Remember LAST week when Elon was like, “Click this hardcore-only link, or you’re fired Fork In The Road” email?

Well, he fired those guys yesterday.

BI: Several Twitter employees who signed up to stay at Elon Musk’s “hardcore” Twitter 2.0 have since been laid off, Platformer’s Casey Newton reported. Some employees on Twitter’s sales team were given notice they were being laid off despite having committed last week to Musk’s ultimatum to work harder and longer under his leadership, Bloomberg reported.

Account managers and client partners on the sales team were part of the layoffs, which took place Sunday evening, Platformer reported.

Musk is cutting more roles in an effort to balance out remaining employees across sales and technical sides of the company after deep cuts in engineering, sources told Bloomberg. 

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider about the additional layoffs.

Twitter’s new head of advertising sales Chris Riedy organized an all-hands meeting with Musk for the sales team on Sunday, to which a large number of employees showed up, per Bloomberg. During that meeting Musk discussed his plans for ads and the implications of bringing back Trump to the platform, but made no mention of the impending layoffs. 

One employee told the Wall Street Journal that he found out he had been laid off on Monday morning through an email that said his role was no longer necessary. 

Riedy has replaced Robin Wheeler who had initially been persuaded by Musk to stay at Twitter after handing in a resignation letter on November 10.

Musk asked managers to fire more staff in sales, partnerships and similar roles on Friday 18, a day after giving employees an ultimatum to either sign up to Twitter 2.0 or quit by Thursday 17 November, 5 p.m.

Wheeler refused Musk’s instructions to fire more employees and lost her job as a result, Bloomberg reported. 

It looks like last week’s “Fork In The Road” email didn’t matter for some of Twitter’s remaining employees in Twitter’s sales dept.

When 95% of your ad revue disappears in two weeks, you don’t need a sales department.

This comes on the heels of Elon deciding to shelve paid Twitter Verification indefinitely because it’s impossible to stop people from impersonating others with that Blue Checkmark.

So he’s lost all his ad revenue and doomed any potential subscription revenue to replace the ad revenue.

What a fucking GENIUS.

Elon hasn’t invented shit. She moves in to buy companies he thinks have legs, then drills billions of OPM into it.

Elon kites off of the inventions of others. He’s done it for 20 years and ran from the PayPal mafia. He took over Tesla (when it was a battery pack in a Lotus) from Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning and bogied/supported Tom Mueller’s work, SpaceX. Those projects were startups.

Twitter isn’t.

Twitter was invented by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in 2006 and is/was a behemoth and established social media company based on 16 years of trial and error. 

The one thing you can’t do to people is change the rules mid-game.

Startups don’t have rules because they’re startups, and Elon was able to coral enough money to make the rules of engagement up for SpaceX and Tesla because they were startups.

Twitter has a 16-year history of testing, failing, winning, and losing, which was the product we enjoyed before Musk’s takeover, changing all the rules midstream. You can’t do that with a billion-dollar established brand without pissing everyone off. Plus, everything Elon is trying to do has been tested and dusted for excellent social and engineering reasons. He’s trying to stuff square pegs in round holes while telling career  Twitter employees he doesn’t need them after threatening their employment by giving them an ultimatum and firing them anyway.

What he’s doing is gutting Twitter of any left-leaning culture, and he knows it.

If he can keep paying the bills at Twitter, Elon will turn it into a firehose of alt-right trigger-happy incels like Dinesh D’Souza and Jordan Peterson while crushing dissent from the left. It’s already happening.

Twitter gained 1.6 million users last week but lost 5 million in the previous two weeks, and the vast majority are paranoid softies who don’t want a good old-fashioned Twitter fight.

Caryma and I are built differently. While I can’t stop antisemitism and rampant racism on this site, I can trigger trolls with the best of them, and I love feeding it to terrible people, so this is the place for me.

Knowing Elon treats his people like shit doesn’t make me want to get off Twitter the same way knowing Apple uses child labor to make iPhones won’t make me give up my phone.

Maybe that makes me a wrong person, but this place is an electric factory, and I can’t get enough.