Delete the workforce

Elon Musk​ bought Twitter because he loved it. He loved tweeting poop emojis at dawn; he loved tweeting masturbation jokes at dusk. He loved that he had more Twitter followers than almost anyone else, though it galled that Barack Obama and Justin Bieber had more. While other celebrity social media accounts were often so sanitised that they smelled of chlorine – ‘Happy Tuesday everybody! Stay positive!’ – at least no one could claim that @elonmusk had ever been focus-grouped. Not when he tweeted an unflattering photograph of Bill Gates with the caption ‘in case you need to lose a boner fast’. Or in response to a tweet from Bernie Sanders: ‘I keep forgetting that you’re still alive.’ For years, he wouldn’t pay to advertise Tesla, his electric car company, and he dissolved its North American public relations department: there was nothing anyone could do for the company’s image, he believed, that he couldn’t do more efficiently himself.

Which isn’t to say that there weren’t mishaps. In 2018, Musk may have produced the most expensive social media post of all time when he tweeted ‘Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured’ – a joke that made Tesla shares jump 11 per cent before traders realised that he wasn’t in earnest. The financial papers had to explain to their readers that ‘420’ was code for smoking pot. Musk paid a $20 million fine for that one – Tesla also paid $20 million – and he had to step down as the company’s chairman, though he remained its CEO. He stood to lose even more money after he tweeted that a British diver involved in the rescue of Thai schoolboys, stuck in a cave, was a paedophile. The diver said that the tweet had destroyed his life, and sued for defamation. Fortunately for Musk, an American jury bought his defence that ‘Twitter is a free-for-all where there’s all sorts of things, you know, that sort of aren’t true, untrue, half true, where people engage in sort of verbal combat effectively.’ He exulted at the verdict: sanity! The American people (the trial had taken place in Commiefornia, no less) had his back. ‘My faith in humanity is restored,’ he told reporters. Perhaps he’d even been wrong to settle with the Securities and Exchange Commission over his marijuana joke – he tweeted that henceforth the SEC could suck his cock.

In Character Limit, the New York Times reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac suggest that at some point ‘Musk’s Twitter habit became an addiction.’ It was especially pronounced during the pandemic, when he couldn’t stop tweeting that Americans were overreacting to the coronavirus, and that the closure of his Tesla factory in California during lockdown was an instance of fascist woke-mind government overreach. By the end of 2022, he’d tweeted more than 19,000 times. Conger and Mac are persuasive that Musk needs to feel, always, that he has ‘narrative control’ – a quick tweet (Musk has said that he typically posts when he’s on the toilet) was the easiest, most immediate way for him to attack whatever it was that he didn’t like.

Of particular concern, Musk said, were ‘non-stop bogus articles about electric cars on fire’. It wasn’t bogus that Teslas sometimes went up in flames, but Musk felt picked on: the website tesla-fire.com tracked every time a Tesla vehicle caught fire, but there wasn’t a toyota-fire.com, no ford-fire.com. Tesla had nearly gone bankrupt in 2008, and again between 2017 and 2019: even as he was on track to be the richest man in the world, he couldn’t stop worrying that his company might fall apart. If consumers weren’t confident that Teslas were roadworthy, it wasn’t just that he would lose nearly all his money, Musk insisted, but that the entire electric energy revolution would be doomed. In which case, the planet would run out of oil, modern agriculture would collapse and humans would go extinct before Musk could safeguard the future of the species by creating a self-sustaining colony on Mars, the raison d’être of his company SpaceX.* He said that if his companies didn’t make it, ‘humanity was fucked.’ He was at the mercy of journalists, but they were ‘idiots’ who had it in for him. He contemplated launching a website to hold particular reporters, editors and publications accountable for their ‘lies’. He joked that he would call the site ‘Pravda’, though maybe it wasn’t a joke, since he also registered a company called Pravda in California. But in any case, he lost interest. ‘Newspapers have been fading away in relevance,’ he tweeted. ‘Not gone, just as writing and mailing paper letters still happens, but no longer the way most people know what’s going on.’ People would get their news the same way he did, from their Twitter feeds.

