Great as an entrepreneur, he’s afraid to be president: Elon Musk (51) cleans up his new Twitter venture — tough and icy cold.
She shuddered for a long time, on Friday swept away by Twitter: a massive wave of layoffs. Just one week after Musk, the founder of Tesla, fired more than half of his 7,500 employees.
And by email: Those who had to leave received the message in their inbox. Those allowed to remain at their work email address have been notified. Previously, no one was allowed into the Twitter office…
It was a bit messy: sometimes access to work was blocked initially – no termination email sent.
After the postal campaign, several former employees immediately filed a class action lawsuit. They accuse the company of not giving them 60 days’ notice of layoff, as required by law. Many turn to the public.
“I woke up to the news that my time on Twitter had expired,” Twitter CEO Michelle Austin wrote. “It breaks my heart. I don’t want to believe it.”
Musk acquired Twitter last Thursday for $44 billion and immediately fired its boss, Parag Agrawal, and two other key managers.
“In an effort to put Twitter on a healthy track, we will go through a difficult downsizing process,” Twitter said in an email to employees on Thursday. This will lead to “meeting many people who have made a valuable contribution to Twitter”, but is “unfortunately necessary to ensure the future success of the company”.
► Simon Balmain, former Senior Community Manager tweeted: “Looks like I’m unemployed. I just got logged out of my work laptop and removed from Slack. (…) It’s sad that it ended this way.”
Despite being eight months pregnant and already raising a nine-month-old, Rachel Boone, director of marketing at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, said that she no longer had access to her laptop.
► Roman Chowdhury, Director of Machine Learning Ethics according to LinkedIn, posted a screenshot showing a failed login attempt to her work account.
What is certain is that mass layoffs have rocked the company.
Musk defends his radical approach
Musk himself responds to critics that layoffs are necessary. He tweeted late Friday that there was no choice but to cut jobs “if the company loses more than $4 million a day.”
He did not give details of the company’s daily losses and said that employees who lost their jobs were offered three months’ salary as an end-of-service gratuity.
First Weekly Budget: Realistic
In any case, the first interim report a week after the completion of Musk’s $44 billion Twitter purchase is sobering. Sales are dropping because advertisers like Volkswagen and Pfizer want their ads to be stopped or suspended.
Volkswagen, for example, is keeping its distance, concerned that Musk’s Internet could become a larger arena for hate messages, hate speech and disinformation.
Musk himself lamented the “massive drop in revenue” on Friday and accused “activist groups” of pressuring ad partners. Advertising activity is by far the most important source of revenue on Twitter, and accounts for more than 90 percent of the group’s sales.
Musk’s solution: Advertisers who suspend their ad budgets are threatened with “thermonuclear labeling and defamation.” The tweet comes after an online lobbyist suggested that they be named so they can call for a “counter-boycott”.
