Twitter was acquired by Elon Musk the previous week. Currently, he plans to let go of a quarter of its workforce as expected during the first round of layoffs. The news was reported by the Washington Post on Monday, mentioning a person familiar with the topic.
Celebrity lawyer Alex Spiro, the legal representative of Elon Musk, has initiated the conversation of job cuts based on the report.
Twitter had over 7000 employees at the end of 2021 as its workforce. The data has been sourced from a regulatory filing and a quarter of the headcount comprises 2000 employees.
Previously, Elon Musk denied in a report that Twitter would not let go of its employees to avoid stock grants on the due date.
Twitter has not immediately responded to the statement of laying off its employees.
Elon Musk’s initiatives to cut costs:
Elon Musk fired Twitter Chief Executive Parag Agarwal, Finance Chief Ned Segal, and Legal Affairs and Policy Chief Vijay Gadde on completing the six-month 44 billion USD buyout saga of the social media platform.
After owning the social media platform, Elon Musk initiated the firing of the four key members as well as the dismissal of the entire board of directors. And, he plans to initiate a major staff reduction of thousands of employees.
Edward Chen, the data scientist in charge of Twitter’s TWTR spam and health metrics and the CEO of Surge AI, said that the company’s decision to let go of 75 percent of employees is unimaginable as it would allow the users to be at risk of hacks and child pornography and other offensive content.
The recession is increasing and tough decisions are yet to be made. Elon Musk is moving firmly to ensure that Twitter is not solely reliant on its advertising revenue, which tends to shrink during an economic downturn.
At the same moment, he is significantly cutting costs to try to elevate Twitter’s margins.
Elon Musk has convinced Twitter’s co-founder Jack Dorsey to roll his 1 billion USD 2.4 percent stake in the public Twitter company to the new private Twitter.
The process of laying offs has been frightening and disorienting as mentioned by the eight employees working in the company.
One of the employees has shared a note from Twitter’s Chief marketing officer saying that the planning is happening and is moving quickly as possible, but it is not complete. Two of the important things are that Elon has let go of the idea of 75 percent of the layoffs, and it is not true that he would initiate a layoff process before November 1.
However, recent reports from valid sources have mentioned that layoffs will take place in the sales, product, engineering, legal and other sectors.
The turmoil for layoffs has resulted in a chaotic situation where the employees are working frantically in an attempt to prevent themselves from slacking off.
Elon Musk had asked the engineers to print out the last 30 to 60 days of the code they have programmed to identify Twitter’s highest and lowest-performing employees to lay off.
In addition, Elon Musk has brought more than fifty employees from Tesla to Twitter to assist with the transition process.
Musk has employed engineers to work on at least two crucial projects, and to complete them within days or weeks.
He has even changed the interface of the application mentioning that the social media platform would require users to pay to retain their verification badges. The subscription would account for 20 USD per month.
Not everyone is disturbed about the increased urgency in the company. Some have supported the process stating the slow pace of product development during the previous times.
Not only Tesla, and many other reputable and giant tech firms, including Meta, and Google, but Netflix also had to let go of its employees to overcome the global crisis.
Edited by Prakriti Arora