At the beginning of 2022, Musk started buying Twitter stock – a little at a time, because he worried that if anyone noticed what he was doing, share prices would shoot up. One of Musk’s catchphrases is that ‘physics is the law, everything else is a recommendation.’ Once he acquired 5 per cent of all Twitter shares, he was legally required to alert the SEC, but he didn’t: that would have given the game away. Instead, he kept shopping. In court filings, the SEC argued that Musk probably saved about $150 million this way (which means that Twitter sellers on the other side of the ledger lost about $150 million). In April 2022, when he owned a little more than 9 per cent of the company, he finally sent a letter to Twitter’s board, seeking to buy all the shares that were still outstanding. At the time, Twitter was trading at around $45 a share. Musk offered $54.20 a share – another 420 joke, but the board had a responsibility to their shareholders to take it seriously. If they agreed to Musk’s terms, anyone who held Twitter stock would be forced to sell him their shares, but at a premium that was supposed to gladden their hearts. Musk was proposing that Twitter was worth $44 billion, about 20 per cent of his own net worth. No one had ever paid so much money for a social media company before.

Musk’s authorised biographer, Walter Isaacson, couldn’t make sense of it – ‘I thought it was insane,’ he told the Financial Times – and Musk’s friends and family didn’t understand it either. Wasn’t Musk supposed to be busy getting humans to Mars by 2025? Kimbal Musk told his older brother that owning Twitter would be a ‘pimple on the ass of what should be your impact on the world’. To Isaacson, Musk said that he had extra cash (‘I didn’t want to just leave it in the bank’) and he couldn’t think of any product he liked better – so why not? In his letter to the Twitter board he offered another reason. He claimed that he believed in Twitter’s ‘potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe’, but that in its current form it was falling short. Moderators had suspended more than 11,000 accounts for spreading Covid misinformation and had ‘permanently suspended’ Donald Trump’s account for violating the company’s ‘Glorification of Violence’ policy. With Isaacson tagging along, Musk went out to dinner with four of his oldest kids, all in their teens, who were ‘puzzled’ by the purchase: it didn’t make sense to them at all. Musk tried to assure them that he knew what he was doing. ‘I think it’s important to have a digital public square that’s inclusive and trusted,’ he said. Then he asked: ‘How else are we going to get Trump elected in 2024?’ In his biography, which was published in 2023 (and now out in paperback), Isaacson writes that he assumed Musk was making a joke.

In 2022, Twitter was fifteen years old, glitzy and intermittently profitable, but Wall Street wasn’t impressed that it was still so much smaller than Meta, which operates Facebook and Instagram, and also less adept at adding new features or selling advertising (the source of most of its income). When Musk sent the Twitter board his ‘best and final’ offer, Putin had just invaded Ukraine and the market was jittery. The board wasn’t confident that, Musk apart, Twitter shares would hit $54.20 any time soon – and that was really all that mattered. They readied for negotiations. Except Musk wouldn’t negotiate, even to improve his own position. Conger and Mac explain that he ‘refused to sign non-disclosure agreements that would have allowed him and his advisers to review non-public information about Twitter’s inner operations and finances’. This was unheard of: ‘No normal buyer would engage in such an expensive and elaborate transaction without first looking under the hood.’

Musk kept insisting that he wasn’t buying Twitter to make money; he just wanted the deal to close quickly – he couldn’t understand what was taking so long. Isaacson writes that he was in a ‘manic mood’, drinking Red Bull and not sleeping. He was also tweeting about cocaine, which he’s denied using, though recent reporting from the Wall Street Journal indicates that he absolutely does (along with ketamine, LSD, ecstasy and mushrooms). Musk’s lawyers did as they were bid, proposing a contract that was so intentionally ‘seller-friendly’ it could have been written by the other side. Conger and Mac report that Twitter’s team could ‘hardly believe their luck’, but they were also wary. It was just too weird. They took the precaution of adding a ‘straitjacket’ clause: once the deal was signed, it would be ferociously difficult for Musk to get out of it.

