At his different firms, which embody the electrical automaker Tesla and the rocket maker SpaceX, Mr. Musk has typically appointed a key adviser to handle the enterprise in his absence. At SpaceX, the duty has fallen to Gwynne Shotwell, its president and chief working officer.
At Twitter, Mr. Musk had opted to run the corporate himself. He has borrowed staff from his different firms, together with Tesla and the Boring Firm, a tunneling start-up, to affix him. Steve Davis, the president of the Boring Firm, has led numerous cost-cutting initiatives at Twitter. Mr. Musk has had folks rotate out and in to advise him on authorized and monetary issues, together with the investor Antonio Gracias, a former Tesla board member, and Alex Spiro, his private lawyer.
Mr. Musk has additionally relied on Tesla and SpaceX staff to take care of technical issues, as layoffs and resignations have decimated Twitter’s engineering ranks. Whereas a minimum of one Tesla board member mentioned he believed the carmaker’s staff can be solely briefly deployed at Twitter, Mr. Musk has continued to make use of them, together with Sheen Austin, a Tesla engineer who has been heading up Twitter’s infrastructure group.
A few of Mr. Musk’s advisers have lobbied to guide Twitter. On Sunday, Jason Calacanis, an investor in Mr. Musk’s Twitter, asked his own followers on the platform if he or the enterprise capitalist David Sacks needs to be Twitter’s chief govt, or share the place.
Mr. Musk, who was in Qatar for the World Cup remaining this weekend with Jared Kushner, can also be in search of new funding in Twitter. After he offered $3.6 billion of Tesla shares final week, his finance staff, led by Jared Birchall, the pinnacle of his household workplace, despatched emails to potential buyers, mentioned one one that was approached to speculate and who was not licensed to talk publicly.
The emails to potential backers invited them to speculate on the $54.20 share value that Mr. Musk paid to purchase the corporate, the individual mentioned. However Mr. Musk has since publicly mentioned the worth he paid for Twitter was greater than twice what it was price. The potential fund-raising was reported earlier by Semafor.
Mr. Musk has continued to aggressively slash prices at Twitter. On Friday evening, the corporate started one other spherical of layoffs, in keeping with 4 folks with data of the actions and paperwork seen by The New York Occasions. About 50 staff, primarily from the corporate’s infrastructure division, have been lower, the folks mentioned. It was unclear how different divisions have been affected.