In essence you're asking your few remaining employees to work 3 times longer for the same pay or be fired. That's an easy choice to make, for me at least.

Darn straight. Musk's 'ultimatum' is essentially:

"Work harder, for free with no additional pay, so as to enable & justify *my* costs and the necessity *for me* to recoup my costs to the point that I eventually grow richer thanks to this acquisition.

You? You'll sacrifice for my benefit or leave."

Therefore, the answer from anyone with a pulse should be:

"Thank you, I'll leave now with your severance. Good luck, you'll be needing it."

[1]Dilbert .

[1] https://assets.amuniversal.com/e72132d06d5001301d7a001dd8b71c47

Not an easy choice for those on H1B visas.

And let's see what outragous conditions those who leave have to sign up to and if he actually pays them without going to court first.

Also, [1]Musk is still a dick .

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592618665933156352

The guy on the left looks like he is already regretting his life decision.

Will the salary be also hitting hardcore levels for those who choose to accept the offer?

Although I don't work for Twitter, I'll consider myself nonetheless fired from Twitter for even mentioning it.

This is not the time to even considered soliciting promises of large pay cheques. The actual clauses you could be looking for are "payment in advance" and "severance pay held in escrow". The key phrase I would be looking for is "job satisfaction" and I wouldn't bother looking for it at Twitter.

Genius! Your immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere.

The end of Twitter? Where on earth will the BBC et al get there news from now?

telegram

Why? the BBC will just go on making it up and reporting "news" three days after every other media source.

Careful what you say about the beeb, they love it around here.

Ignoring the fact that the beeb writers can't even get a name to be consistent in an article. Do they not have proof readings any more?

It seems most outlets don't bother with proof read ing ers these days.

Oh, the SHADE!

No. Go away.

Very rarely is it something you'd want to sign or something that's going to turn out positive for you. And very often it's something the company can't actually do something about if you don't sign it. Hold out and force them to either forget about it or fire you, or keep the honor to yourself and quit. You're either going to have a bad time and quit, have a bad time and lose the job later anyway if you DO sign, or if enough people say no they're going to very quietly drop the issue.

Lets wait until February. Until then El-Reg should ignore all that Twitter stuff and concentrate more on actual IT than some new kings weird behaviour.

Don't be daft, Name another slow motion train crash with even a fraction of the highly entertaining schadenfreude this is generating - There is no way El Reg could leave this alone, it's almost their entire raison-d'etre.

Then El Reg should get their sarcasm level back to what it was before!

There's the problem. The Yanks don't get sarcasm.

I don't know what exactly Musk's personal problem(s) is/are, but the window to sort them out and maybe still salvage Twitter is almost closed and rapidly shutting. I don't know if he's got some kind of personality disorder like bipolar, if it's some kind of drug abuse, if it's his narcissism has reached a critical inflection point, if it's something else, if it's some combination of the above or if it's even all of the above. It doesn't really matter, if the guy doesn't get his shit together ASAP, Twitter is going to be dead by end of year, and then he's just going to turn his attention back to Tesla, SpaceX, and the rest and repeat this process over again.

The only thing that MIGHT save Twitter at this point is if Musk personally walks away and appoints someone to run it in his place. Similar to Ms. Shotwell over at SpaceX, who may be guilty of indulging her boss' whims like propositioning flight attendants and firing employees who just want the hurricane of shit that follows Musk everywhere to go away so they can focus on their jobs, but she is a very talented administrator/executive the way SpaceX manages to function like a well-oiled machine IN SPITE of Musk's antics. If he can find someone like that to take over Twitter, there's a small chance it could be saved and turned around, but we're at the point where the hero of the movie has to get a running start and slide under the door, to only just barely make it before it closes.

Save twitter? Didn't he buy it to destroy it?

I expected his proposals for Twitter would destroy it unintentionally. Musk worked out that driving Twitter in his preferred direction would destroy its value both financially and as a platform for advertising pump and dump schemes - hence the desperate attempts to get out of the merger agreement.

Musk fans have a technique for being right all the time just like I can hit gold every time at archery:

1) fire an arrow at a barn

2) paint a target where it hits

The "Musk destroying Twitter intentionally" idea is just fans looking for possible places to paint a target. If it were actually true it would be Musk painting the target on his own back and the arrows would be fired by the investors and bankers who helped him buy Twitter.

I don't know what exactly Musk's personal problem(s) is/are, but the window to sort them out and maybe still salvage Twitter is almost closed and rapidly shutting. I don't know if he's got some kind of personality disorder like bipolar, if it's some kind of drug abuse, if it's his narcissism has reached a critical inflection point, if it's something else, if it's some combination of the above or if it's even all of the above.

I'd say all the above. Numerous news articles have documented these. Is he a genius or just nuts? Both probably. He reminds me of certain politicians.

Personally, I would have been out the door pretty quick. He doesn't listen to anyone. At a former company that worked for (several actually), the owners all said they wanted people working for them that were smarter than they were. Musk is opposite. He thinks he's smarter than everyone else.

Mastodon subscriptions are continuing to rise.

Popcorn sales are through the roof!

So long as they keep away from Gab then I'm happy. It is nice and peaceful there with lots of top notch memes, cats and discussing the best ways to cook steaks.

Quick, time for everyone to head back to b3ta.com, the original well-spring of tasty internet memes...

Everyone is fired and he tries to move operations, development and so on to Russia.

Why oh why did I think of this...

https://youtu.be/TEIqTBasNrQ

Maybe a conspiracy theory, which came to mind :

Whats the chance that some government which does not like Twitter but Musk wants to deal with (due to Tesla, SpaceX, or other companies) has a metaphorical gun to Musk's head, asking him to discredit / destroy Twitter for him to get whatever deal he wants?

Frankly, am aware of only China having possible leverage over Musk due to Tesla's factory / sales in China, but am sure a few other governments are just as happy with how things are going at Twitter currently. Maybe even Russia, India, etc (but they don't have the leverage over Musk, as far as I know).

Twitter needed discrediting?

Saudis are the biggest investor in Twitter

They now have access to all the data on everyone's tweets: US journalists that need to be disassembled, dissidents at home that need to be visited by the secret police to be dialogued with.

They probably also noticed the role Twitter played in various arabic democracy movemnets

The Saudis were also a major shareholder in the before times.

Did it ever get to court? I thought it was due to go (paperwork filed) if the purchase didn't go though?

It got part way through the court process. The 'arguing about discovery' part was approximately complete. The next event on the calendar would have been Twitter's lawyers deposing Musk. Musk capitulated completely at a break-neck pace rather than let that happen. Almost as if he has a lot to hide and can easily be baited into saying something really self damaging.

When you add up the numbers of staff who have left, or will shortly, as a result of the CEO's flailing around, there can’t be many employees left, and those that are still around won’t necessarily have the right mix of skills to keep the ship afloat, never mind implementing whatever Musk comes up with next.

I was going to say it’s like a soap opera, but if this was fictional it would have jumped the shark several episodes ago.

When does their domain name expire? Because I bet the guy whose job it was to remember to renew it is gone.

When does their domain name expire?

Just over 2 months from now:

Domain Name: TWITTER.COM

Registry Domain ID: 18195971_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN

Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.corporatedomains.com

Registrar URL: http://cscdbs.com

Updated Date: 2022-01-17T06:08:20Z

Creation Date: 2000-01-21T16:28:17Z

Registry Expiry Date: 2023-01-21T16:28:17Z

[ElReg: stop sticking specious blank lines into your CSS!]

Twitter's now ripe for an attack... I can't be the first one to think of that!

Someone should remind Musk that the [1]13th amendment to the US constitution was proclaimed 57676 days ago

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

The one that says "woohoo we freed all the slaves, we are the best country ever, USA USA" except for the part where someone quietly whispered "what about the money? we need slaves for making the money" and the bit about "except for those guys, they can still be slaves"* leading to the prisons for profit system and the most incarcerated nation on earth?

*note for Septics without a sense of humour and other literalists: I was paraphrasing. Giving the gist of. Simplifying for effect.

I read the bit about "except as punishment for a crime", and this was my first thought also. "Slavery by the back door" as somebody once put it.

They should demand Musk show some competence as a CEO and manager first. Take the severance, it's probably better than anything Musk has in store.

Apparently he's on the edge of losing his GDPR compliance. Twitters chief privacy officer resigned and only has the bare minimum of members on the review board in Ireland to keep Twitter's GDPR one stop in Ireland and not be subject to 27 regulators.

They should demand Musk show some competence as a CEO and manager first.

Try a shorter version: get real or fuck off.

All of those former [1]PNAC acolytes must be feeling quite miffed now that Twitter can be a resounding voice for those worthy of leadership but previously disenabled by pwnd media mogul operations.

Way to Go, Elon, Sticking It to the Old Men way Past their Prime Time and Biting the Hands that Feed Them IT.

Ps .... And do your best to remember to not forget, behind every great man is a great woman to make what results from their interactions at least a formidable JOINT unit ..... and JOINT Operation Internetworking Novel Technologies. Such a simple pleasant thought prevents one descending quickly into the madness of the belief that one is actually heaven sent and almightily blessed and invincible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century

amanfromMars 1 is actually Elon - it all makes so much sense now..

Or if they’re not the same person, it seems likely that they get their spliffs from the same place…

All the decent engineers will have left and all that'll be left is the deadwood ie people who couldn't get a job anywhere else

In other words you can either leave with 3 months pay, or stay, burn out, and then leave as a gibbering wreck a few months later (probably with no severance pay).

When you think of it that way, it's a choice of being sane and rested in 3 months time, or screwed up and mentally and physically exhausted in 3 months time, both options paying the same.

I should think most of the American staff will leave but there are a lot of foreign staff on permits which mean if they lose the job they lose the right to domicile in the USA so if they want to stay there they are well and truly fucked.

I bet they have a legal challenge they can make against Elon. Or maybe not, it's the US.