Elon Musk is laying off more Twitter employees, including loyalists
Twitter carried out an unexpected round of layoffs this weekend as the company grapples with falling revenue and aggressive cost-cutting under CEO Elon Musk.
The information first reported on the layoffs, saying the company laid off at least 50 employees in various departments on Saturday, including engineers who help keep the social network running.
The firings also included “hardcore musky loyalists.” tweeted Zoë Schiffer, who closely accompanies the company for platformers. She added that the layoffs came with “a lot of surprises.” For example her tweeted, among those fired was Esther Crawford, chief executive of Twitter Payments. Early November, Crawford tweeted“When your team is pushing 24/7 to meet deadlines, #sleep where you work.”
A senior product manager, Martijn de Kuijper, tweeted that his email account had been suspended. De Kuijper, founder of Revue, an editorial newsletter tool that Twitter acquired in 2021, tweeted: “When I woke up to find that I was locked out of my email account. Looks like I’ve been let loose. Now my revue journey is really over.”
Since Musk acquired the company in October of last year, Twitter’s headcount has fallen by over 70%, and its main source of revenue, advertising, has declined significantly.
The company has encountered some technical glitches amid the turmoil. On February 8, Twitter users across North America were unable to send messages, with an error message stating that they had “exceeded the daily limit for sending tweets.”
“Twitter may not work as expected for some of you. Excuse the circumstances. We are aware of this and are working to fix it,” the company said tweeted.
Musk has attempted to generate revenue in other ways besides advertising, but so far those efforts have done little to improve the company’s financial position. Among those efforts is Twitter Blue, a monthly subscription service that includes a blue verification tick. This service got off to a rocky start when trolls used it to impersonate brands and celebrities. Accordingly The informationby the middle of last month, only about 180,000 users had signed up for the service.
Many advertisers were wary of where Musk, a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist,” would take the platform. That didn’t stop Musk from digging into various hot-button issues this weekend, even amid the layoffs.
Musk defended Scott Adams, creator of “Dilbert,” after newspapers across the country canceled the comic over comments they called “racist,” “hateful,” and “discriminatory.” Adams had described blacks as members of a “hate group” that whites should “get away from.”
musk tweeted: “For a *very* long time the US media was racist towards non-whites, now they are racist towards whites and Asians. The same happened with elite colleges and high schools in America. Maybe they can try not to be racist.”
Musk also applauded this weekend Saturday night live Woody Harrelson’s opening monologue on COVID vaccines and the pandemic. The actor spoke about one of the “craziest screenplays” he’s ever read.
“So the movie goes like this,” the actor explained. “The biggest drug cartels in the world are coming together and buying up all the media and all the politicians and forcing all the people of the world to remain locked in their homes. And the only way people can get out is if they take the cartel drugs and do them over and over again.”
“I threw away the script,” he joked. “I mean, who would believe that crazy idea? Being forced to take drugs? I do that voluntarily all day.”
Must tweeted in response: “So based. Nice job @nbcsnl!”
When one Twitter wrote, “Get ready for the meltdown,” Musk said answered: “Maybe her [media outlets] Don’t you realize that their propaganda is false?”
Musk also chimed in on the origins of the pandemic Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that the US Department of Energy is leaning towards the COVID lab leak theory and is joining the FBI in this regard.
When PayPal colleague David Sacks shared the article and tweeted that Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and others were behind a disinformation campaign about the laboratory origins of the coronavirus Musk answered“Exactly.”
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