Elon Musk to Slash 50 Percent of Twitter Staff, Remaining Employees to Return to Office

In a series of rapid changes to the Twitterverse, the company plans on emailing employees on Friday about whether they have been laid off and will temporarily close its offices, Reuters reported on Thursday. “In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday,” said the email sent to staff. Two employees told Reuters that after the email was sent, staff members flooded the company’s Slack to say goodbye.

The email is set to go out at 9 a.m. Pacific time with the subject line, “Leaving the Flock,” according to Business Insider.

However, layoffs appeared to be happening ahead of schedule, as multiple Twitter employees took to the platform on Thursday night to announce that they had been locked out of their emails, work laptops, and Slack. Senior Community Manager, Simon Balmain, tweeted on Thursday, “Just got remotely logged out of my work laptop and removed from Slack,” while Morgan Bell, a product manager, posted that she was also locked out of her Slack.

Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported on Elon Musk’s plans to lay off about 3,700 Twitter employees, or about half of the current workforce, citing people familiar with the matter.

The move comes as an effort to cut costs following Musk’s $44 billion purchase of the company. The interim CEO also plans to remove the current work-from-anywhere policy that was put into place at the start of the COVID pandemic in 2020. Remaining employees will be required to report to the Twitter offices, with some exceptions, and Musk plans to inform staff affected by the layoffs on Friday, according to the report.

Since Musk took over the social media platform, several Twitter executives were fired including CEO Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal, and Vijaya Gadde, head of legal policy, trust, and safety. Musk also announced his decision to make Twitter Blue $8 a month, shut hundreds of employees out of content-moderation systems days before the midterms, and flirted with the idea of a “paywalled video” feature.

While Musk officially acquired the platform on Oct. 27, in a deal for which he initially tried to back out, reports of impending layoffs are not a surprise. Since first announcing that he would buy the company in April, he previously shared a pitch deck with investors that revealed he planned to make Twitter private and shed workers to bring on new talent in engineering.

Senior personnel on the product teams were asked to reduce their staff by half, and other leaders were asked to make lists of team members they would cut, Bloomberg reports.

Musk seems to be reveling in his new position. He has since updated his Twitter bio from the previous self-described “Chief Twit” to “Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator.” Earlier this week, pundits who just days ago had lauded the billionaire, turned on him after he revealed part of his content moderation strategy to create a council and to consult with “civil society leaders.”

“Being attacked by both right & left simultaneously is a good sign,” Musk tweeted in response.

This story was updated on Nov. 3 at 7:12 p.m. to include reports of Twitter’s plans to lay off employees in a company email.

From Rolling Stone US.