According to the Washington Post on Thursday, Elon Musk told potential investors that he intends to fire approximately 75% of Twitter’s employees as part of his agreement to acquire the social media business.
Regardless of who owns the company, job layoffs are anticipated in the upcoming months, according to the article, which referenced interviews and papers. The firm declared in July that it had already “significantly reduced hiring” in the midst of a general economic slowdown in the tech industry, when other companies have recently announced hiring freezes and layoffs.
The Information about Musk’s aspirations, should he ultimately take over the company, comes at a challenging time for Twitter.
There were “no plans for any company-wide layoffs,” according to an internal memo distributed by Twitter, Bloomberg reported on Thursday night.
Meanwhile, bad morale has been cultivated by the acquisition drama involving Musk, which has caused a mass exodus of workers. Since Musk attempted to back out of the $44 billion takeover deal, Twitter has been locked in a legal battle with the billionaire for months. Musk later changed his mind and announced earlier this month that he would proceed with the takeover after all.
Musk has only made Twitter appear to be rudderless and on a downhill spiral, according to Carl Tobias, Williams chair in law at the University of Richmond. It seems that sailing will be challenging for a while.
Despite promises from the human resources department of the social media firm that mass layoffs were not planned, The Washington Post revealed that significant preparations to terminate employees and lower infrastructure costs were done even before Musk made an acquisition approach.
However, the new report revealed Musk wants to reduce Twitter’s 7,500 employees down to a “skeleton staff” of around 2,000 people. Twitter’s current management had planned to fire 25% of the workforce by the end of next year.
According to Tobias, the layoffs will likely have an effect on Twitter’s daily operations, particularly its capacity to police offensive content and address security issues. This comes after a harsh whistleblower assessment in September claimed that Twitter had “egregious” flaws and had fallen short on both counts.
Twitter reportedly expected reducing financing to infrastructure sites, including its data centres, according to the Washington Post story. Musk has stated that as Twitter’s owner, he would relax content control guidelines and possibly change the business model to one based on subscriptions. A request for comment from the Guardian received no response right away from Twitter.
Musk tried to back out of a contract to purchase Twitter in May on the grounds that Twitter had overstated the amount of spam and bot accounts on its network, which sparked the present conflict between the two parties. Twitter accused him of “inventing” a reason to withdraw.
Before Musk abruptly reversed course and announced that he would proceed with the sale on its original terms in early October, the acrimonious conflict was set to go to court. A judge has set a deadline of next Friday for the billionaire to complete the sale, so he is currently seeking cash to do so.