When the deal was announced, Tesla’s stock dropped 12 per cent: investors didn’t like that their ‘techno-king’ (Musk’s official title on paperwork filed with the SEC) was going to be distracted by another company. It dropped even further when it emerged that Musk was proposing to pay for Twitter, in part, by selling a chunk of his Tesla shares. The more the price of Tesla dropped, the more shares of Tesla he had to sell to raise the cash, so it kept falling. In all, Musk’s net worth decreased by $200 billion in a year, breaking the record for the largest loss of personal fortune in history. Isaacson says that it was one of the few times he’d ever ‘witnessed Musk being unsure of himself’. He was about to be only the second richest person in the world. Eighteen days after the deal was announced, Musk tweeted that it was ‘temporarily on hold’. Twitter claimed to have 229 million users, but he said he needed proof that at least 95 per cent of them were humans. Humans are valuable because they click on advertisements, unlike ‘spam bots’, which masquerade as human but are run by computer programs. Musk tweeted that it was ‘fundamental to the financial health of Twitter’ that ‘advertisers know what they’re getting for their money.’ When the company’s CEO, Parag Agrawal, responded with a series of patient tweets explaining how Twitter distinguished between real and fake accounts, Musk replied with a poop emoji.

On 8 July, Musk filed to terminate the deal, though he told Isaacson that he still intended to buy the company, just at a discount: ‘I mean literally half or something.’ His reputation as an engineering genius was at its height. By the time he finished telling the world that Twitter was a Potemkin company – he tweeted that more than 90 per cent of its users might be fake – its share price would be in the toilet, and the board would be lucky to accept whatever money he offered them. As for the company’s executives and board members who’d hoodwinked him and the public and the SEC: ‘We will hunt every single one of them till the day they die.’ Twitter sued: ‘Having proposed and then signed a seller-friendly merger agreement, Musk apparently believes that he – unlike every other party subject to Delaware contract law – is free to change his mind, trash the company, disrupt its operations, destroy stockholder value, and walk away.’ Two days later, Musk backed down. He may have realised that he would almost certainly lose in court, but he was also worried, according to one of his lawyers, that ‘even if he won the lawsuit, he would lose in the long run – because he wouldn’t end up owning Twitter.’ That was unacceptable.

In October 2022​ , Musk tweeted a video of himself carrying a porcelain sink into Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco. He’s grinning, exhilarated, though it’s unclear if it’s because he’s finally the owner of Twitter or if he’s just pleased with his joke. Let that sink in. Isaacson says that Musk seemed ‘amazed’ by Twitter’s ‘coffee bars, yoga studio, fitness room and game arcades’. Also by the ‘gender diversity is welcome here’ signs on the bathrooms, and the supply cupboard full of T-shirts with the words ‘stay woke’. Musk posted a video of himself rifling through them, with two laughing-crying emojis that suggest it’s all too much to bear. Conger and Mac write that Musk assumed Twitter’s employees (they called themselves ‘Tweeps’) hated him – for being nasty about the company while he was trying to bring down its price, for being anti-trans, for being opposed to remote working and unionisation. It had also recently made the news that he’d got at least one of his subordinates pregnant, and Business Insider was reporting that SpaceX had paid $250,000 to a flight attendant who accused Musk of ‘exposing his erect penis to her, rubbing her leg without consent and offering to buy her a horse in exchange for an erotic massage’.

Musk became deeply anxious that Twitter employees were planning to humiliate him by sabotaging the site – maybe by deleting all the tweets, making him the owner of nothing. (Or, even worse, flooding 229 million feeds with photographs of exploding Teslas and himself, shirtless on a yacht – ‘in case you need to lose a boner fast’?) He wanted to order a ‘code freeze’ that would prevent employees from making any changes to the site or the apps, but until it was officially his company, no one would authorise it. While he waited for the clock to tick down, he prepared letters firing Agrawal and other top executives. He told Isaacson that if he ‘timed everything right’, he somehow wouldn’t have to pay their (huge) contractual severance benefits. He also wanted the pleasure of seeing Twitter’s CEO escorted out of the building by security – payback for making him close at $54.20. (Isaacson’s book is now a central piece of evidence in Agrawal et al v. Musk et al.)

