Elon Musk said the massive job cuts he ordered Friday at Twitter — axing roughly 50% of the social network’s employees — were unavoidable.
“Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day,” the billionaire tweeted. He said every Twitter staffer who was fired was offered three months of severance pay, which Musk added is “50% more than legally required.”
Musk need to cut costs at Twitter because the company was facing a not only a high burn rate but also the need to repay (and pay interest on) the $13 billion in debt he raised to swing the takeover, amounting to about $1 billion per year.
Twitter notified employees Thursday that they would find out via email on Friday whether or not they still had a job. All told, about 50% of the company staff — roughly 3,700 of Twitter’s 7,500 employees — was laid off, according to a tweet by Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity.
In a Twitter thread, Roth said about 15% of the company’s Trust & Safety organization was let go, compared with 50% cuts companywide. He claimed Twitter’s front-line moderation staff “experienc[ed] the least impact.”
Musk reiterated Friday that “Twitter’s strong commitment to content moderation remains absolutely unchanged. In fact, we have actually seen hateful speech at times this week declinebelowour prior norms, contrary to what you may read in the press.”
Earlier Friday, Musk complained that “activist groups” were responsible for a dramatic falloff in revenue at Twitter, although the company was already facing a challenge economic environment before Musk closed the $44 billion takeover.
“Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists,” MusktweetedFriday. “Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.”
Several Twitter employees have sued the company, alleging it violated the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act by failing to notify staff members 60 days ahead of a mass layoffs. The suit seeks to order Twitter to comply with the law and block the company from soliciting employees to sign documents that could give up their right to participate in litigation..
