Elon Musk makes Twitter visitors wait for more than an hour to see him — and they can't speak before being spoken to, report says
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- Twitter visitors often wait more than an hour to speak with Elon Musk, The Washington Post reported.
- They're told not to speak before Musk, who sometimes watches videos in meetings, the report said.
- Meanwhile, Musk has emphasized in-office work and face-to-face meetings.
Elon Musk often makes his visitors at Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco wait for more than an hour to speak with him and then sometimes watches YouTube videos during the meetings, The Washington Post reported on Saturday.
Visitors, who must wait in an area next to the 10th-floor conference room the CEO works in, are also instructed not to speak before Musk does, the newspaper reported.
Musk's leadership style has been heavily criticized since he took over Twitter almost two months ago. One of his first moves was firing some of the company's top execs, and he has laid off thousands of staff members.
The Tesla CEO has also taken away staff benefits, used Twitter polls to make key decisions, and introduced some policies before quickly overturning them.
Musk, who's also known for a headstrong approach to work, is said to have slept in Tesla's factories during production runs. Since taking over Twitter, he's said he's slept at the company's offices; other staffers have appeared to sleep there too.
A person close to Musk told The Post that Musk was "uncovering and solving and programming all night." Musk has previously told staffers that Twitter 2.0 would be "extremely hardcore" and would involve working "long hours at high intensity."
Musk apparently highly values face-to-face communication. He's scrapped Twitter's remote-work policies, telling staffers they needed to return to the office or resign, unless they had a specific exemption.
An attorney representing former Twitter workers said in a lawsuit that the return-to-office mandate broke promises that Twitter execs and managers had made that employees "would be able to continue working remotely, for at least a year after Musk's acquisition of the company."
The former employee who filed the lawsuit argued that the new stance on remote work was discriminatory. The former employee, who has a disability, said he wasn't told how to request an exemption but messaged his manager saying he was "definitely not" returning to the office for a while because he was at "extra risk" from COVID-19. Days later, the lawsuit said, Twitter emailed him to say he was being terminated for behavior that "violated company policy."