When the last documents were exchanged and Twitter finally, officially belonged to Elon Musk, he may have ‘slammed his fist on the table’ (as in Conger and Mac) and/or (as in Breaking Twitter by Ben Mezrich) ‘stood up from his chair, raising his hands in the air’. But in all accounts, he screamed, as if it were a battle cry, ‘FUCK ZUCK!’ – i.e. Mark Zuckerberg, the leader of a social media company that was many times larger and more profitable than his. (As the gap between Meta and Twitter grew wider, Musk challenged Zuckerberg both to a cage match and, dispensing with all pretence, a ‘literal dick measuring contest’. Zuckerberg, who has won jiu-jitsu tournaments, agreed to the former, but Musk has yet to set a date.)

In a boardroom that Musk called the ‘war room’, he told Twitter HR to prepare for mass layoffs. Despite what he’d told Isaacson about his bundles of cash, to finish paying for Twitter without selling even more Tesla shares he’d taken on $13 billion in debt. The interest payments were $1.5 billion a year. He’d also secured $7 billion from outside investors by promising to ‘quintuple’ revenue while slashing costs. He seemed to think it would be easy: Twitter had 7500 employees for what was, essentially, just a website. They didn’t even have to write the tweets!

To determine who would be let go, Musk staffed a transition team with people he trusted from outside Twitter, including his personal lawyers, investors, engineers from his other companies and two of his cousins from South Africa. They would eventually be tasked with ‘deleting’ more than 75 per cent of the workforce, beginning with the non-excellent and the non-loyal. To root out dissenters, the cousins searched employee Slack channels for uses of the word ‘Elon’ and read through personal Twitter feeds. Musk also insisted on an audit to make sure that everyone who worked for him really existed. Just as he’d once suggested that Twitter was overrun with spam bots, now he wondered if the payroll included ‘fake people’. None was discovered, but the experience didn’t stop him, in 2025, from asserting that the ranks of the US federal government were replete with ‘fictional individuals’ or that Social Security payments were being paid to ‘tens of millions’ of Americans who weren’t real, the ‘biggest fraud in history’.

Musk fired half of Twitter’s workforce before the end of his first week. Some employees only realised they’d been laid off when they were booted from work calls without warning, or couldn’t log in to their email. When HR staff warned Musk that he couldn’t act so quickly without violating labour laws, he wasn’t fazed. ‘I’m used to paying penalties,’ he told them. ‘I’ll still come out ahead.’ Within a few days, the transition team began telling managers to rehire some of the people who’d just been dismissed – parts of the site were in danger of collapse. Musk tweeted apologies that Twitter was ‘being super slow in many countries’. Though the consequences weren’t immediately apparent, he had also fired too many people who kept the company compliant with Federal Trade Commission regulations and the European Digital Services Act (fines can be as high as 6 per cent of a company’s annual global revenue). Eventually, Musk figured, he’d get the balance right. In the meantime, he kept firing people.

He also tried to save money by ordering Twitter to stop paying rent on its offices worldwide: Musk assumed that no one would want to lose Twitter as a tenant, so they’d be able to negotiate for better terms. Instead, the owner of the San Francisco offices sued (not just for back rent, but also late fees, interest and legal costs) and so did the Crown Estate, after Twitter stopped paying for its London offices in Piccadilly Circus. In Singapore, employees were marched out by their building’s landlords. Where they weren’t evicted, Musk stopped paying for janitorial staff, and offices quickly became disgusting. Conger and Mac report that in New York, ‘the stench of the bathroom overwhelmed some parts of the office,’ while ‘cockroaches flitted in and out of the drains.’ In San Francisco, ‘employees got used to avoiding the bathrooms by running to nearby coffee shops or restaurants.’

Musk knew that morale was plummeting, and so a directive went out forbidding groups larger than two or three Tweeps from meeting without management’s permission – the assumption was that he was trying to prevent a mutiny. According to Conger and Mac, Musk wouldn’t go anywhere in the office without a bodyguard, even to the bathroom (however foul). In mid-November, he sent a company-wide email with the headline ‘A Fork in the Road’ – no pleasantries, just an announcement that ‘going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.’

Anyone who wanted to stay employed needed to reply affirmatively by 5 p.m. the next day or accept three months’ severance. More than a thousand people decided that they were done. Some of the employees who stayed, especially in the American offices, felt that they had no choice but to tough it out: they relied on the company for their healthcare, or their immigration status was tied to Twitter (if they left they were in danger of being deported). Others – overwhelmingly male – wanted to stay because they believed that Musk was a genius, and that he was going to make them very rich.

