Bew York: Elon Musk said the massive job cuts he ordered at Twitter — axing roughly 50% of the network’s employees — were unavoidable.
To soften the blow, he clarified that all those losing their jobs were offered three months of severance pay, “which is 50 per cent more than legally required”.
“Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day. Everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required,” Musk said in a tweet.
“In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday,” Twitter said in an internal memo to staff hours before the first round of mass layoffs commenced.
The cuts appear to be as broad as they were deep, affecting everything from Twitter’s trust and safety teams that handle content moderation to its marketing department. According to reports, the entire human rights team at the company was sacked.
In the wake of the layoffs, Twitter employees have sued the tech giant, filing a class action lawsuit arguing that the company was conducting mass layoffs without providing the required 60-day advance notice, in violation of federal and California law.
Significantly, the Tesla CEO blamed “activist groups pressuring advertisers” for a “massive drop in revenue”. He, however, did not specify how much Twitter’s revenue has fallen, nor did he identify the activist groups in question.
Musk tweeted that his team had made no changes to content moderation and done “everything we could” to appease the groups. “Extremely messed up! They’re (civil right groups) trying to destroy free speech in America.”