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Inside Elon Musk’s X

Inside Elon Musk’s X

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With the Twitter brand now gone, what’s in it for the remaining employees at the X Corporation? Also: I got my eyeballs scanned by Sam Altman’s Worldcoin orb.

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With Elon Musk in Portofino, Italy, this week for Chamath Palihapitiya’s wedding, and Linda Yaccarino in Los Angeles for a celebrity charm offensive, their rank and file tore down bird logos in the office with power tools. Twitter is becoming X.

Getting rid of the Twitter brand makes no traditional business sense, of course. But it makes sense to Musk, who answers to no one and is continuing to shape the platform how he, and only he, sees fit. If you still work at the company formerly known as Twitter these days, you’ve come to peace with that fact or perhaps even grown excited by it. Now that Musk has stripped the company down to the studs, with only about 200 engineers and a handful of product managers left, I’ve been wondering: what’s in it for those who remain?

Remarkably, Musk has yet to actually issue employee stock grants in X Holdings Corporation, the parent company of what was Twitter, I’m told. That’s despite him saying in February that grants would be issued by late March at a valuation of $20 billion. Instead, employees have been given an IOU in the form of a document saying the company intends to grant them restricted stock units.

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