Elon Musk capped off his tumultuous first week as owner of Twitter Inc. by carrying out sweeping job cuts while complaining that advertisers have slashed their ad spending on the platform over concerns about how he will handle content moderation, reports The Wall Street Journal.
Musk blamed what he called “a massive drop in revenue” on “activist groups pressuring advertisers.” He said in tweets that Twitter hadn’t changed content moderation and had tried to address activists’ concerns.
Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2022
Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.
“We’ve done our absolute best to appease them, and nothing is working,” Mr. Musk said at an investment conference in New York on Friday. “This is a major concern,” he said, casting the ad pullback as an assault on free speech.
Musk, later Friday, appeared to threaten to expose advertisers that were withholding business from Twitter even though many have been public about their decision to suspend placing ads as they watch what the new Twitter owner does with the platform. “A thermonuclear name & shame is exactly what will happen if this continues,” he tweeted.
The comments came as Twitter was notifying about half its staff that they were being let go. The layoffs were broad-based, ranging from the communications team to people working on machine learning. The cuts would put Twitter’s head count back to levels not seen in years when it was a smaller business.
Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2022
Everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required.
Since Musk took over the social-media platform on Oct. 27, change has been swift. The Tesla Inc. chief executive removed most of the previous leaders, brought in staff from elsewhere in his business empire, and pushed to raise the price of Twitter’s subscription service in a bid for Twitter to be less ad-dependent. Meanwhile, several big-name advertisers, including food company General Mills Inc., Oreo maker Mondelez International Inc. and Pfizer Inc., have temporarily paused their Twitter advertising, The Wall Street Journal has reported.
Twitter, by early Friday, began notifying employees about their future employment status, according to documents viewed by the Journal. In the layoff emails, Twitter said employees assigned “nonworking” status would continue to receive compensation and benefits through a separation date, which for one person was designated as early February and for another early January.
Staff retaining their roles were also told that they are still Twitter employees and that Mr. Musk is looking forward to communicating with them about his vision for the company soon, according to an email seen by the Journal. The email added that Twitter’s offices will reopen Monday. In Thursday’s email about pending head-count reductions, Twitter had said its offices were being temporarily closed and asked employees to go home.
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