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The New York Times says Twitter has let go of at least 200 people in another round of cuts.
It said that the tech giant had cut about 2,000 jobs or 10% of its current staff.
This is the latest round of job cuts at Twitter. When Elon Musk became CEO in October, he fired about half of the company’s 7,500 workers.
When employees discovered what would happen to them, Mr. Musk tweeted, “Hope you have a good Sunday. “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”
Layoffs in tech
There have been a lot of layoffs in the tech industry over the past few months, and the Twitter cuts are just the latest.
Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet, which Google owns, have all announced tens of thousands of layoffs. However, layoffs are happening across the industry as a whole.
Six large tech companies, including Spotify, Intel, and IBM, cut more than 10,000 jobs in eight days at the end of January.
A month before the cuts, Reuters said that the company had made its first interest payment on a bank loan that Mr. Musk had used to pay for the purchase.
He paid $44 billion (£37 billion) to take over. A third of that, or $13 billion, came from loans from banks like Morgan Stanley and Barclays.
Twitter secures these loans. This means that the tech company, not Mr. Musk, is responsible for paying back the loans.
Reuters said that Twitter paid the banks about $300 million in January.
In the meantime, there are more signs that the tech company is having trouble getting money.
It is being sued by the Crown Estate in the UK for not paying rent for its London headquarters. It is also being sued in the US for not paying rent for its San Francisco headquarters, which is the same thing.
And a lawyer for more than 100 former Twitter employees who were fired said in February that the number of employees suing the company “goes up every day.”
Mr. Musk said at the World Government Summit in Dubai this month, “I think I need to stabilize the organization and ensure it’s financially healthy.
Twitter fires another 50 people
Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, has a message for his workers: loyalty doesn’t mean anything. So Musk fired more than 50 people from the social media company over the weekend. Among them was product head Esther Crawford, one of his most vocal supporters.
Crawford made headlines when she quote-tweeted a picture of herself sleeping at work in November, just a few days after Elon Musk took over Twitter to meet his crazy deadlines. People said that Musk always made Twitter employees work to prove themselves, but Crawford didn’t mind. At the time, he said, “Doing hard things requires sacrifice.” The Platformer newsletter was the first to say that Crawford had been fired.
The Verge said that Crawford started looking for bigger opportunities at Twitter after Musk took over the company at the end of October. She met the new CEO and told him about herself. She also told him about her ideas for making the company better. Musk soon gave her the job of relaunching Twitter Blue, a subscription service that had a terrible start.
In a Saturday night post, Crawford said she was leaving Twitter.
Crawford was one of many high-ranking workers who lost his job. Revue’s founder, Martijn de Kuijper, said shortly after midnight on Sunday that he thought he had been fired when he couldn’t get into his email. Revue was a newsletter platform for Twitter that was shut down.
The Wall Street Journal said that some employees seemed to have been fired via email on Saturday. The email told them that their job had been eliminated after a wider review.
The Verge says that since Musk took over Twitter, he has fired at least four groups of people, leaving the company with less than 2,000 workers. When the billionaire took over, more than 7,500 people worked for Twitter.
Musk may not support his most vocal supporters, but that hasn’t stopped him from defending Dilbert creator Scott Adams from criticism over a recent racist rant in which Adams told white people to “get the hell away from black people.”
We know what to expect: more controversial changes to how people use the platform and more provocative tweets from its owner, Elon Musk. But no one thought that Esther Crawford, who had become an important person in so-called Twitter 2.0, would be fired.
In November, she posted a picture of herself lying on the floor at Twitter HQ in a sleeping bag and an eye mask. She has worked hard for the company since Mr. Musk took over. Some people thought that the product manager might be the next CEO of the company. Instead, Mr. Musk said weeks ago that he would leave the job when he found someone else to take it.
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It shows again that this new harsh environment leaves no one safe, not even the most loyal people. But, unfortunately, it’s common in business, and big tech is moving in this direction more and more as budgets get tighter.
