Elon Musk's 'Inner Circle' Helped Design the New Twitter, but Who's in It?
In the wake of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover last week, there has been ample amounts of speculation as to how the billionaire will improve the platform and who he will be bringing into the project.
With the purchase completed, Musk has assembled an “inner circle” of lawyers and tech gurus to go about changing things on the Bird app with millions of users anticipating dramatic changes.
According to a report Monday in The Washington Post headlined “Musk’s inner circle worked through weekend to cement Twitter layoff plans,” Musk’s team has been in discussions with the remaining Twitter executives regarding trimming the company’s workforce and how to approach content moderation and spam accounts.
Musk’s team has already begun discussing plans to laying off 25 percent of Twitter employees, according to the Post.
The team includes Musk’s longtime lawyer Alex Spiro, who has taken an active role in the legal department as well as government relations and marketing policy, as reported by the Post.
The company directory also listed longtime Musk associates David Sacks and Jason Calacanis as “staff software engineers,” the Post reported.
Calacanis, a longtime friend of the Tesla founder, revealed on Twitter that he was in discussions with executive Yoel Roth.
Roth is responsible for Twitter’s safety moderation, especially in regard to bots and trolls.
Sacks, with whom Musk worked during their days at Paypal, has been a longtime advocate for ending tech censorship and has argued for reforming Section 230, a portion of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 that protects social media companies from being sued over content posted by users.
A document handed in to financial regulators on Monday found that the Twitter board had been dismissed, leaving Musk and his team as the sole overlords of the social media giant.
According to Insider, the new Twitter boss has ordered a massive company-wide review as he begins to trim down the staff.
Musk has also brought in Tesla engineers to look over Twitter’s code to identify top performers.
Musk has repeatedly promised a dramatic reduction in Twitter’s workforce with some numbers as high as 75 percent being thrown around by the South African native, according to the Post. (At a meeting with company employees on Oct. 26, Musk said that figure was too high, according to the New York Post.)
When asked by a Twitter user on Saturday to name the “most messed up thing” about Twitter, Musk tweeted that “there seem to be 10 people ‘managing’ for every one person coding.”
Plans to overhaul the platform seem to be taking shape, with Musk signaling changes to the verification system, bot management, and a more open policy toward controversial content.
That side of things is sure to keep Sacks and Calacanis busy, while Spiro conducts the dialogue with staff holdovers from the previous regime.
Musk and his team have a long list of reforms to implement, but if early indications reveal anything, the changes are sure to be sweeping.
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