Happened, Twitter fired half of its employees today. Staff were informed by email whether or not they could stay. Twitter needs saving to urgently generate more money.
It was an exciting day for Twitter employees. At 9am (5pm BST for those working at the headquarters in Silicon Valley, or a few hours earlier for those working in Europe) the mailbox was looked at with impatience. They were informed by email if they could stay with Twitter and therefore whether they were expected to arrive at the office next week. Those who were expelled received an email in their personal mailbox. Those who are allowed to stay will receive a confirmation on their company email account.
Today they don’t have to visit the headquarters in Silicon Valley, which they can’t do anyway, because all access badges are off. The company announced this in an email to employees yesterday.
The social networking company, which has been owned by tech entrepreneur Elon Musk since last week, has planned a mass layoff today. 3,700, or about half of Twitter’s 7,000 employees, were told they could look for another job. Not everyone seems to be upset about it. In the various channels where employees can vent their frustration anonymously, it can be read that many are hoping for dismissal with severance pay, so that they can escape the ‘nightmare that Twitter has become’ and can work elsewhere.
ruthless manager
Many Twitter users also express their fear of Elon Musk’s relentless management style. Tesla, where Musk is also CEO, is particularly known for its high employee turnover. Musk is very demanding of his employees and does not hesitate to lay off employees, to say the least. Twitter users savored Musk’s accuracy last week when he instructed programmers to develop a new payment system in a few days that would require Twitter users to pay $8 per month with a checkmark.
However, they don’t just want to let Mask be the way he wants to. Twitter employees also went to court today to file a complaint. In the US there is also something like Belgium’s Renault Act, the Workers Retraining Amendment and Notification Act, which requires 60 days’ notice to employees if a major layoff is imminent.
The mass layoff fits well with the typical Sturm-und-drang that Musk uses when things threaten to go wrong with one of his companies. Musk paid a large sum on Twitter of $44 billion – which he himself admitted. 13 billion of that figure was paid out, $44 billion in loans, with annual interest already in excess of $1 billion. Twitter – which only generates $5 billion in sales and is hardly profitable – needs to generate more money because of this alone.
Musk uses a twofold method: significantly reducing costs and increasing income through the payment system. 90 percent of that income still comes from ads and a much smaller portion from a paid membership, Twitter Blue. Musk expects Twitter’s revenue to quadruple within five years to $26.4 billion. Blue Twitter subscribers are expected to reach 69 million and 159 million subscribers by 2028.
Advertisers
Whether Musk will succeed in getting so many people to pay for a fairly simple tool on a social medium is highly questionable. For example, Netflix, with a very wide selection of series, has 220 million subscribers. But you shouldn’t rule out anything with musk. In Tesla’s early years, few expected the company to sell millions of cars today. Meanwhile, Musk still relies heavily on advertisers to keep Twitter right financially. They watch Twitter’s evolution with skepticism: Will many users exchange Twitter for another platform, and will it become more of a barrack of scolding? They are arguments for reducing advertising on Twitter, which is costing the company money.
