Elon Musk led a $44 billion acquisition of Twitter and appointed himself CEO there in late October. Ever since, he has enlisted high-ranking executives and engineers from his other businesses, including SpaceX, Tesla and The Boring Company, to help out at the social media company, according to internal records obtained by CNBC and conversations with recent Twitter employees.
Musk has also enabled partners from investment firms who participated in the Twitter buyout access to work within the social media company.
It wasn’t immediately clear how many hours each person had worked so far at Twitter, or how much of their work may be done remotely versus in Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters or other offices.
Shareholders remain concerned about how Musk’s financial commitments, split schedule and controversial decisions at Twitter may impact the automaker. Tesla shares have declined about 25% since he took over Twitter on Oct. 27.
Internal records obtained by CNBC indicated that more than 50 Tesla employees, mostly Autopilot software engineers, were authorized to work for Musk at Twitter immediately after he took over, and were still authorized to work there as of early December. Included among the names are people previously reported by CNBC, as well as:
- Director of Software Engineering Silvio Brugada
- Director of Infrastructure Engineering and Info Security Rajasekar Jegannathan
- Senior Manager of DevOps Michael Outland
- Director of Battery Manufacturing Engineering Andrew Ross
- Chief Information Officer Nagesh Saldi
- Autopilot Project Manager RJ Sekator
Attorneys asked Elon Musk in a Delaware court in November about his use of Tesla talent at Twitter. The lawsuit and trial is to determine whether Tesla’s board followed the law when it granted Musk a massive CEO pay package back in 2018.
The attorneys asked, “Did anyone suggest to you that perhaps as a public company, it might not be a good idea to use the resources of the public company for your private company?”
In his testimony, Musk characterized Tesla employees’ work for him at Twitter as “just a voluntary thing.” He also said: “This was sort of an after-hours, just if you’re interested in evaluating the — helping me evaluate Twitter engineering, that would be nice. It was very short-term. I think it lasted for a few days and it was over.”
Musk also said, “I didn’t really regard this as using Tesla assets, as I had asked just for a voluntary basis, and I did not specify any number of people. I don’t know what the…
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