75% of Twitter Employees May Be Doomed - Musk Informs Prospective Investors of His Plan
With Elon Musk’s pending acquisition of the company, Twitter may be in for some big changes.
The billionaire has indicated he plans to fire three-quarters of the Big Tech platform’s employees, according to The Washington Post, citing interviews and documents surrounding Musk’s takeover of Twitter.
Musk told prospective investors of his plans to clean out the company’s workforce, according to the Post’s Thursday report.
The move would leave the censorious social media platform with about 2,000 employees, just a quarter of the 7,500 on its employment rolls now.
Twitter’s current executives had already planned a round of layoffs that would clear $800 million off the company’s annual payroll by the end of next year, according to the Post.
This would only amount to a third of Musk’s planned purge, which would dial back Twitter’s ability to enforce its rigorous censorship policies.
Musk is expected to close on his deal to buy Twitter next week, according to the Post.
The Tesla CEO fought the company’s current ownership in court over what he saw as Twitter’s inflated valuation after making a deal to purchase the company in April.
The wide-ranging terminations could also impact Twitter’s ability to keep illegal content such as child pornography off of its platform, according to current Twitter insiders.
Former Twitter data scientist Edwin Chen warned that such a change to the company’s workforce would render platform services inoperable.
“It would be a cascading effect where you’d have services going down and the people remaining not having the institutional knowledge to get them back up, and being completely demoralized and wanting to leave themselves,” Chen said.
Current content moderators at Twitter expressed fears that Musk would return to the platform to policies from earlier in the company’s history, according to the New York Times.
Twitter’s critics have pointed to the political views of its employees as problematic.
Internal Twitter chats showed employees criticizing Musk, objecting to what they see as an insufficient commitment to censorship.
One senior staff engineer called the billionaire an “a******” in an internal Slack chat.
Negotiations to finally close Musk’s purchase of Twitter are expected to conclude by next Friday, according to the Post.
Musk would immediately become the owner of the platform through the transaction.
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