Elon Musk enlists Tesla, Boring Co., Neuralink employees for Twitter takeover

Twitter owner Elon Musk has enlisted Tesla employees to work at the social-media company.
AP

Elon Musk has authorized Tesla, Boring Company, and Neuralink staff to work at Twitter, per CNBC.
Some Tesla directors were also enlisted to work at Twitter, CNBC reported, citing documents.
Musk has already made significant changes to the Twitter workforce since his takeover.

Elon Musk has brought some employees from three of his other companies, including Tesla, into Twitter, according to a CNBC report on Monday.

More than 50 employees at Tesla have been authorized to work at Twitter, according to internal documents seen by CNBC. The majority of these workers were software engineers from Tesla’s Autopilot team, working on the company’s advanced driver assistance system, per the documents.

In particular, the documents said Musk had pulled a handful of senior directors from Tesla to Twitter, including director of Autopilot and TeslaBot engineering Milan Kovac, director of software development Ashok Elluswamy, and engineering, product and design leader Maha Virudhagiri, CNBC reported.

Tesla, Kovac, Elluswamy, and Virudhagiri didn’t immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.

As well as Tesla workers, the world’s richest man has also enlisted two staff members from his tunnelling venture, The Boring Company, and one employee from his brain-chip business, Neuralink, CNBC reported, citing the documents. Neither company immediately responded to Insider’s request for comment.

CNBC wrote in its report that the documents said some backers, advisors, and acquaintances of Musk were also authorized to work at Twitter, including former PayPal chief operating officer David Sacks and angel investor Jason Calacanis.

Andrew Musk and James Musk, who share the billionaire’s surname and worked at Neuralink and software firm Palantir, respectively, were involved in the plans too, per CNBC’s report citing the documents.

Some Twitter employees told CNBC over the weekend that Musk wanted the staff to quickly learn about source code, as well as content moderation and data-privacy rules in preparation for Twitter’s redesign.

CNBC’s report follows the firing of some top executives at Twitter, as well as CEO Parag Agrawal, hours after Musk took over the site. The billionaire then scrapped Twitter’s board of directors and became its sole director.

Reports have circulated that about 25% of the company’s workforce could be laid off, although the FT reported that the plans would not focus on laying off a certain percentage of workers. It cited people familiar with the matter.