What it’s like to work at Elon Musk’s X

With Elon Musk in Portofino, Italy, this week for Chamath Palihapitiya’s wedding, and Linda Yaccarino in Los Angeles for a celebrity charm offensive, their rank and file tore down bird logos in the office with power tools. Twitter is becoming X.

Getting rid of the Twitter brand makes no traditional business sense, of course. But it makes sense to Musk, who answers to no one and is continuing to shape the platform how he, and only he, sees fit. If you still work at the company formerly known as Twitter these days, you’ve come to peace with that fact or perhaps even grown excited by it. Now that Musk has stripped the company down to the studs, with only about 200 engineers and a handful of product managers left, I’ve been wondering: what’s in it for those who remain?

Remarkably, Musk has yet to actually issue employee stock grants in X Holdings Corporation, the parent company of what was Twitter, I’m told. That’s despite him saying in February that grants would be issued by late March at a valuation of $20 billion. Instead, employees have been given an IOU in the form of a document saying the company intends to grant them restricted stock units.

While they were told that the yet-to-be-awarded RSUs started technically vesting in March, that was over four months ago, and the company’s employee equity plan has yet to be shared. “Supposedly, they’ll start vesting from 3/24, but at this point, no one believes we’re going to get anything,” one current staffer tells me. (I would normally ask a company I cover for comment on stuff like this, but Musk has resorted to trolling the media with an auto-responder on his press email, so I’m not wasting my time.)

Musk has been clear that compensation at X will work similarly to SpaceX, where outside investors come in periodically to buy existing shares from current and ex-employees in so-called secondary transactions. $750 million in SpaceX stock was just sold this way at a roughly $150 billion valuation. Employees at X have been told that a liquidity event will happen every six months, which suggests that Twitter will do its first secondary stock sale around late September. (Who would buy X Corp. shares at anything near a $20 billion valuation at that time is another question entirely.)

For now, employees who were there pre-Musk still have stock awards from the previous regime, vesting at the absurdly high price of $54.20 a share. Twitter used to pay employees performance-based bonuses that could be more than 20 percent of someone’s salary, but that program is no more, and Musk refused to pay the bonuses that were owed from 2022. There are no longer automatic cost of living pay increases each year. Aside from getting another offer, the only way to get a raise is to be promoted to a new role, which has to be personally approved by Musk.

X’s new head of HR, Walter Gilbert, tracks badge-ins to the office to help enforce Musk’s in-person work policy. If an employee isn’t coming in regularly, Steve Davis, one of Musk’s lieutenants who has been essentially acting as Twitter’s COO since the takeover, contacts their manager. Weekend or late-night scrambles to appease Musk, who seems to only send internal memos in the middle of the night, are common.

Employees outside of the San Francisco HQ have been able to more easily get away with not coming into the office, and there’s a general sense that you don’t have to work “hardcore” hours unless Musk is personally involved in your project. I’m told the remaining office spaces feel mostly empty since they were intended for a workforce that is much larger than what X has now.

Here’s a bit more about how stock compensation at X will work, according to current and recently departed employees I’ve spoken with:

For someone with the appropriate appetite for risk, I can see how the Twitter-to-X “everything app” project is a compelling one. I agree with ex-product director Esther Crawford, though: the real test is going to be whether people even want the kind of super app Musk wants to build.

Regarding that super app vision, I do understand where Musk is coming from. In November 2021, I made the prediction that more social media companies would try to become super apps that encompass more of our everyday lives, from banking to transportation.

It’s a natural evolution of where the mobile internet has been heading. It’s also something that no other company has been able to crack in North America or Europe, and I’m highly skeptical that Musk’s plan will have a better rate of success. Who in the US is going to want to bank with Twitter, even if its savings account offers a slightly better interest rate than traditional banks? Musk’s idea for creating X dates back to the late ’90s, when the internet was incredibly nascent. Now that we already have apps for everything, how is one app going to be able to capture it all?

