Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter), had an interesting way of offering a job to a former Twitter executive, as shared by the executive himself. Kayvon Beykpour, who used to lead product development at Twitter, talked about his meeting with Musk on a podcast recently. He said he got let go from Twitter by the previous CEO just before Musk bought the company in 2022. However, Musk still wanted him to work on the platform.
Beykpour had joined Twitter in 2015 when they bought his video live-streaming company, Periscope, for a lot of money.
He said his first chat with Musk was over FaceTime, and then they met in person at Twitter's office. They talked for about two hours about the history of Twitter and its future.
During their talk, Musk asked Beykpour if he wanted to continue working on Twitter's product.
Beykpour said, "Elon was very cool about it. He actually used this phrase at the end of our conversation which I still find hilarious. He was just like, 'Do you want to just like come — You seem like you care about the product and you don't have dumb ideas. Do you want to come hang out?'"
Musk asked Beykpour to "swipe right on whether you want to be here," which means to say yes.
"I was like, 'What would my job be?' And he was like 'Dunno, just like hang out and you can swipe left or swipe right.' He used the swipe right, swipe left Tinder metaphor and I thought that was kind of hilarious coming from him," Beykpour said.
"He was like, 'We don't have to make this a thing. Just like do you want to hang out and work on the product with us?'" he added.
After buying Twitter, Musk let go of a lot of its staff. He said Twitter fired over 6,000 people, which is about 80% of its workers, since he took over. Some former big shots at Twitter, like the ex-CEO, are suing Musk, saying he owes them over $128 million in money they should have got when they left. Another former Twitter boss says the company didn't pay about $500 million to fired staff.
"I sort of ended up deciding that actually, I'm just ready to move on," he said. "I've spent enough time at this company, at this product, trying to shape it into something that I was passionate about, and I think it's someone else's turn, especially Elon. If you buy it, it's your turn. You can do whatever you want with it."