Elon Musk Plans to Decimate Twitter With 50% Job Cuts on Friday
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The other shoe will drop at Twitter on Friday when the company eliminates approximately half of its workforce at the behest of new owner Elon Musk, an individual with knowledge tells TheWrap. Musk will also eliminate remote work and require all remaining employees to return to Twitter officies.
It’s the latest in a series of drastic and unpopular moves in the week since Musk bought Twitter in a $44 billion deal he had to be forced by a lawsuit to honor.
According to Bloomberg, which first broke the news,as many as 3,700 jobs could get the axe. However, it isn’t clear yet who will be let go or how these decisions are being made. The job cuts are part of a range of other changes at Twitter Musk is considering along with a team of advisers, and the exact amount of people who’ll lose their jobs may change.
Bloomberg sources say that terminated employees may be offered 60 days severance pay. Though given that as one of his first acts as company owner, he fired all of Twitter’s senior officers “for cause,” in what appears to be an attempt to avoid honoring the golden parachute he agreed to in the acquisition deal, we expect a lot of Twitter workers to discover they’ve somehow violated company policies on Friday.
Prior to taking over, Musk indicated among other things that he might destroy the company’s content moderation department, though he’s walked that back since.
Twitter has posted losses for most of its existence, and Musk — who experts generally agree vastly overpaid for the platform — has revealed himself to be desperate to make a profit off the company. Among some of the ideas he’s floating is a scheme to end user verification status — “blue check” status — and replace it with an $8 per month subscription plan open to anyone. That plan has widely been criticized as likely to make the user experience worse and more dangerous — and so far at least it appears that at least the majority of current verified users will not pay.
Major advertisers have expressed concerns about a rise in abusive content on Twitter under musk; GM formally paused advertising for that reason, and two of the country’s largest advertising firms have urged other companies to do the same.
