Elon Musk has a unique strategy as he takes over Twitter, namely, to use his own engineers from Tesla to review the code at the social media platform’s headquarters in California.
News of the move broke late Thursday. Bloomberg, who first reported the use of Tesla engineers at Twitter, seemed to indicate that Musk hopes to make changes quickly. Earlier Thursday in Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, product leaders showed Tesla engineers the company’s code “so they could assess and explain to Musk what the company needs, according to one of the people,” the report says.
Automotive engineers and social media engineers don’t necessarily have much in common. Nevertheless, there must be enough crossover that Musk is confident that his team can alert him to potential issues and opportunities. It’s also a potential indication that Musk doesn’t completely trust the team at Twitter.
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New: Elon Musk had some Tesla engineers visit Twitter HQ today to assess the company's code, ahead of the deal closing. https://t.co/GSkJyrLqZG via @KurtWagner8 @EdLudlow
— Sarah Frier (@sarahfrier) October 27, 2022
When the deal was first announced in April, Twitter froze coding changes. At the time it was suspected that the social media giant was concerned about internal sabotage of one sort or another. According to a number of sources, the code was frozen again around noon Pacific Time on Thursday as the deal between Twitter and Musk was finalized.
That same evening Musk evidently had staff at Twitter schedule a number of meetings with one specific direction: “bring code.” That seems to indicate Musk’s interest in getting to the bottom of what’s going on at Twitter and who’s capable of what.
Whether or not engineers from Tesla will continue to work on Twitter code remains to be seen.
Twitter engineering teams are being told "bring code" for meetings suddenly scheduled this evening with Elon Musk for tomorrow. Meanwhile, the C-suite is now gone.https://t.co/4jS5kP4oSl
— Kali Hays (@HaysKali) October 28, 2022