Elon Musk may have promised that there would be no further layoffs at Twitter, but from the looks of it, the billionaire has not kept his word. According to a report by The Information, the social media company undertook yet another round of job cuts last week.
The new round of layoffs saw around 50 employees being laid off on Saturday, and overall, around 200 of its employees have found themselves out of a job over the weekend. This amounts to about 10% of Twitter’s remaining workforce, which has already shrunk by at least 70% ever since Musk completed his $44 billion acquisition of the micro-blogging site.
This development also comes soon after Twitter laid off employees from its ad sales team last week. With the massive job cuts at Twitter, the social media company is now working with a severely-depleted crew of around 2000. This is a far cry from the 7500-strong workforce that Twitter boasted of before it was acquired by Musk
The new wave of layoffs comes as the company’s attempts to cut down on expenses and offset a severe drop in revenue. Media reports suggest that it went on to affect multiple engineering teams, including those that support adtech, the Twitter app, as well as technical infrastructure that keeps Twitter’s systems up and running. Not that the latter has been beneficial as of late, given that Twitter has been somewhat glitchy and unreliable as the skeleton crew is struggling to keep one of the major social media platforms afloat.
Twitter did not respond to a request for a comment on the matter. According to The Verge, the latest round of job cuts is at least the fourth one since Musk took over the ownership of Twitter. Some of the more prominent employees sacked during the latest round include Esther Crawford, Director of Product Management at the company for the past 2+ years, and Martijn de Kuijper, founder of newsletter Revue (which Twitter acquired two years ago before shutting it down later).
At this rate, Twitter will run out of employees to fire before Musk hands over the position of CEO to someone else who is “foolish enough to take the job.” The billionaire recently remarked that he needed to “stabilize the organization and just make sure it’s in a financially healthy place in that the product roadmap is clearly laid out,” and that Twitter would have a new CEO before the end of the year.
The company has already closed two of its three offices in India, refused to pay the rent for its San Francisco and London offices, and even shut down its internal Slack to prevent employees from communicating with each other. It is hardly surprising that advertisers have chosen to jump ship and pull out amid concerns about content moderation on the platform, leading to Musk remarking that Twitter experienced a “massive drop in revenue.”
