for Flores — his first Republican vote. Largely repeats past comments that Twitter should moderate based on what is illegal but not really past that

He suggests adding an “irony” label you could tweet with so people know that you’re trying to be ironic, which, lol

He sort of demurs when asked about CEO plans once he takes over. (Reporting so far has said he’ll hand off that role eventually)

Says he is not really into titles, talks about being “Technoking.” He clearly wants to focus on the product

Here is our story on Musk’s comments about speech and content moderation from today’s Twitter all hands theverge.com/2022/6/16/2317…

Here’s my writeup of the ideas for fixing Twitter Musk shared with employees today. He essentially wants this app to be more like WeChat and TikTok. theverge.com/2022/6/16/2317…

Where should Twitter be in 5-10 years? “Contributing to a stronger longer lasting civilization where we are better able to understand the nature of reality,” per Musk

Am told that towards the end of the call, Musk switched the topic to space, the age of the earth, and potential dead civilizations on other planets, saying he has seen “no actual evidence for aliens, yet”

Very normal all hands

Lol some Twitter staffers wanted to ask Elon about a promise the company made in Jan to take everyone to Disneyland this year (employees were specifically instructed to not tweet about it, has become a bit of a meme internally). But execs recently said the trip won’t be happening