Elon Musk has reportedly drawn more than 50 Tesla employees involved in the Twitter acquisition, most of them are software engineers.
Internal records show that employees from other Elon Musk companies have been authorized to work on Twitter, including more than 50 Tesla employees, two Boring Company employees and one Neuralink employee.
Not only that, but some of Elon Musk’s friends, advisors, and supporters are also involved, such as Jared Birchall, head of Elon Musk’s home office, Jason Calacanis, an angel investor, and David Sacks, PayPal’s founding COO and investor. Also involved were James Musk at Palantir and Andrew Musk at Neuralink.
To name a few Tesla employees involved in the takeover, Ashok Elluswamy, Director of Software Development, Milan Kovac, Director of Engineering for Autopilot Software and TeslaBot, Maha Virduhagiri, Senior Director of Software Engineering, Pete Scheutzow, Senior Manager of Employee Technology Programs, and Pete Scheutzow, Senior Manager of Employee Technology Programs at Tesla. Pete Scheutzow, and Jake Nocon, who works in Tesla’s intelligence, security and surveillance department.
Elon Musk wanted his loyal assistants to determine which Twitter employees should be laid off and which should stay. Elon Musk also asked them to learn everything about Twitter, from source code, content review and data privacy requirements, as quickly as possible so that the tweeting platform could be redesigned.
In addition, Elon Musk filed an amended 13D with the SEC stating that he would serve as CEO of Twitter after the acquisition was completed, but he later responded that serving as CEO of Twitter alone was “only a temporary arrangement.
While Elon Musk has been advocating freedom of speech, such claims have to be in line with legal and business realities and cannot be messed with. How will the reassigned Tesla employees split their time between Tesla and Twitter? It’s unclear.
From past practice, when Tesla employees work for Elon Musk’s other companies, they often get paid by the other companies as consultants. Sometimes an employee of one company will hold a position at another company, for example, Tesla VP of materials Charles Kuehmann is also a VP of SpaceX.
Some Tesla employees have revealed that some Tesla employees have been asked by their superiors to assist other companies with projects without compensation because it would be good for their careers or because the help is tied to a related deal or project.
Some Twitter employees have revealed that Tesla employees are reviewing Twitter code, although their skills are primarily directed toward Autopilot and other Tesla software and hardware, and do not overlap with the language and systems built to sustain the social network. As an example, most engineers at automotive companies don’t have experience designing and operating search engines and platforms, even Tesla engineers.
Tesla uses a language that is primarily Python, and Twitter uses mostly Scala.
