For Twitter employees, Thursday night is going to be a long one. This Friday at 9 in the morning you will receive an email that will tell you if you have lost your job. Layoffs are already a fact. The new owner of the company, the tycoon Elon Musk, 51, has decided to send a message to the staff this Thursday with the confirmation of the bad news that they already expected. The message, the content of which has been disclosed by several US media, indicates that the time has come and states that this step is “unfortunately necessary”, without quantifying the number of employees who will lose their jobs.
“Equipment. In an effort to put Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday. We recognize that this will affect a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions to Twitter, but this action is unfortunately necessary to ensure the company’s future success.” It is simply signed by Twitter.
Twitter is now as much as saying Elon Musk. The businessman has paid a high premium for a social network economically in low hours and whose income statement does not even allow to sustain the interest of the 13,000 million debt that the businessman and his partners have made him assume as part of the purchase operation for about 44,000 million dollars, closed just a week ago.
The message has been published in its entirety by Insider. After the initial announcement, he specifies the operational part: “Given the nature of our distributed workforce and our desire to inform affected people as soon as possible, communications for this process will be made by email. Before 9 a.m. on Friday, November 4 [hora de San Francisco], everyone will receive an individual email with the subject line: Your role on Twitter. Please check your email, including the spam folder. If your employment is not affected, you will receive a notification via your Twitter email. If your employment is affected, you will receive a notification with the next steps through your personal email. If you do not receive an email from twitter-hr@ by 5pm on Friday, November 4, please email [a una dirección concreta]”.
Twitter offices will be closed: “To help ensure the safety of each and every employee, as well as Twitter systems and customer data, our offices will be temporarily closed and all access to ID cards will be suspended. . If you are in or on your way to an office, please come home. We recognize that this is an incredibly difficult experience to go through, whether you are affected or not. Thank you for continuing to abide by Twitter’s policies that prohibit discussing sensitive company information on social media, with the press, or anywhere else,” reads the message, which has been widely leaked to the press. “We are grateful for your contributions to Twitter and for your patience as we move through this process,” he concludes.
Bad moment
The message does not specify the number of workers affected, but Musk’s plans were to cut practically half the workforce, about 3,700 of the 7,500 employees, although lower estimates are also handled for this first day. The layoffs, moreover, come at a terrible time because after a hiring rush in Silicon Valley, many companies are freezing their job offers or even reducing their workforce.
This same Thursday, Lyft, rival of Uber, has announced the dismissal of almost 700 employees, 13% of its workforce, in an effort to reduce its costs. The electronic commerce payment platform Stripe has also announced to its workers that it will cut its workforce by around 1,000 workers, 14%. Amazon, for its part, has decided to freeze hiring in its corporate area. Meta (Facebook), Apple and Alphabet (Google) are also trying to contain their personnel costs with different measures that involve at least slowing down the pace of hiring.
In the case of Twitter, the need to cut costs is exacerbated by the flight—at least temporarily—of advertisers since Musk’s takeover. The suspension of advertising announced last Friday by General Motors has been joined this week by companies such as L’Oréal, General Mills, Audi and Pfizer. Advertisers are waiting for the social network’s new content moderation policies. Without having changed them, the hate messages already skyrocketed as soon as the operation was closed.
Twitter seeks alternative income through its Twitter Blue subscription service, which must be subscribed to by those who want to have the verification mark on their profile that certifies that it is authentic. Musk wants to demand from next week the payment of an $8 monthly fee for those who want to have the signal, although he plans a transition period in which the brand would be maintained at no cost to those who already have it.
As soon as he took control of the company last Thursday, Musk dismissed a good part of the management team, including the CEO, Parag Agrawal; the financial director, Ned Segal; the head of legal and content moderation, Vijaya Gadde, and the secretary of the council, Sean Edgett. In the following days, there have been other departures, such as that of the marketing director, Leslie Berland; that of the director of clients, Sarah Personette, and that of Jean-Philippe Maheu, who was vice president of global solutions for clients.
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