"Interesting": Elon Musk On "Leaked Internal Slack Messages" About Him

Elon Musk, the soon-to-be-owner of micro-blogging website Twitter, reacted to the leaked Slack messages of employees who talked about their future boss as he was addressing an all-hands meeting on Thursday.

"Interesting," Mr Musk said in response to a video of the Slack messages posted on Twitter.

Interesting

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 16, 2022

Nearly 50,000 people liked the billionaire's reply, with some of them questioning why Twitter employees became "crybabies". "Do they not know they can work somewhere else, especially in this economy? Lots of people are hiring. You go somewhere else if you're dissatisfied. If an employer can't get anyone to work for him, he changes his approach or goes broke," a user tweeted.

News agency Reuters reported that Twitter employees posted memes on Slack and complained that Mr Musk was not providing useful answers on his vision for the business and employee compensation.

The All-Hands meeting was meant to be an opportunity for Mr Musk to assuage employees' concerns before formally taking over the company.

"I love Twitter," Mr Musk said at the beginning of the meeting, according to Vox. "Some people use their hair to express themselves, I use Twitter. I find it's the best forum for communicating with a lot of people simultaneously, and getting that message directly to people," he was further quoted as saying by the outlet.

Mr Musk then expressed his view that Twitter would need to cut its headcount, but offered few other new details about his $44 billion planned takeover of the social media company.

He appeared 10 minutes late to the freewheeling question and answer session moderated by a Twitter executive, in which Mr Musk mused about the existence of aliens and other space civilizations and his view that Twitter should help "civilization and consciousness".

The Tesla chief executive, who is also CEO of rocket company SpaceX, told Twitter staff he wants to raise the service's user numbers from 229 million to at least 1 billion people and said advertising would remain important for the company.

"There needs to be some rationalization of headcount and expenses. Right now, the costs exceed the revenue. Anyone who's a significant contributor should have nothing to worry about," said Mr Musk.

When employees asked his about his views on working remotely, Mr Musk said he believed Twitter staff should lean toward working in an office, but expressed willingness to make some exceptions. The bias should be "strongly towards working in person, but if somebody is exceptional, then remote work can be okay," he said.