Elon Musk Begins Layoffs at Twitter, Could Cut Workforce by 50 Percent: Reports
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Mass layoffs are set to begin at Twitter on Friday, just over a week after billionaire Elon Musk officially took control of the company, according to several reports.
Roughly half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees are likely to lose their jobs, the New York Times reported. The layoffs are expected to target the sales, trust and safety, marketing, product, engineering, and legal teams.
“Team, In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday,” read an email to the staff obtained by the Washington Post. “We recognize that this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions to Twitter, but this action is unfortunately necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward.”
The email asked Twitter employees not to return to the offices on Friday as layoffs began.
Musk had performed a weeklong assessment of the social-media company, after which he and his deputies put a pause on development of Twitter’s internal projects and brought in Tesla engineers to review the platform’s code.
Musk is now CEO of Twitter. He finally carried out a deal to buy the company for $44 billion after initially trying to back out of the agreement.
Ahead of Musk’s takeover, the company already had been planning to lay off up to a quarter of its staff in an attempt to save $700 million in labor costs, according to the Post.
Musk previously said he was considering cutting the workforce from 7,500 to just 2,000, saying the company’s staff is too large and disproportionately skews left-wing politically, the Post reported last week.
Musk said Tuesday that he is planning to make changes to Twitter’s verification service, including charging users $8 per month to be verified instead of offering the blue check mark to journalists and other public figures. He also suggested he may reverse Twitter’s lifetime-ban policy, which has kept several prominent figures off the site, including former president Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.).
