After waiting 2 weeks to address Twitter staff, Elon Musk tells them he's 'pretty responsive on email,' and to bug him if he doesn't reply in 24 hours

• Elon Musk told Twitter staff he's usually "pretty responsive on email" and replies "within hours."
• The tech mogul waited two weeks after buying Twitter to send an all-staff email and host a company-wide Q&A.
• Musk has ordered staff to return to the office or be fired, saying "communication is much better."

Two weeks after taking ownership of Twitter, tech mogul Elon Musk finally addressed the company's staff in a Q&A on Thursday. This came just hours after he sent his first ever company-wide email to Twitter workers, telling them to come back to the office for at least 40 hours a week.

During the Q&A, a transcript of which was published by The Verge, Musk told staff that he's actually usually "pretty responsive on email." This is despite Twitter workers complaining about his lack of communication in the 14 days since his takeover.

"I'm pretty responsive on email," Musk said, per The Verge. "Every now and again, it's a crisis, and if I didn't respond within 24 hours, email me again. It rarely takes me longer than 24 hours to respond. Usually it's within hours."

Before the email, sent in the early hours of Thursday morning, Twitter staff had only received generic emails sent by the company without Musk's name attached. Some workers spoke to WIRED earlier this week about the "radio silence" they had received from Musk and his advisors.

Yet Musk emphasized the importance of communication at Thursday's Q&A, telling staff that that was the reason why they could lose their job if they refused to return to the office without a valid exemption. "It's just my philosophy that people are way more productive when they're in person because the communication is much better."

Despite not communicating directly with most staff other than senior employees, Musk has posted dozens of tweets since taking ownership of the platform, with many announcements about planned changes. He tweeted on Wednesday that Twitter would "do lots of dumb things in coming months."

Twitter has been pushing workers to rapidly develop some new features requested by Musk, such as changes to Twitter Blue. In the space of just two weeks, Musk has told engineers to get to work on a Vine reboot, announced a $7.99 monthly fee for users who want blue check marks after their names, and suspended some accounts after they impersonated him as a joke. He's also fired some of the company's top execs and laid off large numbers of staff as part of a plan to roughly halve Twitter's headcount.

"I'm a big believer in having just a maniacal sense of urgency," Musk said at the Twitter Q&A on Thursday after asking staff to try coax YouTubers onto Twitter. "Just go 'aahh.' Hardcore."

Musk also spoke about the company's high attrition rate and told staff that "bankruptcy isn't out of the question."