Twitter might reopen its offices but can Elon Musk really change its culture?

Is it #RIPTwitter? The offices of the social media company are supposed to reopen on Monday after last week’s closure, amid yet more tumult sparked by Elon Musk’s quixotic – some would call it unhinged – acquisition and operation of the business.

Having fired half the staff, he issued a typically macho diktat to those who survived the cull: Sign up to the “intense work environment” at the new “extremely hardcore” Twitter 2.0 or quit with three months’ severance.

This culture would mean “at least” 40 hours a week in the office, which given the way things have been going there may mean double that in practice. Any plans the remaining staff may have had for Thanksgiving might have to be put on hold.

“Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade,” said Musk in one of those internal emails that quickly gets out. Staff were told to click “yes” on a Google form or head for the exit. The latter option appears to have been quite popular judging by what the sizeable corps of refuseniks have been posting on Twitter.

The Verge reported hundreds of resignations, citing internal Slack messages. The firm had only 3,000 or so employees before the deadline. No wonder the RIP hashtag has been trending.

Amid Musk’s provocations, trolling, spreading of misinformation and spectacular mismanagement of the company he bought, it’s easy to forget his considerable skills as a businessperson.

He didn’t get to be the richest person in the world – with something like $180bn in his back pocket – through being entirely stupid. He has created multiple businesses of serious note. Zip2, the software business he founded with his brother, which got him started, was sold for £258bn. Next up was X.com. It became one of the constituent parts of eBay.

Then there is Tesla, which he didn’t found but rather got involved with at a very early stage. To build up a car company that, incongruously, has 10 times the market value of General Motors is some achievement. Not to forget SpaceX.

But these are all startups or fledgling firms. They’re all businesses in which Musk has been able to set the culture at the outset, where staff know the rules of the game and those contemplating joining can find out what they getting into before they bid their families a fond goodbye and take their seats on the Musk rollercoaster.

Twitter is an established business with an established culture.

Sure, corporate cultures can’t stand still. But clashing cultures and poor management of them have killed some very big mergers in the past, and prevented others from realising their potential. Most of them were at least entered into with some kind of plan. Musk, on the other hand, seems to be making it up as he goes along.

The gazillionaire iconoclast has carried on as only he does, with a blizzard of tweets, trolling his critics with memes, claiming spectacular increases in Twitter usage, with accompanying graphs, and generally making noise.

One does rather wonder how he finds the time to log in to the app. He’s also being paid $56bn or so to run Tesla. That appalling package is now the subject of a court case brought by unhappy investors. Small wonder. Even with the mind of Lex Luthor and the ability to work like Clark Kent on speed, and to do all that on only a couple of hours’ sleep on a couch at the office, there’s no way he can effectively do it all.

Nobody is getting the best from him. They wouldn’t get that even if he had the time-turner used by Hermione Granger in Harry Potter.

He has said he is not “super worried” about what’s been going on because “the best people” have stayed put. That’s open to question. Twitter’s best Tweeps are the sort of people who have options, even in a Silicon Valley that has been suffering some privations. Job cuts, demands from restive investors and the like. The “best people” in IT always have options, even in an unusually austere climate.

So is it #RIPTwitter? With reports suggesting that the loss of key engineers could see outages starting in a matter of days? We’ll see. Musk has confounded sceptics in the past. But the investors who lent him billions can’t be feeling too happy right now.

You’d think this would provide a lesson but they’ll cough up the cash the next time a flashy, charismatic CEO rocks up with a similarly shaky proposition. No one wants to miss out. That’s Wall Street for you.