Twitter Rewards Remaining Loyal Staff By Decimating Them

Twitter has reportedly axed about another 200 employees, equivalent to roughly 10 per cent of its workforce.

The biz has undergone dramatic changes since it was acquired by Elon Musk for $44 billion. Shortly after the billionaire took over as CEO, Twitter's 7,500 staff was in November slashed by more than 50 per cent. Entire teams across multiple departments were let go, including those tackling machine-learning ethics, content moderation, communications, and more. 

Musk's controversial behavior and antics have turned advertisers off; half of the company's top 100 advertisers, who collectively spent over $750 million in ads last year, have pulled out of Twitter, according to a report by the non-profit organization Media Matters for America. Meanwhile, the business launched a subscription service costing from $8 a month, enticing users with a blue verified check mark on their account, more visibility on people's timelines, fewer ads, and some other special features.

Twitter has hardly been profitable, and is now saddled with incredible debt and interest payments after that forty-four billion dollar takeover; Musk will have a hard time turning the company around as advertising, its largest source of revenue, continues to dwindle. This latest round of job cuts has reduced its workforce to about 2,000 staff, according to the New York Times.

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Some workers apparently realized it was game over for them when they were logged out of work email accounts, laptops, and other applications over the weekend. Earlier in the week, the business's Slack and Jira instances were switched off, according to The Verge. It's said Twitter hadn't paid its Slack bill, though rather being cut off by the Salesforce-owned service, the workspace was manually deactivated by someone at Twitter perhaps to see how well teams worked without the chat tool.

Even the monetization infrastructure team overseeing Twitter's revenue streams was hit by the job cuts, going from 30 people down to eight.

Rumors of the latest layoffs began when it was reported Twitter product manager Esther Crawford, who was leading the Blue subscription service and upcoming payments platform, had been laid off or otherwise exited the business. She was famous for tweeting a photo of herself kipping on the floor at Twitter HQ in San Francisco to meet Musk's demanding deadlines.

A class-action lawsuit was filed against the Tesla tycoon, who was accused of breaking America's employment laws by laying off employees without having given them sufficient notice. ®