Musk To Begin Twitter Layoffs Friday: REPORT

Musk To Begin Twitter Layoffs Friday: REPORT

John Hugh DeMastri on November 3, 2022

Twitter will announce significant layoffs Friday, just eight days after the social media giant was acquired by Elon Musk, according to an email obtained by the New York Times.

While the email did not specify the number of employees that would be cut, roughly half are expected to lose their jobs according to internal memos and an investor in Musk’s takeover, the NYT reported. Employees will receive a message informing them of their status at 9 a.m. Pacific time Friday, in an email with a subject line of “Your Role at Twitter,” according to The Washington Post, who also saw a copy of the email.

“Team, In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday,” the email reads, according to the Post. “We recognize that this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions to Twitter, but this action is unfortunately necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward.”

Employees in Twitter just got an email from their bosses saying layoffs are coming tomorrow.

Those who are staying will get a note tomorrow in their work email. Those who are let go will get an email sent to their personal address.

Slot machine-style layoffs.

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) November 4, 2022

Employees would be informed they had kept their jobs in a message sent to their company email, while they would be informed of a layoff in a message sent to their personal email, the Post reported. Both the federal government and California have laws that require them to be notified of mass layoffs, but it was not immediately clear if Twitter had notified the proper authorities, the NYT reported.

Twitter workers are usually given two months’ worth of their scheduled compensation as severance pay, according to the NYT. Musk is obligated to maintain current employee compensation and benefits for the next year, as a condition of his acquisition of the company, the NYT reported.

The announcement comes one week after Elon Musk acquired the company and fired several top executives, reportedly without severance. The social media giant was planning layoffs before Musk took over, expecting to cut roughly a quarter of employees in a bid to cut $700 million in labor costs, the Post reported.

On Oct. 20, Musk had said he was “obviously overpaying” for Twitter in a third quarter earnings call for the electric car company Tesla, of which he is the CEO, according to Yahoo Finance. When touting a plan to charge users money for identity verification, commonly referred to as a “blue check,” Musk tweeted that Twitter couldn’t rely on advertisers and that the company “[needs] to pay the bills somehow.”

Twitter did not immediately respond to a Daily Caller News Foundation request for comment.