Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images
Elon Musk will attend a virtual all-hands meeting with Twitter employees this Thursday, during which he’ll field questions from the company he’s in the process of buying. His attendance was announced in an email from Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal on Monday seen by Business Insider. Employees will be able to submit questions in advance of the meeting. It will be the first time Musk has addressed Twitter’s nervous employees directly since announcing plans for the $44 billion takeover.
The meeting has the chance to be fractious. In Twitter’s internal Slack channels, the Tesla CEO’s attempt to buy the company has reportedly been met with a negative response, and employees are concerned about the effect a privately-owned Twitter could have on their culture and compensation (many of them receive a proportion of their compensation in stock). Musk has also been critical of the company’s past decisions, leading his follows to unleash a wave of abuse on a prominent employee.
Even Musk’s enthusiasm for the deal appears to have waned since he first announced plans to acquire Twitter in mid-April. He repeatedly threatened to postpone or scrap the deal after claiming that Twitter had refused to provide him with more data on the number of spam bots on the platform, only for Twitter to oblige earlier this month. If work on the deal continues, it’s expected to take around six months to close.