Twitter planned to shut offices Friday, but Musk asks engineers in

After Twitter told employees it might be closing its offices until Monday, recent owner and CEO Elon Musk has called engineering staff into the San Francisco headquarters office, in response to internal emails obtained by CNBC.

Late Thursday, Twitter sent out a companywide email saying its offices could be closed from Friday until Monday, and badge access would cut off during that temporary closure.

Then, in a pair of widely distributed emails sent in the beginning of business Friday, Musk called for “anyone who actually writes software” to report back to Twitter’s headquarters by Friday afternoon. First, though, he asked them to send him a high-level report of the very best code they’ve worked on within the last six months.

After the initial call for engineers to return into the office, he also sent a follow-up encouraging people to fly to San Francisco to present in person. He said, in one among his emails, he could be working late into the night at the corporate’s headquarters office Friday and again on Saturday morning.

Musk said the purpose of sharing all this code and meeting with him within the office could be to do “short, technical interviews” that might help him “higher understand the Twitter tech stack.”

Musk said those authorized to work remotely could request to talk with him by video. But quixotically he also said, “Only those that cannot get to Twitter HQ or have a family emergency are excused.”

The mixed messages on returning to the office come after a wave of Twitter employees resigned Thursday.

Their recent “Chief Twit,” as Musk humorously calls himself, had issued an ultimatum a day earlier telling them they would wish to commit to his vision for Twitter 2.0, and conform to work “long hours at high intensity.”

Three employees who resigned Thursday told CNBC they still had access to some internal systems at Twitter on Friday morning.

One believed that so many individuals from Twitter’s human resources and IT teams had resigned or been laid off that it might take a protracted time for the corporate to work out whose access to email, Slack and other systems needs to be switched off.

These people asked to stay unnamed, citing fear of skilled repercussions.

Listed below are the emails sent from Elon Musk to employees at Twitter early on Friday (transcribed by CNBC) over the primary few hours of the business day in San Francisco: