- Sacked contract workers found out when they could not log in to systems.
- Musk wants employees to work in Office 40 hours a week, at least.
- Contract workers wear green, and permanent workers wear blue badges.
Silicon Valley is facing massive layoffs in almost all major companies. After the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk in a $44 billion deal, he is now firing employees at a very rapid rate. 4400 out of 5500 contract workers were laid off over the weekend. That too without prior notice.
The workers found they were being sacked when they could not log in to Slack and other work systems. Axios and CNBC claim that the staff was not given prior notice before being laid off.
According to an internal mail sent to contract workers and obtained by Business Insider, in which Twitter explains that the job cut is part of a “reprioritization and saving exercise.” Since the acquisition, Musk has been taking stringent actions to reduce the workforce. Almost 50% of staff is already sacked and to add to the list are these 4,400 contract workers. Some workers learned about their termination from social media, not from the company management.
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey apologized last week for “growing too quickly.” and adding that “I own the responsibility” just a day after twitter let go thousands of employees. After the acquisition deal, Musk fired CEO Parag Agarwal, CFO Ned Segal, and Head of Legal policy, trust, and safety Vijaya Gadde.
Since the layoffs began and high-level management sacked, Twitter has seen a string of high-profile exits, including the head of Content Moderation. Contract workers wore green badges in their San Francisco HQ and other offices, whereas full-time workers wore blue ones. Contractors did the job of making the micro-blogging giant run.
After joining, Elon also fired the entire board of directors team and now sits as sole director, ‘Chief Twit’ and CEO (temporarily) of Twitter, according to filing at SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission). Musk had been planning for these layoffs for a long time and started the work on day zero of the acquisition. He wanted to change the team structure with 10 managers for every coder.
Musk has been brutal about a potential ‘Twitter Bankruptcy’ and told employees to brace tight for ‘difficult times ahead as most of the company’s high-level management is laid off. According to an email obtained by CNBC, Musk wants employees to work at least 40 hours per week in Twitter offices.
He wants to change the business model with a “focus on generating at least half of its revenue from subscriptions and being less reliant on advertising. Recently Oreo pulled out their adverts from Twitter.
Facebook’s parent company Meta also laid off 11,000 employees, 13% of its staff. They said, “some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in history.” Mark Zuckerberg said the company overhired people during the pandemic but later realized that the ultra boom was not sustainable.