Confusion and Frustration Reign as Elon Musk Cuts Half of Twitter’s Staff
By early Friday, the scale of the layoffs by Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, was becoming clear: Roughly half of the company’s work force, or about 3,700 jobs, had been eliminated, four people with knowledge of the matter said. The cuts hit across many divisions, including the engineering and machine learning teams, the trust and safety teams that manage content moderation, and the sales and advertising departments. Rarely have layoffs this deep been made by a single individual at a tech company.
A blockbuster deal. In April, Elon Musk made an unsolicited bid worth $44 billion for the social media platform, saying he wanted to turn Twitter into a private company and allow people to speak more freely on the service. Here’s how the monthslong battle that followed played out:
The layoffs leave Twitter significantly changed just over a week after Mr. Musk closed his blockbuster $44 billion buyout of the company. The actions raise questions about how the world’s richest man can carry out his ambitious plans for the social media service, which include new product features, boosting the number of users and finding other revenue streams.
Mr. Musk, 51, faces numerous challenges at Twitter, which he has taken private. He is under financial pressure to make the deal work, having taken on $13 billion in debt for the buyout. Yet the company has lost money for eight of the past 10 years and faces a decline in digital advertising amid a slowing economy.
At the same time, some advertisers, which provide 90 percent of Twitter’s revenue, have paused their spending on the platform, citing fears over how the site’s content might change under Mr. Musk. That pullback accelerated on Friday as advertisers like Volkswagen Group joined the growing boycott. Civil rights groups have repeatedly warned that loosening Twitter’s content rules might lead to a rise in toxic speech.
On Friday, Mr. Musk addressed Twitter’s layoffs while speaking at an investment conference in New York. He said the cuts were needed because “Twitter was having pretty serious revenue challenges and cost challenges” before the deal, which have been made worse by “activist groups pressuring major advertisers to stop spending money on Twitter.”
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/technology/elon-musk-twitter-layoffs.html