On Wednesday, I drove to West Hollywood to have my eyes scanned by a shiny, metallic orb. If you live in cities like San Francisco, you may have seen ads for these Black Mirror-esque orbs appear around your neighborhood this week. They belong to Worldcoin, a crypto startup co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that has raised hundreds of millions of dollars to scan every eyeball on earth.

While I know Altman hates this description, Worldcoin is essentially the antidote to what he’s building at OpenAI. In a future world where AI is more intelligent than humans and capable of impersonating us through deepfakes, the idea behind Worldcoin is that we’ll need some way to verify who is — to borrow from Westworld — a human and not a host.

After someone’s eyes are scanned by an orb, it generates a unique “World ID” for the person along with a corresponding (though apparently unidentifiable) code that is stored publically on an Ethereum-based blockchain. The Worldcoin token is then distributed in fixed amounts through the World mobile app to people who have been scanned. The company says more than 2 million people have already been scanned, though reporting suggests the company used questionable recruiting tactics in poor countries to help reach that number.

The thinking behind this token, according to Altman and Worldcoin CEO Alex Blania, is that it will eventually be used for some sort of universal basic income in a future, AI-dominated world. Even after pouring through interviews the two have given to date, I’m unsure how this would actually work or why any government would allow it to happen. Complicating matters is that people have already been buying World IDs from others to get their tokens, though Worldcoin says it has put in additional security measures to thwart these black market transfers.

What’s clear is that, in the short term, the only reason to own the Worldcoin token is because you think its price will go up, which is another way of describing ownership of a security. Thanks to the orb rollout and the hyping being done by Altman and others, it’s already one of the 10 most valuable cryptocurrencies in the world. Scams from verified accounts trying to convince people to give over their tokens have littered Twitter all week.

My appointment with one of the orbs was at a nondescript co-working space off Melrose Avenue. (I booked it myself online without the help of Worldcoin PR.) As I walked in, I immediately noticed the metallic orb sitting on a table, manned by one of Worldcoin’s freelance operators who are paid per scan. Worldcoin claims that your biometric data never leaves the device and is deleted unless you opt in to sharing it, which I didn’t. Within a couple of minutes, I had been verified as a human with a World ID in the company’s mobile app and sent on my way.

What I didn’t get from my scan was any Worldcoin tokens. After multiple launch delays, Worldcoin decided not to make its token officially available in the US for reasons it has yet to explain in detail (I’m hoping to chat with CEO Alex Blania soon). For now, I have to assume the decision is partly due to Altman not wanting the potential political blowback at such a delicate time for OpenAI, along with the SEC’s increasingly hawkish stance on cryptocurrencies and how they are sold. Even the “tokenomics” section of Worldcoin’s whitepaper that explains how they are distributed is not accessible in the US at the time of this writing.

I find this to be problematic for a project with “world” in its name. I also can’t help but predict that a lot of people are going to be burned by the quick run-up in Worldcoin’s price this week, considering that the vast majority of the tokens have yet to be put on exchanges and institutional investors in the company can’t start selling their holdings for a year. “A lot of projects have recovered from bad launches, but I think the biggest thing they have going against them now is valuation,” someone who works on another large crypto project tells me. “It’s a curse you have to grow into.”

“On a revenue-per-headcount basis, I think you could make the case that we should actually invest more.” - Snap CEO Evan Spiegel defending the company’s headcount size (which currently sits at just over 5,000) during the company’s Q2 earnings call.

As Snap’s sinking stock price illustrates, Spiegel’s investors disagree with him. The company has paid nearly $8 billion in stock-based compensation and posted a net loss of over $9 billion since it went public in 2017. Its current market cap is currently hovering at $17 billion.

Yes, Snapchat’s user base continues to grow, but its revenue growth is decelerating. Investors ultimately want to see profits, and as Spiegel signaled this week, he’s not ready to make the kinds of cuts that would get the company there.

That’s it for this issue. I’ll be back next week. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your feedback.

Thanks for subscribing, and have a great weekend.