Read the midnight email Elon Musk sent Twitter staff telling them to work 'long hours at high intensity' – or quit

• Elon Musk sent Twitter staff an email at midnight with his expectations for building "Twitter 2.0."
• He said staff "need to be extremely hardcore" and gave them until Thursday 5 p.m. to agree.

Elon Musk told Twitter employees they will be fired unless they work at an "extremely hardcore" rate to build "Twitter 2.0".

Musk sent the email at midnight Pacific time on Wednesday, a time stamp on the email seen by Insider showed.

The self-described "Chief Twit" said in the email that employees "need to be extremely hardcore" to build a "breakthrough Twitter 2.0" and are expected to work "long hours at high intensity".

The world's richest man also said in the email with the subject heading "a fork in the road" that employees who don't sign up to be part of "the new Twitter" by Thursday 5 p.m. will receive three months of severance.

One Twitter employee speaking on the condition of anonymity said: "I have no clue what this means for non-technical roles."

They added: "I think this is a great idea and have been saying from day 1 that this is how it should have been handled. Still sad to leave. Most of us who are going to accept the 3 months are doing it to get away from him. Not the work."

This week Musk publicly fired an engineer after he engaged in a spat with the platform's new owner. The Tesla founder then took to Twitter to complain that free lunches for employees were costing the company $400 per meal.

The CEO reportedly asked his team to make note of any insubordinate employees who were speaking out on the internal Slack platform and fire them, The New York Times reported.

Read the full email below: