Elon Musk has pulled more than 50 Tesla employees into his Twitter takeover
The Twitter profile page belonging to Elon Musk is seen on an Apple iPhone mobile phone.
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images
New Twitter owner Elon Musk has pulled more than 50 of his trusted Tesla employees, mostly software engineers from the Autopilot team, into his Twitter takeover, CNBC has learned.
Musk, who is CEO of automaker Tesla and reusable rocket maker SpaceX, completed the $44 billion acquisition of Twitter on Oct. 28 and made his mark there immediately. He fired the company’s CEO, chief financial officer, policy and legal team leaders right away, and has also dissolved Twitter’s board of directors.
According to internal records viewed by CNBC, employees from Musk’s other companies are now authorized to work at Twitter, including more than 50 from Tesla, two from the Boring Company (which is building underground tunnels) and one from Neuralink (which is developing a brain-computer interface).
Some of Musk’s friends, advisors and backers, including the head of his family office Jared Birchall, angel investor Jason Calacanis, and founding PayPal chief operating officer and venture capitalist David Sacks, are also involved. So are two people who share Musk’s last name, James and Andrew Musk, who have worked at Palantir and Neuralink, respectively.
Among the dozens who Elon Musk enlisted 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 staff technical program manager, and Jake Nocon, who is part of Tesla’s surveillance unit, as a senior manager of security intelligence.
Nocon previously worked for Uber and Nisos, a security company that had a multimillion-dollar contract with Tesla to identify insider threats, and monitor critics of the company.
At Twitter, Musk is counting on his lieutenants and loyalists to decide who and what to cut or keep at the social network.
He is also pressing 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 redesign the platform, several Twitter employees told CNBC over the weekend.
Musk has billed himself as a free speech absolutist, but he has to balance those wishes with laws and business realities. He said in an open letter to advertisers last week as he was taking over the company: “Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences.”
It is not immediately clear how Tesla employees are expected to split their schedules between the automaker and Twitter.
Typically, when Tesla employees work for other Elon Musk ventures, usually SpaceX or the Boring Company, they can get paid by the other venture as a consultant. Some of Musk’s employees have full-time roles at more than one of his businesses. For example, Tesla Vice President of Materials Charlie Kuehmann, is concurrently a vice president at SpaceX.
At other times, two Tesla employees told CNBC, workers at the electric automaker are pressured to help with projects at his other companies for no additional pay because it’s seen as good for their careers, or because the work is regarded as helping with a related party transaction or project.
Tesla is facing serious scrutiny around the technology built and maintained by its Autopilot team, namely its driver-assistance systems, which are marketed as Autopilot, FSD and FSD Beta.
The Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice, and the California Department of Motor Vehicles are all investigating whether Tesla or Musk violated laws and misled consumers about Tesla’s driver assistance systems, which are still in development and do not make the company’s cars self-driving.
Meanwhile, the federal vehicle safety authority, NHTSA, continues to investigate whether Tesla driver assistance systems may have contained defects that contributed to or caused collisions. The way that Tesla marketed these systems on social media, including Twitter, is part of the scope of at least one NHTSA investigation.
Code reviews and 12-hour shifts
Several Twitter employees told CNBC over the weekend that Tesla employees now at Twitter have been involved in code review at the social network, even though their skills from working on Autopilot and other Tesla software and hardware do not directly overlap with the languages and systems used to build and maintain the social network. These employees asked not to be named because they’re not authorized to talk to the press about internal matters, and feared retaliation.
For example, most engineers in automotive companies, even the tech-forward Tesla, do not have experience designing and operating search engines and platforms that are broadly accessible to the public.
Twitter has multiple code bases with millions of lines of code in each, and myriad 10- or even 100-query per second (QPS) systems underpinning it. At Tesla, Python is one of the preferred scripting languages, and at Twitter programmers have used Scala extensively.
Twitter also has more exposure to international regulations around hate speech and data privacy, for example, particularly the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.
Twitter employees who were there before Musk took over said they have been asked to show his teams all manner of technical documentation, to justify their work and their teams’ work, and to explain their value within the company. The threat of dismissal looms if they do not impress, they said.
The employees said they are worried about being fired without cause or warning, rather than laid off with severance. Some are worried that they will not be able to reap the rewards of stock options that are scheduled to vest in the first week of November, according to documentation viewed by CNBC.
Meanwhile, the Twitter employees said they have not received specific plans from Musk and his team yet, and are largely in the dark about possible head count cuts within their groups, budgets and long-term strategies.
Musk has set nearly impossible deadlines for some to do-list items, however.
One immediate project is to redesign the company’s subscription software, dubbed Twitter Blue, and the company’s verification system (known sometimes as “blue checks” for the way they are denoted on the service). Employees say Musk wants that work done by the first week of November. The Verge previously reported that Musk wants to charge $20 per user per month, and to only give verification marks to the accounts of users who are paid subscribers, and would remove verification from accounts who do not pay for Twitter Blue.
Managers at Twitter have instructed some employees to work 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, in order to hit Musk’s aggressive deadlines, according to internal communications. The sprint orders have come without any discussion about overtime pay or comp time, or about job security. Task completion by the early November deadline is seen as a make-or-break matter for their careers at Twitter.
In an atmosphere of fear and distrust, many Twitter employees have stopped communicating with each other on internal systems about workplace issues. What’s more, some of Twitter’s Slack channels have gone nearly silent, multiple employees told CNBC.
Meanwhile, Musk and his inner circle have been plumbing archived messages in the systems, ostensibly looking for people to fire and budgets or projects to slash.
On Sunday night, in a display of his unfettered access to internal information at the company, CEO Elon Musk (who calls himself “Chief Twit” but is officially CEO and sole director) posted a screenshot to his 112 million listed followers on Twitter.
The screenshot depicted comments made by Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, Yoel Roth, in May 2022. At the time, Musk was trying to get out of his agreement to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share.
In court, and in public, Musk had vociferously accused Twitter of faking metrics, specifically of playing down the amount of spam, fake accounts and harmful bots that exist on the platform.
In the internal message that Musk made public, Roth wrote disparagingly of a person involved with the business named Amir, and also remarked, that if Amir continued to “BS” him or others about objectives and key results, Twitter would be “literally doing what Elon is accusing us of doing.”
Musk alleged in a tweet that, “Wachtell & Twitter board deliberately hid this evidence from the court.” He also appeared to threaten further legal action, writing: “Stay tuned, more to come…”
Representatives for Twitter, Tesla and the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz have yet to respond to requests for comment.
Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO and Co-Founder of Swedish fintech Klarna, gives a thumbs up during the company’s IPO at the New York Stock Exchange in New York City, U.S., Sept. 10, 2025.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
LONDON — It’s been a busy week for the European technology sector.
On Tuesday, London-headquartered artificial intelligence startup ElevenLabs announced it would let employees sell shares in a secondary round that doubles its valuation to $6.6 billion.
Then, Dutch chip firm ASML on Wednesday confirmed it was leading French AI firm Mistral’s 1.7 billion-euro Series C funding round at a valuation of 11.7 billion euros ($13.7 billion) — up from 5.8 billion euros last year. Mistral is considered a competitor to the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.
To cap it off, Swedish fintech firm Klarna on Thursday debuted on the New York Stock Exchange after a long-awaited initial public offering. Klarna shares ended the day at $45.82, giving it a market value of over $17 billion.
These developments have revived hopes that Europe is capable of developing a tech industry that can compete with the U.S. and Asia. For the past decade, investors have been talking up Europe’s potential to build valuable tech firms, rebuffing the idea that Silicon Valley is the only place to create innovative new ventures.
However, dreams of a “golden era” of European tech never quite came to fruition.
A key curveball came in the form of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which caused inflation to soar and global central banks to hike interest rates as a result. Higher rates are considered bad for capital-intensive tech firms, which often need to raise cash to grow.
Ironically, that same year, Klarna — which at one point was valued as much as $45.6 billion in a funding round led by SoftBank — had its market value slashed 85% to $6.7 billion.
Now, Europe’s venture capital investors view the recent buzz around the region’s tech firms as less of a renaissance and more of a “growing wave.”
“This started 25 years ago when we saw the first signs of a European tech ecosystem inspired by the original dotcom boom that was very much a Silicon Valley affair,” Suranga Chandratillake, partner at Balderton Capital, told CNBC.
Balderton has backed a number of notable European tech names including fintech firm Revolut and self-driving vehicle tech developer Wayve.
“There have been temporary setbacks: the 2008 financial crisis, the post-Covid tech slump, but the ecosystem has bounced back stronger each time,” Chandratillake said.
“Right now, the confluence of a huge new technological opportunity in the form of generative AI, as well as a community that has done it before and has access to the capital required, is, unsurprisingly, yielding a huge number of sector-defining companies,” he added.
Europe vs. U.S.
Investors backing the continent’s tech startups say there’s plenty of money to be made — particularly amid the economic uncertainty caused by President Donald Trump’s trade tariffs.
For one, there’s a clear discount on European tech right now. Venture firm Atomico’s annual “State of European Tech” report last year pegged the value of the European tech ecosystem at $3 trillion and predicted it will reach $8 trillion by 2034. Compare that to the story in the U.S., where the tech sector’s biggest megacap stocks combined are worth over $20 trillion.
“Ten years ago, there wasn’t a single European startup valued at over $50 billion; today, there are several,” Jan Hammer, partner at Index Ventures, which has backed the likes of Revolut and Adyen, told CNBC.
“Tens of thousands of people now have firsthand experience building and scaling global companies from companies such as Revolut, Alan, Mistral and Adyen,” Hammer added. “Crucially, European startups are no longer simply expanding abroad — they are born global from day one.”
Amy Nauikoas, founder and CEO of fintech investor Anthemis, suggested that investors may be viewing Europe as something of a safe haven market amid heightened geopolitical risks and macroeconomic uncertainty.
“This is an investing opportunity for sure,” Nauikoas told CNBC. “Macroeconomic dislocation always favors early-stage entrepreneurial disruption and innovation.”
“This time around, trends in family office, capital shifts … and the general constipation of the U.S. institutional allocation market suggest that there should be a lot more money flowing from … global investors to U.K. [and] European private markets.”
Problems remain
Despite the bullish sentiment surrounding European tech, there remain systemic challenges that make it harder for the region’s tech firms to achieve the scale of their U.S. and Asian counterparts.
Startup investors have been pushing for more allocation from pension funds into venture capital funds in Europe for some time. And the European market is highly fragmented, with regulations varying from country to country.
“There’s really nothing that stops European tech companies to scale, to become huge,” Niklas Zennström. CEO and founding partner of early Klarna investor Atomico, told CNBC.
“However, there’s some conditions that make it harder,” he added. “We still don’t have a single market.”
Several tech entrepreneurs and investors have backed a new initiative called “EU Inc.” Launched last year, its aim is to boost the European Union’s tech sector via the formation of a “28th regime” — a proposed pan-European legal framework to simplify the complex regulations across various individual EU member states.
“Europe is in a bad headspace at the moment for quite obvious reasons, but I don’t think a lot of the founders who are there really are,” Bede Moore, chief commercial officer of early-stage investment firm Antler, told CNBC.
“At best, what you can say is that there’s this secondary tailwind, which is that people are feeling galvanized by the need for Europe to … be a bit more self-standing.”
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