In three weeks, Elon Musk fired almost two-thirds of the Twitter staff, which numbered 7,500 people. But during a recent meeting with Twitter employees, Musk said the company has ended layoffs and is actively recruiting for engineering and sales roles.
Musk did not specify which engineering or sales positions Twitter is hiring for, and the company does not currently have any open positions on its website.
“In terms of critical hires, I would say people who are great at writing software are the highest priority,” he said during the meeting.
Last week, The Verge reported that Twitter recruiters are already asking engineers to join "Twitter 2.0 - Elon's company".
Monday's meeting was the first Twitter employees heard from Musk as he demanded they all stay on for his "extremely hardcore" cultural reboot, which led to about 1,000 layoffs last week. Answering questions from employees for half an hour from Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco, Musk said there were no plans to move the headquarters to Texas, as he did with Tesla, but it made sense to have "dual headquarters" in California and Texas.
"To be the digital town square, we must represent people with a wide array of views even if we disagree with those views," Musk also said.
He acknowledged that his current reorganization of the company "will have a lot of mistakes" but will "stabilize over time." In response to a question from an employee, he said that "significant portions of the technology stack need to be rebuilt from scratch," and at another point in the meeting he suggested that it would be nice to "decentralize a bit" by creating engineering teams in Japan, India, Indonesia and Brazil.
Twitter's historically strong use in Japan was specifically noted by Musk as something the company should strive for "ideally in every country without exception."
“It may seem as though Twitter is US-centric but if anything it’s Japan-centric,” he said. "There are roughly the same number of daily active users in Japan as there are in the US, despite the fact that Japan has one third of the population of the US."
When asked about employee compensation, Musk reiterated that they will receive Twitter stock options and be able to regularly cash them out, as is the case at SpaceX. Anyone who comes to Twitter now will be working for a much smaller company than it was before Musk took over.