Elon Musk has reportedly ordered massive job cuts across Twitter immediately after his official takeover of the company on Thursday. The Tesla CEO is also requesting that managers review employees of the social media company.
Musk has ordered job cuts across the company, with some teams to be curtailed more than others, three people — who refused to be identified — with knowledge of the matter told the New York Times.
Additionally, some managers are being asked to create lists of employees to cut, they said.
While the scale of the layoffs could not yet be determined, Twitter currently has about 7,500 employees, the New York Times noted. Twitter not only has too many employees for its level of revenue according to Silicon Valley wisdom, but also has an employee base comprised of radical leftists, such as those who wrote an open letter to Musk demanding their jobs remain intact.
“I was told to expect somewhere around 50 percent of people will be laid off,” Ross Gerber, the chief executive of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management, said.
Moreover, the Twitter layoffs are to take place before November 1, when employees were scheduled to receive stock grants as part of their compensation, the report added.
Therefore, by laying off employees before that date, Musk may avoid having to pay out the grants, although he is reportedly supposed to pay the workers cash in place of their stock under the terms of the merger agreement.
On Wednesday, Musk arrived at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, where he began meeting employees. The following day, he fired the company’s top executives, such as CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and Vijaya Gadde, head of “trust and safety,” who was notorious for her fanatical left-wing censorship campaign, which included suspending former President Donald Trump’s account.
Musk also had Tesla engineers review Twitter’s software code and locked out Twitter engineers, preventing them from making any further changes to the platform.
The SpaceX founder is also considering becoming Twitter’s new CEO, with plans to reverse many of the lifetime bans for users that have been blacklisted from the — including former President Donald Trump. Kanye West’s account is already visible on the platform following his ban.
