Twitter ‘Hiring’ As Musk Plans ‘Everything App’

Matthew Broersma,
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Elon Musk says Twitter is hiring as he plans encrypted messaging and payment services to turn platform into ‘everything app’

Elon Musk has said in slides from a presentation on Twitter’s future that the company is hiring, as he laid out plans for turning the microblogging service into an “everything app” that offers encrypted direct messaging and payments.

Musk published the slides over the weekend, but did not say when he had given the talk in which they were used.

The first slide stated, “We’re recruiting,” without giving details.

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Image credit: SpaceX

User growth

After taking over Twitter a month ago Musk had initially laid off roughly half of the company’s global workforce, with hundreds more understood to have quit after he asked remaining staff to sign up to a “hardcore” work ethic.

The presentation included figures stating new user sign-ups were at an all-time high, averaging more than 2 million a day for the seven days to 16 November, as were minutes users actively spent on the platform, at 31.5 minutes per day.

Hate speech impressions and reported impersonations have fallen, according to slides citing data with mid-November dates.

Musk said he sees the platform on a path to having more than one billion monthly users in the next 12 to 18 months.

‘Everything app’

In the presentation he said he intends to introduce encrypted direct messaging and payments services, turning Twitter into an “everything app” similar to services such as China’s WeChat that offer a variety of services on a single platform.

Musk has said Twitter will reintroduce the latest version of user verification on Friday with a colour-coded system offering a blue checkmark for individuals, “celebrity or not”, grey for government and gold for companies.

He said verified accounts would be manually authenticated before the checkmark appeared, following a wave of impersonations of high-profile people and organisations using the Twitter Blue paid blue checkmark, which was not verified and has since been scrapped.

‘General amnesty’

Musk called manual verification “painful, but necessary”.

He has said Twitter would offer a “general amnesty” for suspended accounts that had not broken the law or “engaged in egregious spam”.

Since Musk’s takeover Twitter has been hit by a massive drop in advertising revenue as large advertisers have suspended their involvement with the platform due to concerns over how Musk plans to police content.