In a major cost-cutting move by new owner Elon Musk, Twitter has notified employees that there will be a wave of layoffs on Friday, Nov. 4 — and that they’ll be notified by email about whether they will continue to have a job at the company.
The companywide email did not indicate how big the cutbacks would be. Musk has been planning to axe about 50% of the staff, or around 3,700 of Twitter’s 7,500 employees, according to a Bloomberg report earlier.
Musk has already indicated that he would make job cuts at Twitter, telling employees at a town-hall meeting this summer that there needs to be “a rationalization of headcount” at the social network. On Oct. 30, asked by someone on Twitter to identify “the one thing that’s most messed-up at Twitter right now,” Musk replied, “There seem to be 10 people ‘managing’ for every one person coding” at Twitter.
The email sent to employees Thursday was signed only “Twitter.”
“In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday,” the memo said. “We recognize that this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions to Twitter, but this action is unfortunately necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward.”
Because of “the nature of our distributed workforce and our desire to inform impacted individuals as quickly as possible,” Twitter staffers will be notified by 9 a.m. PT on Friday about whether they’ve been pink-slipped or whether they will continue to be employed, according to the internal email.
Twitter’s offices will be closed on Nov. 4 “to help ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data,” the companywide memo said.
Musk closed the $44 billion deal for Twitter on Oct. 27, after a six-month back-and-forth during which the world’s richest person tried to back out of the agreement several times (and later complained he was “obviously overpaying”). Musk, who is now the CEO of Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX, is eager to slash costs at Twitter as well as ramp up revenue, in part because he needs to pay back the $13 billion in debt financing he needed to complete the deal.
In what Musk hopes will become a major new revenue stream, he announced that the price of a Twitter Blue subscription will increase from $4.99 to $8 per month and will become the only way to achieve blue check-mark verification on the platform, along with other new perks. The $8/month fee has been met with resistance (and derision) from many Twitter users, spurring Musk to defend the decision from detractors. “You get what you pay for,” he tweeted Wednesday.
Cancels ‘days of rest’ for Twitter employees
Elon Musk has cancelled “days of rest” for Twitter employees after taking over as the new owner.
Twitter began offering one paid rest day per month, in addition to normal paid time off, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The policy was meant to help reduce burnout among staffers.
But Musk has eliminated future “days of rest” from Twitter’s calendar this week, sources familiar with the situation, told Bloomberg.
Musk interrupted one of Twitter’s “days of rest” even before he became the company’s owner and CEO.
The policy change is the latest indication that Musk will set new standards for Twitter.
Musk is reportedly planning to lay off about half of Twitter’s 7,500-employee workforce, with impacted workers expected to learn their fate on Friday November 5, according to Bloomberg.
