SAN FRANCISCO, United States —
Twitter sacked half of its 7,500-strong staff on
Friday as new owner Elon Musk launched his major overhaul of the troubled
company just a week after his blockbuster takeover.
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An internal
document seen by AFP said “roughly 50 percent” of employees were impacted and
would be denied access to company computers and email on an immediate basis.
Workers around the
world were shown the door and took to Twitter to vent their frustration or
disbelief and say goodbye to one of
Silicon Valley’s most iconic companies.
“Woke up to the
news that my time working at Twitter has come to an end. I am heartbroken. I am
in denial,” said Michele Austin, Twitter’s director of public policy for the US
and Canada.
“Regarding
Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately, there is no choice when the
company is losing over $4M/day,” Musk tweeted Friday evening in his first
comment on the subject, 24 hours after the company’s initial email notifying
employees of forthcoming layoffs.
Ahead of the
layoffs, Twitter closed access to its offices worldwide, asking employees to
stay at home to await news of their fate through an email.
“It’s a pretty
inhumane way to treat people. It seems like a mercenary effort, they’re trying
to save money at all cost,” said one dismissed employee who spoke on the
condition of anonymity.
The cull is part of
Musk’s push to find ways to pay for the mammoth $44 billion deal for which he
took on billions of dollars in debt and sold $15.5 billion worth of shares in
Tesla, his electric car company.
Company sources
said that Musk’s teams were imposing a furious pace on the remaining employees,
bringing in Tesla developers to oversee the work of “Tweeps”, the inhouse name
for Twitter workers.
Musk, the Tesla and
SpaceX chief, is said to owe $1 billion in annual interest alone to pay for a
deal he tried to wiggle out from almost as soon as he made it in April.
Musk has been
scrambling to find new ways for Twitter to make money after his mammoth buyout,
including an idea to charge users $8 a month for verified accounts.
The moves would
help overcome the potential loss of advertisers, Twitter’s main source of
revenue, with many of the world’s top brands putting their ad buys on hold,
spooked by Musk’s well-known disdain for content controls.
‘Messed up!’
The mercurial tycoon on Friday complained on Twitter of a “massive drop in
revenue” that he blamed on “activist groups” that were pressuring advertisers.
“We did everything
we could to appease the activists. Extremely messed up! They’re trying to
destroy free speech in America,” he added.
This appeared to
refer to Musk’s recent meeting with civil rights groups in which he heard
concerns that Twitter would open the floodgates to hate speech a week before
midterm elections in the US.
In an effort to
soothe nerves, Musk had vowed that Twitter will not become a “free-for-all
hellscape”, but since taking over the company he also has shared a tweet
relaying a conspiracy theory about an assault on the husband of US House
Speaker
Nancy Pelosi.
“We are witnessing
the real-time destruction of one of the world’s most powerful communication
systems. Elon Musk is an erratic billionaire who is dangerously unqualified to
run this platform,” said Nicole Gill, Executive Director of Accountable Tech.
She was part of a
coalition of 60 rights groups calling on Friday for a boycott by advertisers of
the Musk-owned platform.
Derrick Johnson,
president of the NAACP, a leading civil rights organization, said it would be
“immoral, dangerous, and highly destructive to our democracy for any advertiser
to fund a platform that fuels hate speech, election denialism, and conspiracy
theories”.
“Until actions are
taken to make this a safe space, we call on companies to pause all advertising
on Twitter,” he added.
Twitter head of
safety and integrity Yoel Roth tried to soothe concerns, saying that about 15
percent of his department had been let go in comparison to the 50-percent cuts
company-wide.
The site’s “core moderation
capabilities remain in place”, he tweeted.
Though extremely
influential with opinion-makers and celebrities, the California company has
long struggled to generate profit and has failed to keep pace with Facebook,
Instagram and TikTok in gaining new users.
In the sign that
matters were not improving, data showed Twitter may have lost more than a
million users since Musk took over.
Estimates from Bot
Sentinel, a firm that tracks Twitter accounts, suggested that more than 875,000
users deactivated their accounts between October 27 and November 1, while half
a million more were suspended.
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