Elon Musk Intends to Let off 75% of Twitter’s Employees if He Takes over Company

October 21, 2022

Last Updated Date: October 24, 2022

Twitter New Owner Elon Musk — Graphics Credit: Nibedita Kundu

Elon Musk told potential investors that he plans to get rid of nearly 75% of Twitter’s staff as part of his deal to take over the social media company. The Washington Post said on Thursday

No matter who owns the company, the report based on interviews and documents says that job cuts are likely in the coming months.

If Musk ends up taking over the business, the news of his plans comes at a bad time for Twitter. In July, the company said it had already “significantly slowed hiring” because of the wider economic downturn and because many tech companies had recently announced hiring freezes and layoffs.

Bloomberg said Thursday night that a memo from inside Twitter said there were no plans for layoffs across the company.

In the meantime, the acquisition drama with Elon Musk has led to low morale, which has caused a lot of employees to quit. Musk tried to back out of the $44 billion takeover deal with Twitter, but he changed his mind earlier this month and said he would still go through with it. This has caused Twitter and Musk to fight in court for months.

Carl Tobias, who holds the Williams chair in law at the University of Richmond, said, “Twitter seems to have no direction and be on a bit of a downward spiral. Musk has only made it worse.” “It looks like things are going to get rough for a while.”

Human resources staff at the social media company told employees that they were not planning to lay off a lot of people, but documents showed that a lot of plans were already in place to get rid of staff and cut infrastructure costs before Musk offered to buy the company, the Washington Post said.

But Twitter’s current management had planned to lay off 25% of the staff by the end of next year. A new report shows that Musk wants to cut Twitter’s 7,500 employees down to a “skeleton staff” of about 2,000 people.

Tobias said that the layoffs will affect Twitter’s daily operations, like its ability to remove harmful content and deal with security problems. This comes after a scathing report from a whistleblower in September said that Twitter was failing on both counts and had “egregious” flaws.

According to a report in the Washington Post, Twitter had already planned to cut money from infrastructure sites like its data centers. Musk has said that if he owned Twitter, he would relax the rules about how content is moderated and might switch the company to a subscription-based business model. When the Guardian asked Twitter for comment, Twitter didn’t answer right away.

Musk and Twitter have been fighting since May when Musk tried to back out of a deal to buy the company. He said Twitter had lied about how many spam and bot accounts were on its platform. Twitter said that he was “making up” a reason to back out.

Before Musk made a sudden U-turn in early October and said he would go through with the deal on its original terms, the fight was going to go to court. The billionaire is now trying to get the money he needs to finish the deal by next Friday, which is when a judge said the deal must be done.