By
Steve Muchoki
April 24th, 2024
In the case of Elon Musk and Twitter, speculations have hinted that the world’s richest man will sack as many as 75% of all his workers.
Elon Musk, the new owner and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the social media giant, Twitter Inc has denied reports that he was firing the company’s staff in a bid to deny them access to stock grants and other such benefits. According to a report from The New York Times, Elon Musk was sacking Twitter’s employees before Tuesday, November 1 when they will be entitled to exercise their stock options.
This stock option is notably a very big part of employee compensation and with the current state of things, it remains unclear whether any of the staff laid off will receive these compensations. A major way we would know is whether the severance packages of former CEO Parag Agrawal, Chief Financial Officer, Ned Segal, General Counsel Sean Edgett, and Head of Legal Policy, Trust and Safety Vijaya Gadde will be paid.
Elon Musk fired these top executives as one of his first acts as the new owner of the company, making good on his claims that they may not fit well into the future of the firm seeing they lied about the bots and spam accounts that exist on the platform in the months leading to the closure of the Twitter deal.
The relationship between Agrawal and Musk has not been exactly a cordial one as evident from messages leaked during the litigation process. Many consider the layoff of the C-Suite Executives as a good way to propel the social media firm forward
Elon Musk acquired the company for $44 billion, paying the agreed price of $54.20 per share for the firm. Despite the broad claims against him, Elon Musk tweeted “This is False” in response to a tweet from Eric Umansky, deputy managing editor of ProPublica alleging he fired those affected in order to deprive them of the compensation which is billed to kick in on Tuesday.
This is false
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 30, 2022
Will Elon Musk Fire 75% of Twitter Inc’s Staff?
While it is not a new event that a change of ownership and management of a major company can result in some restructuring that can affect the staff count, the rate of retrenchment has always varied from company to company.
In the case of Elon Musk and Twitter, speculations have hinted that the world’s richest man will sack as many as 75% of all his workers. Elon Musk has come out to deny this claim when he addressed Twitter staffers at the company’s headquarters on Friday after completing the acquisition deal.
There are reports some of Twitter’s own engineers were denied access to the product about a day before the deal was closed. This move was made reportedly to prevent these engineers from tampering with the product in one way or the other. Thus far, the exact number of Twitter staff that have been laid off remains unknown
Besides the layoffs, however, Elon Musk is expected to make changes in the product and services of Twitter, and the firm may be featuring Binance exchange in this move.