© Reuters
Investing.com – After his takeover of Twitter (NYSE:), Elon Musk brought in more than 50 trusted Tesla (NASDAQ::) employees, mostly software engineers from the Autopilot team. Employees of Musk’s other companies are now allowed to work at Twitter, including more than 50 from Tesla, two from the Boring Company (which builds underground tunnels) and one from Neuralink (which develops a brain-computer interface).
Also, Musk’s friends, advisers and backers, including his family office manager Jared Birchall, angel investor Jason Calacanis, and chief operating officer PayPal founder (NASDAQ:) and venture capitalist David Sacks, are also involved. The same goes for two people in his family, James and Andrew Musk, who worked at Palantir and Neuralink respectively.
Among the dozens of people Elon Musk has recruited specifically from Tesla are director of software development Ashok Elluswamy, director of Autopilot and TeslaBot engineering Milan Kovac, senior director of software engineering Maha Virduhagiri, Pete Scheutzow, a senior technical program manager, and Jake Nocon, who is part of Tesla’s oversight unit, as senior security intelligence officer.
At Twitter, Mr. Musk relies on his lieutenants and followers to decide who and what to remove or keep within the social network. He also urges them to learn everything they can about Twitter as quickly as possible, from source code to content moderation and data privacy requirements, so he can reshape the platform.
Musk has presented himself as a free speech absolutist, but he must reconcile his wishes with laws and business realities. He said in an open letter to advertisers last week as he took over the company, “Twitter obviously cannot become a zone of free expression, where anything can be said without consequences.”