Elon Musk Is Said to Have Ordered Job Cuts Across Twitter
Twitter and a representative of Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
Ross Gerber, the chief executive of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management, said he was told by Jared Birchall, the head of Mr. Musk’s family office, that layoffs were coming at Twitter. “I was told to expect somewhere around 50 percent of people will be laid off,” he said.
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:
Mr. Gerber said his firm had invested less than $1 million to help finance Mr. Musk’s Twitter acquisition. Mr. Birchall did not respond to an email for comment.
Mr. Musk, 51, has moved swiftly since assuming ownership of Twitter on Thursday. He arrived at the company’s San Francisco headquarters on Wednesday and began meeting employees. Late Thursday, he fired Twitter’s chief executive, chief financial officer and other executives. He has also made an appeal to advertisers, who provide the bulk of Twitter’s revenue, to tell them that the platform will be a respected advertising destination.
But Mr. Musk is taking time to evaluate other areas of Twitter, such as deciding what posts to keep up and take down on the site. While he initially said he wanted Twitter to be a freewheeling place for all kinds of commentary and would bring back banned users, including former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Musk on Friday made it clear that such changes would not happen immediately. Instead, he announced that he planned to form a council to handle content questions and would not immediately reinstate users who had been barred.
Mr. Musk also appears unlikely to pay the golden parachutes that the fired top executives of Twitter were set to receive. Under the merger agreement, those executives — including Parag Agrawal, the chief executive — had been set to receive compensation of $20 million to $60 million if they were fired. But Mr. Musk terminated the executives “for cause,” meaning he did it with justification, which may void that agreement, two people with knowledge of the matter said.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/29/technology/twitter-layoffs-musk-jobs.html