(NewsNation) — Elon Musk, the billionaire and Tesla CEO who offered $44 billion to buy Twitter, will address the social media platform’s employees Thursday.
It should be an interesting meeting, says Ian Samuel, a fellow and lecturer at Harvard Law School.
During Wednesday’s edition of “On Balance with Leland Vittert,” Samuel discussed how the social media giant’s employees and ethos — 99% of the platform’s contributions have gone toward Democratic campaigns and committees — will fare with a tech billionaire who doesn’t align.
Especially given the fact that, just one day before the meeting, Musk said he voted Republican for the first time (for Mayra Flores for Texas’s 34th Congressional district) and predicted Wednesday on Twitter that there would be a “massive red wave in 2022.”
Typically, he said, “the workers of the company are … the ones who have the real control.”
But in this case, Samuel explained, the workers of Twitter are not unionized, meaning they don’t have any capacity to resist and have zero organized worker power. This is in contrast to Musk, who is “inherently organized.”
“And so in the end, if there are troublesome employees that are not sort of implementing these new directives, he could fire those people. And if you look at the way he’s run Tesla, Space X and other companies, he is not shy about doing that,” Samuel said.
“Twitter employees may not like it — they may be right not to like it — but if they don’t organize, they’re just going to get blown away by the force of Elon Musk and his personality,” he continued.
Watch the rest of the segment above.
