Twitter: Elon Musk wanted to find out how many employees were… real  

Twitter’s new boss demanded a payroll audit

As the chaos at Twitter continues, a new report from the New York Times reveals that Elon Musk wanted to find out which employees were real and which weren’t. 

This came during the period when he laid off 3,600 employees en masse , with the Tesla and SpaceX mogul CEO demanding a Twitter-wide payroll audit as he argued that he needed to sort out which employees “were human” before giving them their regularly scheduled bonuses . 

The report goes on to claim that Musk wanted to fire the employees before they received their regular bonuses, with the Twitter owner even going so far as to delay sending them out when he found out…how much the bill turned out to be. 

The NYT reports that Musk was concerned that Twitter’s books contained “ghost employees” who would receive money when he decided to make the layoffs. Three people familiar with the matter told The Times that when Musk took over the company on Oct. 27, he immediately indicated to Twitter’s human resources department that he wanted to lay off much of the salaried staff.

Musk was told that staff were scheduled to receive their vested stock and retention bonuses on Nov. 1, and that firing them now could be the difference between holding onto millions of dollars. A group on Twitter informed Musk that firing staff before this time could potentially result in millions of additional dollars in legal fees and fines.

Musk was reportedly convinced by this and decided to wait until November 4th to begin the layoffs. During that time, Tesla’s CEO ordered the aforementioned payroll audit conducted by Twitter’s chief accounting officer, Robert Kaiden.

Just to recap a few events of the last 24 hours as Twitter rolled out the new ‘Official’ badge, removed it and added it back , turned verification/blue tick into a purchasable perk for $8, and finally removed the subscription option shortly after.