Confusion and Frustration Reign as Elon Musk Cuts Half of Twitter’s Staff
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When the ax came down at Twitter on Friday, it did not fall smoothly.
The first sign that some of the company’s 7,500 employees had been laid off came when their email accounts were shut off late Thursday. Yet they received no official word about termination and some of their Slack accounts still worked. In Twitter’s offices in Ireland and Britain, employees stayed up late waiting for the San Francisco headquarters to inform them of their job status. Some learned they were unemployed in the middle of their night.
The cuts were so haphazard that at one late-night meeting about the Twitter Blue subscription product, at least one worker was locked out of the company’s systems during the call, according to three people with knowledge of the meeting and internal messages viewed by The New York Times.
Many employees vented on Twitter. Chris Younie, a member of the partnerships team based in London, discovered he had been laid off when he checked his corporate laptop and email account after midnight and could not access the internal systems.
“So grateful this is happening at 3am,” Mr. Younie posted sarcastically on Twitter. “Really appreciate the thoughtfulness on the timing front guys.”
By early Friday, the scale of the layoffs by Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, was becoming clear: Roughly half of the company’s work force, or about 3,700 jobs, had been eliminated, four people with knowledge of the matter said. The cuts hit across many divisions, including the engineering and machine learning teams, the trust and safety teams that manage content moderation, and the sales and advertising departments. Rarely have layoffs this deep been made by a single individual at a tech company.
The layoffs leave Twitter significantly changed just over a week after Mr. Musk closed his blockbuster $44 billion buyout of the company. The actions raise questions about how the world’s richest man can effectively operate the social media service and carry out his ambitious plans for it, including adding new product features, boosting the number of users and finding other revenue streams.
Mr. Musk, 51, faces numerous challenges at Twitter, which he has taken private. He is under financial pressure to make the deal work, having taken on $13 billion in debt for the buyout. Yet the company has lost money for eight of the past 10 years and, like other social media companies, faces a decline in digital advertising amid a slowing economy.
At the same time, some advertisers, which provide 90 percent of Twitter’s revenue, have paused their spending on the platform, citing fears over how the site’s content might change under Mr. Musk. That pullback accelerated on Friday as advertisers like Volkswagen Group joined the growing boycott. Civil rights groups have repeatedly warned that loosening Twitter’s content rules might lead to a rise in toxic speech.
On Friday, Mr. Musk addressed Twitter’s layoffs while speaking at an investment conference in New York. He said the cuts were needed because “Twitter was having pretty serious revenue challenges and cost challenges” before the deal, which have been made worse by “activist groups pressuring major advertisers to stop spending money on Twitter.”
He added that he had tried “every possible thing to appease” these activists and reiterated that he had not changed Twitter’s content rules. He later said in a tweet that the company was losing more than $4 million a day.
Twitter’s communications team, which was almost entirely laid off, did not respond to a request for comment. Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
Sandra Sucher, a professor of management at Harvard University who has studied layoffs for more than a decade, said Twitter’s cuts were among the most poorly handled that she had seen. While the scale was not unprecedented, it was unusual to see layoffs done so quickly without a detailed explanation provided to workers about who was being laid off and why, she said.
“This is a master class in how not to do it,” Ms. Sucher said. “If you were going to rank order ways to upset people, telling them you’re going to do it in advance, without rationale, that is a particularly inhumane way to treat them.”
Mr. Musk already faces legal challenges from the layoffs. On Friday, five former Twitter workers filed a class-action lawsuit against the company for failing to give advance notice of the cuts. California and federal laws require companies to notify workers in advance of mass layoffs.
While Mr. Musk said in a tweet on Friday that laid-off workers were offered three months’ severance, U.S. employees were told that they would be kept on the payroll for two months before being officially terminated, a maneuver that could help Twitter skirt the advance notice required by law for a mass layoff. The employees could then receive an additional month of severance.
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