Wave of layoffs: Elon Musk breaks his word and continues to fire – Twitter loses hundreds of employees again

February 27, 2023

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, the company had 7,500 employees. After another wave of layoffs, around three quarters have now had to vacate their positions. Less than 2000 could stay.

The Twitter offices continue to empty: As the “New York Times” reports, Elon Musk fired hundreds of employees again last weekend – although he had promised that the mass layoffs would be over.

Elon Musk had employees locked out again

According to the report, Musk once again used rather rough methods in the layoffs. Around 200 employees found out about their termination when the logins for work e-mail accounts and work devices no longer worked. Musk had already resorted to this less empathetic form of dismissal in past staff reductions.

Among those affected this time are product managers, data scientists and engineers. According to the New York Times, the latter were responsible for machine learning and the reliability of Twitter, for example.

Before the layoffs, about 2,000 people worked for the company, which Musk took over completely in October 2022. When he came on board, there were still 7,500. The last wave of layoffs affected around 10 percent of the remaining workforce – including people who, despite all the criticism, had welcomed the new owner with open arms, they say.

The current developments on Twitter come as a surprise, since Musk promised after the first big waves of layoffs that this would now be the end of it. Now the multi-CEO is sending a different message: nothing is certain, every chair is shaking.

Chat programs cannot be used by Twitter employees

The “New York Times” reports chaotic conditions, citing people who are familiar with what is happening at the short message service. For reasons that have not yet been clarified, Twitter made communication between employees last week “more difficult” by shutting down the company’s internal chat program “Slack”.

After the terminations, Twitter is said to have extended this to a Google chat service, which has also been unavailable to people with a Twitter company address since the weekend. It seems Musk is trying to prevent employees from ganging up unseen to discuss what’s going on at all costs.

For Twitter it will be quite expensive again. According to the report, several people who came to Twitter through a company takeover are also affected this time. Their severance payments, it is said, are significantly higher than those that Musk owes to normal employees.

For example, there’s Esther Crawford, who came on board through the sale of an app called Squad. Crawford was also among those who had publicly endorsed “Twitter 2.0” — or “Hardcore Twitter.” Most recently, she wrote: “The worst conclusion one could draw from my commitment to Twitter 2.0 is that my optimism or hard work was a mistake. Those who taunt and mock me are bound to be on the sidelines and not in the Arena. I’m very proud of the team that endured so much noise and chaos.”

Musk, who tweeted numerous times over the weekend, said nothing about the layoffs at his company.