Done with layoffs, Elon Musk says he wants to go on hiring spree

Plans engineering teams in India, japan Indonesia, and Brazil

Twitter's new owner Elon Musk told staff in an all-hands meeting that the company does not plan more layoffs and is recruiting for engineering and ad sales roles, according to a tweet by a The Verge reporter.

Musk told staff in the all-hands meeting that the company does not plan more layoffs and is recruiting for engineering and ad sales roles. 

“In terms of critical hires, I would say people who are great at writing software are the highest priority,”  he said.

During the discussion, as reported by The Verge, Musk announced that he wanted to decentralise Twitter by setting up engineering teams in Japan, India, Indonesia, and Brazil.   

 

In the meeting, he claimed that the technology stack of Twitter needs to be built from scratch. He also claimed that it is a good idea to “somewhat decentralize things”. As a part of this, Musk hinted at setting up engineering teams in India as well. The report does not specify what kind of engineers or sales executives Musk is planning to hire. However, he did emphasize the need to get software engineers who are great at writing software and called it the ‘highest priority’.

Currently, the company doesn’t have any open roles listed on its website. However, As reported by The Verge last week Twitter recruiters were already reaching out to engineers asking them to join “Twitter 2.0 — an Elon company.” 

Meanwhile, An internal counter of employees currently reads 2,750, one person said, though some resignations and cuts may still be in the process of being counted. 

Twitter had more than 7,000 employees before Musk took over in late October.

In another major development, Twitter has paused the re-launch of the $8 subscription-based ‘Blue Verification’ mark. Elon Musk announced on Tuesday that the relaunch of the ‘Blue Verified’ badge on Twitter will be temporarily suspended “until there is high confidence of stopping impersonation”. 

The social media company is holding off the launch of a new system of issuing verified badges to users and could use different “colour checks” for authenticating organisations and individuals, Musk said. 

Musk also said that Twitter will soon be competing with YouTube in terms of video streaming service, hinting that Twitter might soon offer good video experience with ‘higher compensation for creators.’ 

The new Twitter boss, today urged those critical of his handling the microblogging site to stay on other platforms and wrapped up his message in Hindi - “Namaste”. “Hope all judgy hall monitors stay on other platforms - please, I’m begging u,” wrote the world’s richest man.

The billionaire is being criticized for the wave of changes in Twitter, both in administrative and technical aspects. Last week, Mr Musk asked workers to commit to his more “hardcore” version of the company or leave. Bloomberg reports that he is considering laying off even more employees, targeting the company’s sales and partnership teams.

Update us on your work every Friday, employees told

An internal memo from Twitter as seen by The Verge also mentioned that has asked the employees to submit weekly reports with details about their work. The Twitter employees working technical positions will also have to include samples of their work and the non-technical employees will have to submit a summary of their work. 

The memo said, “Looking forward to making Twitter the highest performing tech software company in the world.”

The ‘days of rest’ for employees was also removed, which was implemented in 2020 by Jack Dorsey to prevent burnout.