Musk lays off more employees and seeks new ones for “Twitter 2.0 – an Elon Company”

The bloodshed continues on Twitter. Financial service Bloomberg and technology insider service Platformer report that Elon Musk announced further layoffs in the sales force on Monday. Those affected received their resignations by email: “Following a further review of our workforce, we have identified roles within our organizational structure that are no longer needed,” it says. «Today is your last working day in the company».

It is unclear how many workers will be affected by the latest layoffs. Bloomberg writes that Twitter has lost about 5,000 of its nearly 7,500 employees in recent weeks, leaving about 2,700 employees on the payroll.

Before that, Musk had two meetings with the sales team on Sunday. He declined to comment on whether there would be more layoffs. The last redundancies were announced the following day.

As early as Friday, Robin Wheeler, the former head of advertising sales, firework. Wheeler, like several other top executives, wanted to resign a week ago, but Musk is said to have asked him to stay. Wheeler confirmed her contract termination with a farewell tweet to her team. Some employees speculated that Wheeler was fired after all because she refused to suggest additional names from her sales team for the new round of layoffs. With Maggie McLean Suniewick and Sarah Rosen, two other senior executives left the company on Friday.

Musk is looking for employees for “Twitter 2.0 – an Elon Company”

Also on Monday, Musk told employees at a staff meeting that he was done with the layoffs and that new employees would be hired immediately in software development and advertising. “In terms of critical attitude, I would say that people who are good at programming are the highest priority,” he said at the meeting, according to US tech blog The Verge. The Verge reported last week that recruiters approached software engineers asking them to join “Twitter 2.0 – an Elon Company.”

While answering employee questions at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco for about half an hour on Monday, Musk said there were “no plans” to move Twitter’s headquarters to Texas, as he did at Tesla. But it could make sense to have “dual headquarters” in California and Texas. Moving its headquarters to Texas would give the impression “that Twitter has migrated from the left wing to the right wing, which it hasn’t,” Musk said. “It’s not a right-wing takeover of Twitter. It’s a moderate-wing takeover of Twitter.”

Musk describes himself as a libertarian, he hates the state or unions. Yet he puts himself in the political center, as he likes to emphasize. That the far right celebrates him as a hero of free speech is in stark contrast to his self-image or the image of himself he is trying to convey.

Musk continued, “If we want to be the digital marketplace of expression, we need to represent people with a wide range of views, even if we disagree with those views.” (He didn’t address the fired employees who had criticized him in company chats or publicly on Twitter.)

Musk and the right-wing influencers

Musk has a similar view on free speech as Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg has long claimed. What is not explicitly prohibited by law must be tolerated. Tech companies avoid responsibility and save costs because they need less content moderation.

Critics therefore accuse Musk of turning the social network into a perfect breeding ground for hatred and radicalization without sufficient measure. It fits into this picture that as one of his first actions on Twitter, Musk fired some 5,000 temporary workers who mainly worked as content moderators without notice.

Twitter has unblocked several Twitter profiles of right-wing influencers in recent days Musk was in touch with them.

carrot and stick

At another point in the employee meeting, Musk said Twitter needs to become more decentralized. Specifically, he talked about possible development teams in Japan, India, Indonesia and Brazil, as Twitter is widely used in these countries. However, the intention is that Twitter will be used extensively everywhere in the future.

When asked about employee compensation, Musk reiterated that employees should be given stock options. The new Twitter boss wants to push the remaining employees to peak performance with stocks in prospect. A week ago he wrote that “extraordinary amounts of shares will be awarded for exceptional performance.”

Musk in crisis mode

After a first wave of layoffs in early November, Musk last week gave the remaining employees the choice to work overtime or leave the company. In an email, he warned that implementing his vision for “Twitter 2.0” would be “extremely hardcore”. Hundreds of employees have resigned.

These mass layoffs were most likely planned and part of his plan from the start to transform the corporate culture as quickly as possible. The “hardcore” email and Musk’s open malice towards the fired may have further accelerated the exodus.

However, more and above all more top people seem to have left their jobs than had been foreseen by Musk and his team. According to various American media, which are provided with information by Twitter employees, many teams have been thinned out or sometimes only consist of one person.

Musk then went into crisis mode. According to technology insider service Platformer, the recent ban on working from home has been relaxed. Some particularly important employees would be motivated to stay with a huge pay raise. Musk also brought about 100 employees from his other companies to Twitter to fill in the gaps.

Twitter employees who have been laid off are fighting back against their former employer. “A class action lawsuit has been filed in the US, in Germany some workers are organizing through the Verdi union,” writes the tech portal golem.de.

(oli)