elon musk addressed twitter employees for the first time on thursday expressing his view that twitter would need to cut its headcount but offering few other new details about his 44 billion planned takeover of the social media companymusk appeared via video call 10 minutes late to what turned out to be a freewheeling question and answer session moderated by a twitter executive in which musk mused about the existence of aliens and other space civilizations and his view that twitter should help civilization and consciousnessthe tesla chief executive who is also ceo of rocket company spacex told twitter staff he wants to raise the services user numbers from 229 million to at least 1 billion people and said advertising would remain important for the company despite previously saying he believes twitter should not serve ads according to audio of the meeting heard by reutersi think advertising is very important for twitter musk said im not against advertising i would probably talk to the advertisers and say like hey lets just make sure the ads are as entertaining as possiblemusk who was expected to provide assurance to twitter employees during his first meeting didnt offer an update on the deal closinghe reiterated he was still trying to learn more about bot and spam accounts on twitter which he called his biggest concernin response to a question about whether he expected layoffs musk said there needed to be some rationalization of headcount and expensesright now the costs exceed the revenue he said adding anyone whos a significant contributor should have nothing to worry abouttwitter employees took to an internal slack channel in droves during the session posting memes and complaining that musk was not providing useful answers on his vision for the business and employee compensationthey also demanded on slack that the moderator press musk on his views about remote work as twitter currently allows employees relatively free reign to work remotely or in the officemusk said he believed twitter staff should lean toward working in an office but expressed willingness to make some exceptions the bias should be strongly towards working in person but if somebody is exceptional then remote work can be okay he saidthe impending takeover of twitter has been met with widespread skepticism and concern among the san franciscobased companys employees some of whom have worried musk will relax rules on certain contentthe billionaire told twitter staff he believed users should be allowed to say pretty outrageous things on the site as long as the content is not illegaltwitter shares were down 15 and tesla shares slumped more than 9 in afternoon tradingmusk dialed into the call wearing a white shirt and appeared to be sitting in a kitchen according to a source who watched the callwhen he turned off his video at the end of the qa his avatar appeared to be two hands in the shape of the number 69 an apparent reference to a sex position the source said