Elon Musk tells Twitter staff to reach out to YouTubers and lure them over to Twitter with 10% higher pay

• Elon Musk told Twitter staff to coax YouTubers onto the platform with 10% pay increases.
• This is despite Twitter just laying off more than 1,000 workers as part of cost-cutting measures.

Elon Musk told Twitter staff to reach out to "cool" YouTubers and lure them over with 10% pay increases so that the platform can bulk up its video content.

Musk said during a staff Q&A on Thursday, a transcript of which was published by The Verge, that Twitter was eyeing up introducing video monetization and possibly allowing longer videos, too.

Most content creators currently post links on Twitter that redirect users to their videos on YouTube, TikTok, or other platforms.

"Provided they are able to post their video on Twitter and monetize the video at least to the same degree as on YouTube, then naturally, they would just post their video on Twitter as well," Musk said, per The Verge. "But right now, content creators cannot post the length of video that they would like to post and they cannot monetize it, which means they cannot pay the bills."

Videos on Twitter are currently limited to 140 seconds.

"These are not like super complicated things," Musk added. "They're pretty basic."

"We're not trying to put YouTube out of business, but I'm just saying, do we really need to give YouTube a whole bunch of free traffic?" — he asked.

YouTube brought in just over $7 billion in ad revenue in the third quarter of 2022. Twitter, in comparison, reported just $1.18 billion in total revenue in the second quarter.

Since taking over Twitter on October 27, Musk, the world's richest person, has embarked on drastic cost-cutting measures, including laying off scores of employees.

He told remaining staff Thursday that it "does make sense" for Twitter to start spending money enticing creators to the platform.

"Let's just get a bunch of content creators that we think are cool on YouTube and say, 'Hey, would you consider putting your content on Twitter, and we'll pay you 10% more than YouTube and see how it goes?'" Musk told Twitter workers.

"Please do it. Let's take action ... So if you can do it after this meeting, I would do it after this meeting."

This is part of Musk's plans to promote more multi-media content on Twitter. "We are the strongest when it comes to anything that's writing and real-time," he told staff on Thursday. "But we also want to have that for pictures and video and not in a way that copies what others do."

Within days of taking ownership of Twitter, Musk told engineers to get to work on a reboot of Vine, the short-form video app Twitter bought in 2012 but shut down in 2016. TikTok has since largely taken the place of Vine, with a huge boom in users during the pandemic.

At Thursday's Q&A, Musk said that his reboot idea wasn't necessarily a case of copying an old version of Vine and could potentially be achieved by developing Twitter's own video-sharing functions instead.

"I was actually flipping through the Twitter video where once you go into kind of a full screen video mode, you can just start flipping through videos. It's actually not bad," he said, adding that it showed him some "good" and "interesting" videos. "I think building on that makes a ton of sense."

"When I told a roomful of people that this morning, they didn't know it existed," Musk continued. "If we try to surface it and make it more obvious that it exists, that would be a good move."

Musk added that his kids "were basically educated by Reddit and YouTube."

During the Q&A, Musk also spoke about the company's return to the office and told staff that "bankruptcy isn't out of the question."

Do you work for Twitter? Or have you been affected by the layoffs? Contact this reporter at gdean@insider.com using a non-work email.