Twitter employees have resigned en masse after Elon Musk's ultimatum to adapt to what he called a new "hardcore" culture with longer hours "at high intensity."

What Next For Twitter After Mass Exodus

Welcome back to closing bell and better news. If you've opened twitter recently, it can seem like a memorial service for the app that has changed the way that humans communicate over the past 16 years. Well some are sad, others believe it's a natural progression of events. But whatever the emotion it seems that a lot of people are blaming Elon musk must giving twitter employees an ultimatum stay and commit to extremely hardcore work. Those were his words or leave the company and that led to hundreds of resignations in the past few days and doubts about the app's future. I do want to bring in china news senior reporter Michele Castelli who follows this space closely. Michelle. It's good to see you what is the latest at twitter. Oh my God, there's so much to catch up on kristen. So let's start with Elon musk did send out a letter according to the new york times two employees saying that they should be prepared to work really hard or they can leave the company and he gave a deadline of five p.m. On thursday, pacific standard time to make that decision. Now it's a lot of employees have taken him up on the offer to leave the company. They're offered three months severance if they decide to take that deal at this time, which is leading to what people are calling a mass exodus at twitter. This is on top of the fact that the company has laid off about half of its staff to the point where they actually had to bring back some employees because they they served for critical functions that the company didn't really account for when they laid them off in the first place. Now there's this app called blind and then new york times had pointed out, there was a survey on their blind is a lot is a place where a lot of people talk about their workplace anonymously and they asked you know twitter employees are you idea is do you want to leave the company at this time or do you want to stay with employees? Stay with the firm? And about 73% of them said that they were willing to take that severance package. So it does seem like a lot of people are moving against twitter at this time with must new mandate but we will have to see how it goes on because musk is serious, he has done this strict work hard, long hours across his other companies so this isn't really out of the norm, we've heard these stories from Tesla, we've heard them from SpaceX, so it's something that twitter employees should have been expecting once must take over so what has musk response been to all of this as people have Michelle reportedly decided to leave, You know, he has pointed out that this attention on Twitter has brought it a lot of extra users as well as all time usages has reached all time high so I did look at some data from app topia and they did say there must might have something that he is actually accurate about that. The usage on Twitter is reaching all time highs specifically on November six, they hit an all time peak of usage on Twitter, daily downloads compared from October two two november are up about 28% and when you compare it to september it's up 46%. So musk is right, more people are paying attention to the app. However, there is another company that is tracking the number of people leaving twitter and they said from a period of a week from one must took over, they actually saw more than 1.3 million people leave the platform. Now some of these people were forced to leave the platform because their accounts had been deactivated, Other people decide to leave the platform about 877,000 of them because they disagreed with where the direction of the app was going, we are seeing from musk that people are being reinstated like Kathy Griffin who had violated his rule against impersonated accounts without saying pirate because she impersonated himself. And also I did do an informal survey among my Twitter users and a lot of them say they haven't really seen anything change, they're gonna stick with Twitter unless um something drastically changes but so far they're not really seeing many changes in the actual experience on the platform, interesting. Well let's talk more about the user um I feel like safety more than anything and you can bottle up a lot of things in that, whether it's hate speech abuse on the platform misinformation or even your own data that might be compromised in the wake of all of these engineers. Key teams reportedly leaving would be a concern from me. But what has made twitter such a unique social media company within the broader social space? Well, twitter has always been known as the place where news can really travel at the speed of light and really be so quick. It was a great place if you need to get a message out broadly and quickly. And that's why it was such a valuable marketing tool for both brands who were looking to create brand awareness for their companies as well as politician Is who would want to spread their message about their political beliefs. Now let's remember that Twitter did ban political advertising in 2019 but it still is one of those places where you see a lot of your top politicians making their comments because they know they can reach public at a mass scale and that's really what Twitter was really known for. This idea that they could reach these people, they could get messages out and in such a short form it really revolutionized the idea of what we thought of blogging because in just 100 40 characters later expanded to 280 you could get your message out. So this idea of microblogging, they're really the ones who started that. And then as a result, I think we start to see other social media platforms kind of shortened that message but still have that impact. You can think about things that came out after like instagram or Tiktok, but the idea really of that you could get a whole message out in just such a short period of time and expand to a large audience really started at twitter, so much more to talk about what we got to leave it there. Michelle cheddar news senior reporter Michele Castelli. Oh, thank you.