Twitter employees sense Elon Musk’s cost-cutting results

In a Twitter Spaces conversation on Dec. 20, Musk said, “This venture is basically like you’re in a plane, heading for the ground at high speed, the engines are on fire and the controls aren’t working.”

Amidst his drastic cost-cutting measures, Musk stopped janitorial services at the company’s San Francisco headquarters this month, the company said New York Times. Combined with workers being packed onto two floors after four were closed, one result was the smell of leftover food and body odor lingering in the air.

Also, the bathrooms have gotten dirtier, and some employees have brought their own rolls of toilet paper to work.

Earlier this month, janitors said they were locked out of Twitter headquarters without warning after demanding better wages and the company reportedly terminating a cleaning contract.

A janitor told the BBC he worked at Twitter for 10 years and was told by Musk’s team that his job would eventually cease to exist as robots would replace human cleaners.

“You know it smells crazy in there,” a source told New York Times Journalist Mike Isaac referring to Twitter headquarters.

wealth reached out to Twitter for comment but received no immediate response.

Musk’s Twitter blunder

Musk admitted to making some cost-cutting mistakes while speaking on the Twitter Spaces conversation. For example, he said, “We may have gone too far at lunch to cut costs. We may have overcorrected in that regard.”

And he admitted more mistakes in his messy makeover of Twitter. For example, the company suspended the account of respected venture capitalist Paul Graham, who has supported Musk’s efforts at Twitter, because Graham wrote on his website about a link to his account on Mastodon, a platform widely viewed as a Twitter alternative. The suspension followed the company instituting a short-lived policy stating that links to competing social networks were not allowed.

“Yeah, that was a mistake,” Musk admitted.

Whether he thinks deteriorating hygiene at Twitter headquarters is another mistake remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, it’s not just the main office in San Francisco. According to the TimesJanitorial services have also been cut at the company’s Seattle office, where employees also bring their own rolls of toilet paper.

In November, Musk gave Twitter employees an ultimatum: embrace a hard-core work culture or accept severance pay and leave the company. Those who headed for the exit might now be glad they did.

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