Tesla CEO Elon Musk has recently disclosed to investors his plans to lay off 75% of Twitter’s workforce which is about 5,500 workers, once he takes over from the microblogging company.
Following his decision, Musk plans to have a workforce of only a little more than 2,000 workers.
In June this year, via a video call with Twitter employees, Musk disclosed that it was necessary to rationalize the number of employees at the company, noting that anyone who is a significant contributor should have nothing to worry about. Although this statement was made before he opted out of the Twitter acquisition deal.
In a response to Musk’s statement, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal issued a statement assuring the company’s employees that while he did not have concrete answers about what would happen once Elon Musk purchases the platform, there are no planned layoffs. Agrawal further admitted that there is quite a bit of uncertainty following Musk’s acquisition.
In a recent development following Musk’s statement of a 75% job cut, Twitter General Counsel Sean Edgett emailed employees on Thursday, clarifying that the company has no plans for massive layoffs since it signed a deal to be acquired by billionaire Elon Musk.
Also, Human resources staff at Twitter have told employees that they were not planning for mass layoffs, but documents showed extensive plans to push out staff and cut down on infrastructure costs were already in place before Musk offered to buy the company
While job cuts have been expected regardless of the sale, the magnitude of Musk’s planned cuts is far more extreme than anything Twitter had planned.
Experts have warned that with Musk’s drastic reduction of Twitter’s workforce, the platform could quickly become overrun with harmful content and spam.
Recall that after Musk’s initial $44 billion bid in April to buy Twitter, the Tesla boss opted out of the deal, stating that Twitter lied about the number of fake “spam bot” accounts it had on its platform.
Twitter then sued Musk, and a Delaware judge gave both sides until Oct. 28 to work out details, otherwise, there will be a trial in November. Investors King reported that Tesla CEO has made a u-turn to acquire the microblogging platform for the initially agreed price of $44bn.
