On Monday, Twitter CEO Parag Agarwal addressed employees about Elon Musk ‘s purchase of the company amid a tense environment.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal tried to quell employee unease during a company-wide meeting, where workers demanded answers on how they will handle the anticipated mass exodus following the Elon Musk buyout .
The meeting follows Elon Musk’s latest financial move to buy Twitter for $44 billion , as Tesla’s CEO has repeatedly criticized Twitter ‘s content moderation practices .
In addition, to drum up financial support, Musk has told banks he will cut salaries for executives and boards in order to cut costs, according to sources familiar with the matter.
However, the acquirer of Twitter will not be able to make any decisions on haircuts until he takes ownership at the end of the year.
Twitter employees concerned about Musk
In the internal meeting, reported by Reuters , the executives indicated that Twitter would monitor staff attrition on a daily basis, but that it is too early to say how buying Musk will affect staff retention.
According to the testimony of a Twitter employee, collected by Business Insider , when the news of Elon Musk’s interest in buying Twitter broke, an employee in a Slack group shared one of Elon’s old tweets: the controversial “pregnant man” tweet “ . They wondered: “How am I going to explain to my children that I work for someone like that?”
Others were concerned about whether or not Musk would reinstate Donald Trump’s Twitter handle and what that would mean for misinformation and free speech on the platform, while a small group threatened to walk away.
For now, Agrawal urged staff to expect changes in the future under new leadership, acknowledging that the company could have performed better over the years. “Yes, we could have done things differently and better. I could have done things differently. I think about that a lot ,” he said.