Before Musk bought Twitter, many of its employees had worked on ‘content moderation’, which for Musk wasn’t a priority: in the digital public square he envisioned, people would say whatever they wanted. He called for a ‘general amnesty’ of previously banned accounts, including those of white supremacists. Advertisers were spooked: they didn’t want their brands to appear next to violent pornography or anything too obviously racist. In Musk’s first month, ad sales fell 80 per cent. Musk blamed ‘activist groups’ for turning advertisers against him, and started tweeting his frustration: ‘Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter. Do they hate free speech in America?’ In another tweet, he threatened to go ‘thermonuclear’ on brands that withdrew their accounts. But when they just kept leaving, he affected not to care. In a broadcast interview with the New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin (whom Musk called ‘Jonathan’), watched more than four million times on YouTube, he said that advertising boycotts were tantamount to ‘blackmail’, and that brands which fretted about the salutariness of the site or his own feed should go elsewhere.

Musk: Don’t advertise.

Sorkin: You don’t want them to advertise?

Musk: No.

Sorkin: What do you mean?

Musk: If somebody is going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself. Go fuck yourself. Go. Fuck. Yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is.

Before Musk bought Twitter, advertising had accounted for 90 per cent of the company’s revenue. He persuaded himself that he could make money another way, by getting users to pay for ‘blue ticks’. These were already used by Twitter to indicate that an account had been ‘verified’ – @barackobama really was Barack Obama – and no payment was required. Blue ticks had become brag-worthy because they were scarce, usually only offered to accounts that Twitter considered important or in danger of copycats; it took time to verify an account, and Musk’s Twitter had increasingly few people who could do it. Conger and Mac report that Musk had come to ‘hate what he saw as Twitter’s two-tiered system of the verified and unverified’. He called it a ‘system of lords and peasants’ and said that it especially bothered him that journalists were often able to get blue ticks ‘simply because of their profession’. To Musk, the solution was obvious: blue ticks for all – for a fee.

One of the strangest moments in Character Limit is when Isaacson enters the story: he wasn’t just scribbling in a corner. He had strong views about blue ticks, and started sharing them at meetings: ‘This should be accessible to everyone,’ he said. ‘You need a really low price point, because this is something that everyone is going to sign up for.’ Musk went with $8 a month. But the celebrities rebelled: when their blue ticks were taken away, they wouldn’t pay to get them back. ‘Fuck that, they should pay me,’ Stephen King tweeted. LeBron James told his 52 million followers that he wouldn’t be paying either. And if the lords didn’t have blue ticks, then the peasants didn’t want them either. Almost the only people who seemed willing to pay for them were either Musk loyalists or mischief-makers. Conger and Mac write that Musk’s ‘rush to get the product out led him to decide that there would be no review process’: anyone who paid for ‘Twitter Blue’ with a credit card could get a tick mark. And so a verified George W. Bush tweeted that he ‘missed killing Iraqis’. A verified Tony Blair replied: ‘Same tbh’. An account called @teslareal – it looked just like the real Tesla account – posted that there was a problem with the car’s navigation system; @nycgov and @NYC_GOVERNMENT each tweeted that they were the only authentic account representing the City of New York, and to beware impostors. And seemingly from the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly: ‘We are excited to announce insulin is free now.’ That post stayed up for six hours and was retweeted thousands of times – Eli Lilly’s stock dropped more than 5 per cent, and the company had to release an official apology and denial. Only Musk seemed to be enjoying it all: ‘Some epically funny tweets! 🤣🤣,’ he posted. But it was also, for many users, the beginning of the end of the site’s usefulness.

In July 2023, Musk announced that Twitter was dead: the company had only been an ‘accelerant’ for his new ‘everything app’, called X – though when it was unveiled it looked like Twitter with a different logo. The decision didn’t seem to make much sense: ‘Twitter’ was a globally recognised brand, and still valuable, despite everything Musk had done to it. The reporter Kurt Wagner, who covered the company closely for Bloomberg, suggested that Musk craved a ‘fresh start’ after so much public failure. By the time Twitter became X, the company was worth around $20 billion, less than half what Musk had paid; a year later, his co-investors would value it at under $10 billion. Musk tweeted: ‘How do you make a small fortune in social media? Start out with a large one.’

