Thousands of Twitter employees were ordered to stay home Friday to await a bracing round of layoffs that could see half of the payroll axed as new owner Elon Musk launches his major overhaul of the company.
A company-wide email seen by AFP said Twitter employees will receive word on their future at the company via email at the start of business Friday, California time.
The cull is part of Musk’s push to find ways to pay for the mammoth $44 billion deal for which he took on billions of dollars in debt and sold $15.5 billion worth of Tesla shares, his electric car company.
Musk, the owner of Tesla and SpaceX, has been scrambling to find new ways for Twitter to make money after his mammoth buyout, including charging users $8 a month for verified accounts.
This would help overcome the potential loss of advertisers, Twitter’s main source of revenue, with many of the world’s top brands putting their ad buys on hold, spooked by Musk’s well-known disdain for content moderation.
To mitigate concerns, Musk has vowed that the site would not become a “free-for-all hellscape” though this was quickly followed by a Musk retweet that relayed a conspiracy theory about the assault on the husband of the US House Speaker.
Though extremely influential with opinion-makers and celebrities, the California company has long struggled to generate profit and has failed to keep pace with Meta-owned Facebook and TikTok in gaining new users.
“In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce,” the unsigned email said.
The email did not give a number but the Washington Post and New York Times reported that about half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees — mostly based in San Francisco — will be let go.
