Twitter Reassures Anxious Employees No Layoffs Planned After Report Musk Would Fire 3/4 of Company
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The Washington Post reported Thursday that billionaire prospective Twitter owner Elon Musk has plans to slash 75% of employees from the company, and that that board was planning deep cuts even without a Musk sale. But on Friday the company sent a memo to worried employees denying there were plans in the works for massive layoffs.
Reuters reported first on Friday that Twitter General Counsel Sean Edgett sent an email to employees saying that “the company does not plan layoffs, according to a source who viewed the email.”
Business Insider confirmed that a short time later with an unnamed representative for Twitter.
Earlier this month, when it was announced that the Musk-Twitter deal was moving forward after all, many employees reacted with alarm, with at least one person actually saying, “cue the layoffs.”
The Washington Post wrote that Musk privately told prospective investors his plan is to cut approximately 5,500 jobs at the company, paring it down from around 7,500 to 2,000.
Overlooked in some of the more harried reactions to that plan was that the Post further reported that massive layoffs were likely whether Musk took over or not.
Even if Musk’s Twitter deal falls through — and there’s little indication now that it will — big cuts are expected: Twitter’s current management planned to pare the company’s payroll by about $800 million by the end of next year, a number that would mean the departure of nearly a quarter of the workforce, according to corporate documents and interviews with people familiar with the company’s deliberations. The company also planned to make major cuts to its infrastructure, including data centers that keep the site functioning for more than 200 million users that log on each day.
The extent of the cuts, which have not been previously reported, help explain why Twitter officials were eager to sell to Musk: Musk’s $44 billion bid, though hostile, is a golden ticket for the struggling company — potentially helping its leadership avoid painful announcements that would have demoralized the staff and possibly crippled the service’s ability to combat misinformation, hate speech and spam.
Twitter stock may have moved on the news, but it’s hard to say because it definitely moved the wrong way on Friday after a Bloomberg report that President Joe Biden is weighing a national security review of Musk’s bid. Shares tumbled over 4% on Friday.
Not long after the layoff news and the security review news, another story about Biden and Musk broke, as reports came out that the administration is talking with Musk about providing the Starlink satellite service so critical in Ukraine to the protesters in Iran.
With all that going on, it may be no surprise that outspoken director of machine learnings ethics, transparency and accountability at Twitter Rumman Chowdhury tweeted on Thursday night with a gut check for managers at the company.
Parts of this story involve developing news and may be updated.
