Musk Planning To Fire 75% Of Twitter Staff: WaPo

Despite Twitter company executives repeatedly telling employees that there are no immediate layoff plans during town hall meetings over the past few months, The Washington Post reports that Musk is planning to make massive job cuts in the coming months.

According to interviews and documents obtained by WaPo – so take that with the pinch of salt it deserves – Musk told prospective investors in his deal to buy the company that he planned to get rid of nearly 75 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 workers, whittling the company down to a skeleton staff of just over 2,000.

However, while the headline appears to want to make Musk out to be some Gecko-esque corporate raider?…

…WaPo admits freely that, according to corporate documents and interviews with people familiar with the company’s deliberations, 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.

Of course, WaPo also managed to find a number of ‘experts’ willing to damn Musk’s reported plan (apparently forgetting that 1) he already runs a number of successful companies very well, and 2) you don’t become the richest man in the world by making business decisions that would hurt the products that customers want.

For example, Edwin Chen, a data scientist formerly in charge of Twitter’s spam and health metrics, decried the reported cuts as “unimaginable”, putting users at risk of seeing child pron.

“It would be a cascading effect,” he said, “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.”

Additionally, Nell Minow, a corporate governance expert who is vice chair of ValueEdge Advisors, said:

“He’s got to be able to show if he makes those cuts, what happens next? …What’s he gonna replace it with, AI?”

Yes, exactly! Or maybe he won’t need as many freshly minted marxists to judge whether Twitter’s content (child porn aside) is acceptable or not?

Twitter and Musk are expected to close the purchase by next Friday… so we will soon know. No tweets from Musk yet confirming or denying the cuts.