Under the new owner Elon Musk, thousands of Twitter employees have already had to leave the group. According to an internal email, job cuts went into the next round at the weekend. The tech billionaire is coming under more and more pressure because the group is in the red.
Six months after being taken over by Elon Musk, Twitter has not come to rest. The short message service is said to have cut another ten percent of the jobs over the weekend. A staff email seen by The Wall Street Journal, dated Saturday, said the position was axed as part of a broader review. “Today is your last working day at the company,” the email said.
“I woke up and found that I no longer have access to my email,” tweeted Martijn de Kuijper, a senior product manager at Twitter and founder of newsletter tool Revue, which was acquired by Twitter in 2021. “Looks like I’m going to be fired. Now my revue journey is really over.” De Kuijper added a saluting face emoji used by employees to symbolize the end of the pre-Musk version of the company. Twitter shut down Revue last month.
Product managers and software specialists who are responsible for the reliability of the Twitter services and for functions related to artificial intelligence (AI) are also said to be affected. Twitter was initially unavailable for comment. According to Musk, the company had around 2,300 employees in January. Before the $44 billion takeover by the Tesla boss, there were more than 7,000.
At Twitter, job cuts had already begun after the takeover. Laid-off employees received emails in early November saying it was their last day at the company. At the time, tweets from previous employees reporting on their termination increased on Twitter. “Around 50 percent” of the approximately 7,500 employees of the online platform were affected by the layoffs. The circular said the job cuts were “unfortunately necessary to ensure the company’s future success.” For Twitter employees, the circular was the first official communication since Musk completed the Twitter purchase last week.
Twitter was recently in the red. Musk had also taken out loans of around 13 billion dollars for the takeover deal – and according to media reports, servicing them requires more money than the Twitter business generates in free funds.