Yes, Musk wants to get rid of more employees. Seems laying off 50% of the base (around 3750 employees) at beginning of this month, then incentivizing 1200+ more to quit last week who rejected Musk’s Twitter 2.0 ultimatum plus firing employees who disagrees with him were not enough.
Twitter may cut more of its shrinking workforce as early as Monday. According to Bloomberg, Elon Musk is considering new layoffs that would target the company’s sales and partnerships teams. The scale of the potential cuts is unclear but come after a large number of employees rejected Musk’s Twitter 2.0 ultimatum. On Friday, Musk reportedly asked Robin Wheeler, Twitter’s head of ad sales, and Maggie Suniewick, the firm’s partnerships chief, to fire more employees. Both were terminated after pushing back.
Musk did say he wanted to cut Twitter workforce by 75% days after he completed the purchase. So rough count as of now nearly 5000 Twitter employees have either been laid off, quit or fried since Musk took over on October 27th of this year. Before Musk took over Twitter’s worldwide employee headcount was sitting at around7500 employees; 75% would be 5625 which means another 600+ employees could find out as early as this Monday if they are also going to be laid off. Hopefully they will get the same 3-months severance package as those who opted not to put in long hours at high intensity in a highly toxic environment.
There are concerns (which Musk will not take seriously and likely fires anyone who mentions them) about parts of Twitter being inoperable as result of the 1200+ employees who left last week. The company no longer has a communications team and it appears the platform’s automated copyright strike system wasn’t working on Saturday. Maybe there will still be enough of a skeleton staff left (really sounding like this is not the case even currently) to keep Twitter running (and it would not be smoothly) after this next round. However, I would not be surprised if Twitter is shutdown by regulators in the US, EU (Musk has already been warned Twitter must comply with The DSA) and elsewhere. Musk is already treading on thin ice here in the US with the FTC and Senate Democrats are calling for more FTC action (mainly because of the Twitter Blue verification dumpster fire earlier this month). All of this could further be exacerbated if Musk ends up declaring Twitter bankrupt.
Not only have advertisers fled, but it is going to be hard to attract new advertisers when cutting out the entire sales and partnership teams. Also have to wonder how many more are going to leave now that Musk has lifted Donald Trumps permeant ban from Twitter. However, Trump has indicated he has no interest in returning to Twitter. Musk has admitted “Twitter can not be dependent on advertisers alone” which is why getting the new Twitter Blue up and going is so important. However, new sign-ups (even if the Twitter is account is more than 90-days old) have been suspended since at least November 11th. The latest estimate was to resume new subscription sign-ups starting on November29th, but that would still only be for iOS users.
Stay tuned….
via Engadget
