At his other companies, which include the electric automaker Tesla and the rocket maker SpaceX, Mr. Musk has sometimes appointed a key adviser to manage the business in his absence. At SpaceX, the task has fallen to Gwynne Shotwell, its president and chief operating officer.
At Twitter, Mr. Musk had opted to run the company himself. He has borrowed employees from his other companies, including Tesla and the Boring Company, a tunneling start-up, to join him. Steve Davis, the president of the Boring Company, has led various cost-cutting initiatives at Twitter. Mr. Musk has had people rotate in and out to advise him on legal and financial matters, including the investor Antonio Gracias, a former Tesla board member, and Alex Spiro, his personal lawyer.
Mr. Musk has also relied on Tesla and SpaceX employees to deal with technical matters, as layoffs and resignations have decimated Twitter’s engineering ranks. While at least one Tesla board member said he believed the carmaker’s workers would be only briefly deployed at Twitter, Mr. Musk has continued to use them, including Sheen Austin, a Tesla engineer who has been heading up Twitter’s infrastructure organization.
Some of Mr. Musk’s advisers have lobbied to lead Twitter. On Sunday, Jason Calacanis, an investor in Mr. Musk’s Twitter, asked his own followers on the platform if he or the venture capitalist David Sacks should be Twitter’s chief executive, or share the position.
Mr. Musk, who was in Qatar for the World Cup final this weekend with Jared Kushner, is also seeking new investment in Twitter. After he sold $3.6 billion of Tesla shares last week, his finance team, led by Jared Birchall, the head of his family office, sent emails to potential investors, said one person who was approached to invest and who was not authorized to speak publicly.
The emails to potential backers invited them to invest at the $54.20 share price that Mr. Musk paid to buy the company, the person said. But Mr. Musk has since publicly said the price he paid for Twitter was more than twice what it was worth. The potential fund-raising was reported earlier by Semafor.
Mr. Musk has continued to aggressively slash costs at Twitter. On Friday night, the company began another round of layoffs, according to four people with knowledge of the actions and documents seen by The New York Times. About 50 employees, mainly from the company’s infrastructure division, were cut, the people said. It was unclear how other divisions were affected.
