By
Bena Ilyas
April 23rd, 2024
Elon Musk has not come out to officially announce the job cut.
Twitter’s Chief Twit Elon Musk is gearing up to fire as many as 50% of the total workforce of the company in a bid to downsize and reduce costs simultaneously. The news was broken by Bloomberg News, citing people familiar with the matter.
According to Bloomberg, the affected staff will be informed as early as this Friday. With Twitter’s total workforce numbering up to 7,500 globally, the projected cut will be about 3,750 in all. It is not immediately clear the criteria that will be used to send these staffers off but notably, Elon Musk has instructed the social media staff to resume back to the office.
Twitter was one of the first companies to institute the work-from-anywhere policy during the lockdowns that ensued during the hottest days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The policy was made permanent and some employees have been enjoying that leverage since 2020. With Elon Musk’s reversal, hopes abound that some of the staff will take the initiative to leave the job, helping the firm’s headcount trim.
Elon Musk has not come out to officially announce the job cuts. When he was addressing Twitter’s staff last Friday, the report has it that he confirmed the reports that he will axe 75% of the workforce were not true. This statement leaves room for so much ambiguity, but one thing is certain, Musk needs to cut costs across the board.
Based on the new trajectory of Twitter as it concerns free speech and content moderation, a number of advertisers are already currently halting their use of the platform, a move that is detrimental to the revenue generation and flow the platform so needs. By running into some debt in his bid to meet up with the acquisition demand and wade off the lawsuit that would have ensued, Elon Musk needs to generate revenue and balance it out by reducing costs considerably.
Twitter’s Workforce Slash by Elon Musk Already Underway
That Elon Musk will cut jobs is no longer the bone of contention as he has already started this move when he took over. The Billionaire entrepreneur sacked the former Chief Executive Officer Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, General Counsel Sean Edgett, and Head of Legal Policy, Trust, and Safety Vijaya Gadde.
There have also been reports that some of Twitter’s engineers have either been sacked or made to take a backside role as Musk drafted as many as 50 advisors from his other ventures including Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA), SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Neuralink to help join hands in the restructuring.
While Elon Musk seems to be paying so much attention to his Twitter Blue subscription which he has now pegged at $8, the move to stabilize the workforce remains a key factor in charting a positive future for the social media company.