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The New York Times says that at least 200 more people have lost their jobs at Twitter.
It said that the tech giant had cut about 2,000 jobs, about 10% of its current staff.
This is the most recent round of job cuts at Twitter. When Elon Musk became CEO in October, he fired about half of the company’s 7,500 employees.
When employees found out what was going to happen to them, Mr. Musk tweeted, “Hope you have a good Sunday.”
Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”
Tech layoffs
There have been a lot of layoffs in the tech industry in the past few months, and Twitter’s are just the most recent.
Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet, which Google owns, have all said they will let go of tens of thousands of workers. But people are losing their jobs in the industry as a whole.
Six big tech companies, including Spotify, Intel, and IBM, laid off over 10,000 people in just 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) for it. One-third of that amount, or $13 billion, came from loans from banks like Morgan Stanley and Barclays.
Twitter backs these loans. This means that the tech company, not Mr. Musk, has to pay back the loans.
Reuters said that Twitter gave the banks about $300 million in January.
In the meantime, there are more signs that the tech company is having trouble getting money.
The Crown Estate in the UK is suing it because it hasn’t paid rent for its London headquarters. It is also being sued in the United States because it still needs to pay the rent for its office in San Francisco.
And in February, a lawyer for more than 100 fired Twitter employees said that the number of employees suing the company “goes up every day.”
This month, Mr. Musk said at the World Government Summit in Dubai, “I need to make sure that the organization is stable and has enough money.
Twitter fires another 50 employees
Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, wants his workers to know that loyalty doesn’t matter. So, Musk fired more than 50 people from the social media company over the weekend. One of them was Esther Crawford, who ran the products department and was one of his biggest fans.
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 hard to prove themselves, but Crawford didn’t care. At the time, he said, “To do hard things, you have to make sacrifices.” Then, of course, the first thing to say that Crawford had been fired was the Platformer newsletter.
The Verge said that Crawford started looking for bigger jobs at Twitter after Musk took over at the end of October. When she met the new CEO, she told him about herself. She also told him what she thought could be done to make the company better. But instead, Musk gave her the job of relaunching Twitter Blue, a subscription service with a bad start.
In a post she made on Saturday night, Crawford said she was leaving Twitter.
Crawford was just one of many high-level workers who lost their jobs. Martijn de Kuijper, who started Revue, said that he thought he had been fired when he couldn’t get into his email shortly after midnight on Sunday. Revue lets Twitter users send newsletters, but it has since been shut down.
The Wall Street Journal said that some workers were fired by email on Saturday. After a closer look, the email said their job had been taken away.
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 disagree with his most vocal supporters, but that hasn’t stopped him from defending Dilbert creator Scott Adams from criticism over Adams’ recent racist rant in which he 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 controversial tweets from Elon Musk, who owns it. But no one thought Esther Crawford would be fired, even though she had become important in so-called Twitter 2.0.
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 could be the company’s next CEO. Instead, Mr. Musk said weeks ago that he would quit the job when he found someone else to do it.
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It shows again that no one is safe in this new, dangerous world, not even the most loyal people. But this is common in business, and as budgets get tighter, big tech is moving more and more in this direction.
