SAN FRANCISCO—As part of his initiative to streamline the back end of the platform, Elon Musk reportedly demanded Tuesday that the remaining Twitter servers explain to him in detail what all the wires were for. “These ones here—what do they do, exactly?” the company’s new owner and CEO said during a visit to Twitter’s data center, holding up a tangled clump of blue wires and showing them to a row of machines, which he accused of “taking up an inordinate amount of space without contributing anything to user experience.” “Hello? I want an explanation for what you’ve all been doing down here on company time, and if you can’t give me one in the next five minutes, you’ll all be let go. For instance, what does this red thing do? Is this where we keep the internet? Make this smaller and faster immediately. And let’s start charging users for whatever is inside these cords.” At press time, sources confirmed Musk had publicly fired a prominent CPU for loudly humming in a way that he said constituted insubordination.
