Elon Musk's 'Hardcore' Twitter Offer Backfired & Users Are Ripping Him As The Site Burns

Meme lord Elon Musk spent $44 billion to buy Twitter for the "lolz," and he was still loling after most of his staff abandoned him and left the site to burn on Thursday.

Musk laid off half of Twitter's 7,500 employees earlier this month before giving the rest of them an ultimatum this week: commit to working long, hard hours and being "hardcore," or say goodbye.

Staff were told they had until end of day Thursday to click a link confirming they still want their jobs, otherwise they'd get three months of severance.

According to reports, hundreds of Twitter's remaining staff opted to leave instead of sticking around for "Twitter 2.0" under Musk.

The Verge reports that some critical teams at the platform have now lost all of their staff, and Twitter is likely to "start breaking" very soon. It's unclear exactly how many people are left at the company.

There was a "last day of school" vibe on Twitter late Thursday and into Friday, as users said goodbye to the platform and dropped links to their profiles on Reddit, Discord, Mastodon and Instagram.

Many departing Twitter employees were among those who said goodbye.

"We're all about to get fired!" says one employee in a video posted to Twitter, while standing alongside several other outgoing staff in what appears to be a Twitter office building.

Meanwhile, someone showed up at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco on Thursday to troll Musk with a light projector. The projector lit up the outside of the building with a bunch of insults for the new owner, dubbing him "space Karen," "mediocre manchild," "megalomaniac" and "petulant pimple," among other things.

"Space Karen" seemed to win hearts and minds on Twitter, where many used it to mock Musk for apparently screwing up keycard access at the company. Musk himself admitted that he had to call a guy whom he'd fired just to get back in.

Meanwhile, Elon continued to point fingers, tweet jokes, share memes and claim that everything was going according to plan.

"Record numbers of users are logging in to see if Twitter is dead, ironically making it more alive than ever!" he tweeted on Friday morning.

He also answered U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's heartfelt message to Twitter's outgoing staff with a joke.

"Shout out to all the workers at Twitter. You all built a vital place for connection and deserved so much better. Millions of people appreciate the space you built and the hard work that went into it. Thank you," she wrote.

"You're welcome," Musk replied.

"We just hit another all-time high in Twitter usage lol," Musk tweeted late Thursday, before going back to the dad joke he shared on Day 1 of his takeover.

"Let that sink in."

Musk spent $44 billion to buy the platform a few weeks ago. He reportedly borrowed about $13 billion of that money and will have to pay $1 billion in interest per year on top of that loan, Forbes reports.

In other words, Musk will have to keep the site up and sell a lot of $8 checkmarks to cover his costs.

"How do you make a small fortune in social media?" Musk tweeted on Thursday night. "Start out with a large one."

Twitter was still operational on Friday morning.