Elon Musk purchased X, then
in 2022. Musk’s acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion was followed by immediate and extensive layoffs. The CEO has laid off roughly 80 percent or 6,000 of the company’s staff. He instructed the remaining staff to brace themselves for “extremely hardcore” working hours “at high intensity”, says a report by the Telegraph.
Twitter workforce compelled to justify their roles: Report
Musk also brought a “cadre of loyal lieutenants, including Steve Davis, an aerospace expert who previously ran Musk’s Boring Company, and James Musk, his cousin,” to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of current employees.
“Davis reportedly set up camp in the company’s headquarters, with his wife and newborn child joining him in sleeping on site in the immediate wake of Musk’s acquisition.” As per the report, Twitter’s workforce was compelled to justify their roles and also assess whether their colleagues should be retained.
The report cites an unnamed source who said “It was clearly pretty bloated. You had to right-size the organisation. When he cuts a team, he cuts the whole team and that creates significant chaos”.
As per the report, Musk had been hoping to rebuild the business with “a challenger mindset” and a clean slate. But by “lopping off whole divisions without a clear strategy” he had left too many gaps to plug, it states.
..Twitter layoffs “kind of set a new standard for Silicon Valley firms
David Freidberg, a technology investor, said Elon Musk’s layoffs “kind of set a new standard for Silicon Valley firms. A lot of folks might end up saying, maybe we should go deeper.”
Since
Twitter layoffs
,
Meta
, Amazon and
have announced job cuts. According to layoffs.fyi data, tech companies laid off 165,269 staff in 2022, 263,180 in 2023 and 96,551 so far this year.