Just a couple of days ahead of a deadline to close his $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter, Elon Musk showed up at the company’s headquarters carrying, of all things, a sink.
Never backward in coming forward, the billionaire entrepreneur tweeted a video (below) of himself entering Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco on Wednesday, accompanied by the message: “Entering Twitter HQ — let that sink in!”
Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in! pic.twitter.com/D68z4K2wq7
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 26, 2022
As you can see, the nine-second video doesn’t add up to a great deal. It’s Musk. With a sink. Entering Twitter’s main office. Perhaps the stunt is partly explained by his updated Twitter profile, which now reads: “Chief Twit.”
Four hours after showing up at the building, it still wasn’t clear if Musk’s attention-grabbing arrival was supposed to confirm that his acquisition of Twitter has finally gone through, with representatives of Musk or Twitter failing to offer any official comment on the matter as of early Wednesday evening.
Several hours after arriving at the headquarters, Musk tweeted that he was “meeting a lot of cool people at Twitter today,” though if recent news reports turn out to be correct, around three-quarters of them could soon be out of a job.
A draft of an internal letter written by employees and apparently being circulated among staff at Twitter described Musk’s reported plan to reduce the company’s headcount from around 7,500 to somewhere closer to 2,000 as “reckless.”
The letter also insisted that staff who wish to do so be allowed to continue to work remotely, a practice that Musk is known to dislike.
More widely, many in Twitter’s community of around 23o million users are concerned that Musk could follow through on earlier comments and reduce moderation of content on the platform, which could lead to an increase in offensive or other problematic material appearing on the service.
With the end-of-week deadline to complete the deal looming, and Musk’s surprise appearance at Twitter’s headquarters on Wednesday, it seems as if the acquisition is pretty much in the bag. If that’s the case, then in the coming days and weeks we should begin to get a clear idea about how Twitter is likely to change under Musk’s ownership.