But there were fringe benefits. Engineers added a line of code (‘author_is_elon’) to ensure that Musk’s account would reign supreme. Even users who weren’t following @elonmusk started seeing his posts at the top of their feeds. Any account he engaged with – by replying or retweeting – was boosted too. In 2024, the Wall Street Journal found that ‘new X users’ – accounts created for their study which only engaged with posts about amusement parks, crafts, sport or cooking – were being ‘blanketed with political content’, much of it bonkers. You sign up to read tweets from @ChampionsLeague and @bonappetit, and soon you’re learning that Democratic Party operatives are generating hurricanes with weather machines and importing foreign leftists to vote in US elections (Musk: ‘The more illegals that the Democrats can bring in, the more likely they are to win, so that’s what they’re going to do’). When a reporter was able to ask him why he was bolstering conspiracy theories, Musk said it was because ‘so many conspiracy theories have turned out to be true.’ He didn’t ban posts that included links to newspapers, but they were often downranked so fewer people would see them (‘freedom of speech, not freedom of reach’, as Musk likes to say). And he was able to punish users he didn’t like: reporters from CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times (including Ryan Mac) have all had their accounts turned off and on. The Washington Post found that Twitter/X was also intentionally ‘throttling’ links to the New York Times and Facebook, making them open more slowly than they should – presumably so that users would become impatient and give up.

When Musk bought Twitter, he kept teasing the return of @realdonaldtrump. But the past and future president was ensconced in his own personal social media platform, Truth Social, a Twitter clone except with ‘truths’ and ‘retruths’ instead of tweets and retweets. After January 2021, Trump’s only post on X was a photograph of his mugshot with the words ‘Election interference. Never surrender!’ He didn’t come back to the platform until after Musk joined his campaign – eventually contributing almost $300 million. In August 2024, Trump agreed to appear in a ‘live conversation’ with Musk on X. The video was glitchy and for forty minutes wouldn’t work at all, but Trump claimed not to mind. ‘It’s an honour, we view that as an honour,’ Trump said, as though it wasn’t possible for any website to accommodate the vast number of people who wanted to hear him speak – nothing to do with the fact that X was falling apart. Musk praised Trump for his ‘strength under fire’ and Trump praised Musk for being so good at firing people: ‘You’re the greatest cutter. I mean, I look at what you do. You walk in, you just say: “You want to quit?”’ It was at that moment that Musk offered to do to America just what he’d done for Twitter.

The country’s​ annual budget is $6.8 trillion; Musk has said that he will cut ‘at least’ $2 trillion by eliminating waste and fraud, and by getting rid of regulations that cost money and personnel to enforce, which also happen to be burdensome to the CEO of car and rocket companies. (Musk is entitled to ‘self-determine’ if he ever has a conflict of interest.) He’s promised to vanquish the ‘deep state’, which turns out to mean ‘deleting’ the agency that feeds starving children because, Musk posted on X, ‘USAID was a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.’ Food inspectors have been fired, and so have park rangers, janitors, the ‘top authority for all nuclear safety matters’ at the Department of Energy, meteorologists, epidemiologists, engineers, tax collectors, electric lineworkers, firefighters, surveyors and IT specialists. Hospitals run by Veterans Affairs are being gutted. Even the sniffer dogs that patrol airports are being affected – workers for the Transport Security Administration have been instructed that all requests for dog food and vet visits have been ‘put on hold’. Musk has said that he isn’t targeting air traffic controllers, which is true, but Politico found that he hasn’t spared the workers who support air traffic controllers, such as the ‘mechanics who maintain and repair the grounds and buildings where controllers work’. He’s also been cancelling hundreds of leases for office space, and has declared war on paying for software licences – on message boards, federal workers seek advice on how to do their jobs without Adobe Acrobat. The Trump administration’s official position is that Musk isn’t actually doing all this as the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, because then he would have to be confirmed by the Senate and abide by conflict of interest laws. But when an unsigned email went out to two million federal workers, offering them a chance to resign with severance or take their chances with further layoffs, the subject line – again – was ‘Fork in the Road’. Musk wanted them to know it had come from him.