Elon Musk Reiterates Support For Free Speech In First Town Hall With Twitter Employees Since Acquisition Deal

Keneci Channel

Thursday's virtual town hall is the first with Twitter roughly 8,000 employees since the Tesla CEO struck a deal to acquire the social media company. The transaction is expected to be completed this fall when he formerly takes control of the company.

The meeting -- video of which was leaked to Project Veritas -- also comes days after Twitter executives agreed to hand over more data to help Musk and his team understand the prevalence of fake and spam accounts on the social media platform. He threatened last week, to walk away from the deal if he did not get the data.

During the all-hands Thursday, moderated by Twitter CMO Leslie Berland, Musk reassured employees about his intention to follow through with the deal. He also answered questions on content moderation, layoff plans, remote work policy and other topics of interest to employees. CEO Parag Agrawal was also present at the meeting.

Responding to a question about his past promise to allow more free speech on the 'woke' platform when he takes over, Musk reiterated: "I think it's essential to have free speech."

"There's freedom of speech and freedom of reach," he elaborated. "Anyone could just go into the middle of Times Square right now and say anything they want. They can just walk into the middle of Times Square and deny the Holocaust ... but that doesn't mean that needs to be promoted to millions of people. So I think people should be allowed to say pretty outrageous things that are in the bounds of the law but that don't get amplified and don't get a ton of reach."

His plans for the company also include his desire to grow daily active user base to "at least a billion people," from just over 200 million currently. He said he wants to increase monetization opportunities for creators and explore potential payments features.

"I think an important goal for Twitter would be to try to include as much of the country, as much of the world, as possible," Musk said.

The Tesla CEO sees popular Chinese all-in-one social media platform WeChat as a model of what Twitter can be.

"You basically live on WeChat in China because it's so usable and helpful to daily life, and I think if we can achieve that, or even get close to that at Twitter, it would be an immense success," Musk said.

Musk who is apparently not a fan of the post-coronavirus-pandemic remote work culture, sent a memo earlier this month to Tesla executives requiring them to return to the office. This reportedly led to growing concerns among woke Twitter employees -- who mostly work remotely -- that it won't be business as usual under their new owner.

"There is a hit one takes remotely, because it does reduce espirit de corps," Musk told Twitter employees at the all-hands. "Even if someone is working remotely, they've got to come in sometimes so they recognize their colleagues ... The bias for me may be strongly toward working in person, but if somebody is exceptional then remote work can be okay."

On layoff plans, Musk said: "Right now, [Twitter's] costs exceed the revenue, so that's not a great situation to be in. But anyone who's obviously like a significant contributor should have nothing to worry about."

WATCH highlights of Elon Musk's remarks at Thursday's town hall with Twitter employees.