Every second employee should have to leave the company.
(Photo: dpa)
san francisco Elon Musk is pushing ahead with the restructuring of the short message service Twitter. According to a media report, he wants to cut more than half of the approximately 7,500 jobs on Twitter. Around 3,700 employees are to be laid off, reports the Bloomberg agency, citing insiders. The portal “The Verge” also wrote that plans for mass layoffs had been finalized and spoke of the reduction of 3,800 jobs.
With a few exceptions, the remaining employees should have to return to their workplaces in the office. So far, many of them have worked from home. Since March, Twitter has had a rule that all employees can work from where they feel most productive.
That should cause displeasure. There is also dissatisfaction among users. The changes Musk is introducing are being announced at record pace. Just this week, the billionaire announced an $8 monthly subscription. The users’ accounts should be verified for this, they will see less advertising and their tweets should be given preferential treatment. The Californian company wants to start selling blue verification badges for user profiles as early as next week.
Users who already have a blue verification badge will have a grace period of several months before either having to pay for the badge or losing it, the company said.
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The moves are part of Musk’s attempt to boost revenue at the company he bought for $44 billion. Musk had announced that around half of future sales should come from subscriptions. Advertising revenue currently accounts for around 90 percent of sales on Twitter.
Dissatisfaction is growing among Twitter advertisers
IPG, one of the world’s largest advertising companies, on Monday issued a recommendation through its media agencies for its clients to temporarily pause their spending on Twitter over moderation concerns, according to a New York Times report, according to three people associated with the message are familiar.
The Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a coalition of platforms, advertisers and industry groups fighting harmful content on social media, also said this week that it is monitoring how Twitter plans to deal with content moderation.
Twitter employees have braced themselves for layoffs since Musk took over the helm of the company and fired much of the executive team, including chief executive officer Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal, and senior legal staff Vijaya Gadde and Sean Edgett. Those leaving in the days that followed included Chief Marketing Officer Leslie Berland, Chief Customer Officer Sarah Personette and Jean-Philippe Maheu, who was vice president of global customer solutions.
Senior executives in the product teams have been asked to target a 50% headcount reduction, according to Bloomberg, a person familiar with the matter said this week. Engineers and executives at automaker Tesla Inc., also owned by Musk, reviewed the lists, the person said. The layoff lists were created and ranked based on each person’s contributions to Twitter’s code during their time at the company, the people said. The assessment was made by both Tesla employees and Twitter executives.
With agency material
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