EThe net was amused by the verbal showdown between Elon Musk and the Australian multi-billionaire Scott Farquhar: Ironically, on the short message service Twitter, which Musk was trying to buy, the co-founder of the software house Atlassian violently attacked the American. He had previously asked his employees at Tesla and the aerospace company Space X via email to spend at least 40 hours a week in the office again: “If you don’t show up, we will assume that you have resigned,” it read.
Musk attacked Australia’s fifth richest billionaire head-on: “Sounds like it was written in the 1950s,” Farquhar tweeted. “We aim to increase Atlassian’s workforce to 25,000 by fiscal year 2026. Is any Tesla employee interested?” he provoked the founder. It was later said that in the hours that followed, Atlassian’s careers page was visited around 500 percent more often than at normal times. The Australians are not doing well: in the wake of the crash in technology stocks on stock exchanges around the world, their value has also lost around 45 percent within six months. As was to be expected, Musk did not let the attack from Sydney sit on him. “These tweets illustrate why recessions are a vital economic cleanser,” he wrote. The software house followed suit: “Work is not tied to one place, it can take place anywhere. Companies are wasting enormous resources and spinning the wheel trying to find an effective strategy for going back to the office, rather than devoting their time and energy to creating the future,” it said. And looking at Musk’s point of view: “This way of thinking is backwards and devalues the last two years of joint, digitally oriented work.” As early as 2020, Atlassian had given its employees the freedom to ever return to the office. “In the past year alone, 42 percent of our new hires lived two or more hours from an office. There is huge talent all over the world – not just within an hour of our offices,” the Farquhar wrote. On Friday, the Australian then typed again himself and countered Musk’s threat of recession: “Hard to believe it’s been 20 years since we founded Atlassian – during a recession.”
The ping-pong of short messages is nothing new for the Atlassian billionaires and the Tesla billionaire: Farquhar’s co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes, who is currently involved in a takeover battle for the energy company AGL on the Fifth Continent, already had one with Musk via Twitter in 2017 bet settled. At that time, the question was whether the American would be able to build the world’s largest battery for the power supply in South Australia in record time.
