Elon Musk's 'hardcore' work ultimatum was a deliberate plan to push Twitter employees out after he was warned against cutting more than 50% of staff

• Elon Musk laid off half of Twitter's staff. But he'd originally planned to cut even more, per Platformer.
• After he was advised against making bigger cuts, he instead issued staff an ultimatum.

Elon Musk actually wanted to lay off significantly more than half of Twitter's workforce.

But he agreed to laying off just 50% to start with after he was advised again making bigger cuts, Platformer reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.

Instead, he sent staff a now-infamous email telling them to commit to "hardcore" work as a deliberate ploy to push more employees to leave, Platformer reported.

Immediately after taking control of Twitter, Musk fired some key execs including CEO Parag Agrawal and CFO Ned Segal. The next week he started laying off staff, with around half of the company's workforce being cut.

He also began firing some workers who criticized him and his leadership of the company.

On midnight on the night of November 15, Musk sent an email to staff testing their loyalty to his new vision for Twitter. In the email, he briefly outlined "Twitter 2.0" and told workers that they would need to be "extremely hardcore" and work "long hours at high intensity" to stay on at the company.

If they didn't commit by the end of the business day on Thursday, November 17, they would be laid-off and given three months severance.

But fewer people committed to Twitter 2.0 than Musk and his team had expected, Insider previously reported. Sources told Platformer that there was only one person left in Twitter's core services group, which includes workers responsible for user services and serving tweets.

As the 5:00 p.m. deadline approached on Thursday, managers were asked to write lists of staff they thought were "critical" to Twitter but likely to leave, and the company's vice-presidents and Musk himself called some of them in a desperate bid to persuade them to stay on, Insider reported.

Musk also emailed staff clarifying Twitter's slightly softened stance on remote work after he initially told them they'd have to return to the office or be fired, and Platformer reported that his team offered some staff raises of up to $100,000 to stay on.

Ultimately less than half of the company's remaining roughly 4,000 employees chose to stay on, a person familiar with its processes told Insider's Kali Hays, while Platformer reported that as of Monday morning Twitter had around 2,700 full-time staff.

Peter Clowes, who had worked at the company since April 2020 according to his LinkedIn profile, was one of the workers who decided not to commit to "Twitter 2.0." He tweeted that, as well as a lack of a retention plan, there had been no communication from Twitter's new leadership on what exactly the new company would strive to achieve.

"There was no vision shared with us," Clowes tweeted. "Nothing more than what anyone can see on Twitter ... The ask was blind faith and required signing away the severance offer before seeing it. Pure loyalty test."

Clowes said that the round of layoffs had wiped out around 85% of his team. "I was the last one standing in multiple large slack rooms and JIRA boards," he tweeted. "The office was depressing."

Musk has since been asking some staff who were fired or resigned to return to the company. This includes Robin Wheeler, Twitter's global head of advertising sales, who handed in her resignation on November 10 but whom Musk persuaded to stay in the job. He has since fired her for refusing to get rid of staff from her team, Insider reported.

Some staff who committed to Musk's "hardcore" Twitter, meanwhile, were laid off by the company, Platformer and Bloomberg reported.