Musk Reveals Size of Twitter Bloodbath - Will Literally 'Decimate' Twitter Staff, Bring in Even More of His Own People
Twitter employees reading the tea leaves as they try to discern the future in an Elon Musk-owned company received some bad news last week.
Musk recently prepared a presentation for investors, known as a pitch deck, that outlines some of the moves he’s planning for the social media giant, according to The New York Times.
The deck includes Musk’s plans to expand the company, which in the long run will expand its workforce.
However, it makes it clear that about 10 percent of the workforce that starts 2023 will not finish the year.
Elon Musk is aiming to increase Twitter’s annual revenue to $26.4 billion by 2028, up from $5 billion last year, the New York Times reported on Friday, citing a pitch deck presented by the world’s richest man to investors.
https://t.co/QnuLZdisWR— Newsmax (@newsmax) May 8, 2022
Twitter has about 7,500 employees, which Musk estimates will increase to 9,225 this year before tumbling to 8,332 in 2023, which would be roughly when a new order would take hold of Twitter.
After that culling of 10 percent of the company’s workforce, hiring would then begin in a company under Musk’s control until Twitter hits 11,072 workers by 2025.
The Times reported that, “Musk is likely to shed workers as part of his takeover, before bringing on new talent in engineering, a person with knowledge of the situation said. Stock-based compensation costs are also expected to rise to just over $3 billion by 2028, from $914 million in 2022.”
Musk projects that the changes he will make at Twitter will generate more than five times its current $5 billion annual revenue, hitting $26.4 billion by 2028, according to The Times.
Twitter has 217 million users. By 2025, Musk projects that will hit 600 million and that by 2028, there will be 900 million Twitter users.
In the days of ancient Rome, the Roman army would punish major offenses such as large-scale mutiny or desertion by executing one-tenth of the guilty cohort, a process known as “decimation” — an extremely harsh process that was very rarely used (for obvious reasons).
Since Musk’s plans to purchase Twitter became public, he has not appeared worried by the idea that mutinous employees might decide to leave the company.
Asked about a potential flight of skilled employees during an appearance at the Met Gala last week, according to Reuters, Musk shrugged it off, according to Reuters.
“It’s a free country,” Musk said.
The company’s software and process for determining how tweets are treated would be public, he said.
“Certainly if anyone doesn’t feel comfortable with that, they will, on their own accord, go somewhere else. That’s fine,” he said.
In a recent Twitter post, in which he forwarded a Forbes article about how interest in working for Twitter has actually expanded, he elaborated slightly.
Also, work ethic expectations would be extreme, but much less than I demand of myself
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 7, 2022
Charlie Sull, a cofounder of CultureX, an HR technology firm that uses artificial intelligence to analyze organizational cultures, said Musk will get results, whatever the numbers, according to Time.
“Elon Musk companies are quite remarkable in, in a lot of ways. So you often see off-the-charts results with them that you don’t see for other organizations,” he said.
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