Mere days after taking over Twitter, Elon Musk has gotten rid of almost half of the nearly 3,700 Twitter employees, gutting whole teams. The teams most severely impacted were those tasked with defending against election misinformation ahead of the US midterms next week.
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According to impacted employees familiar with the matter, the areas of Twitter impacted the most by Musk’s cuts include its product trust and safety, policy, communications, tweet curation, ethical AI, data science, research, machine learning, social good, accessibility, and even certain core engineering teams.
Some high-level company leaders have also been retrenched, including Arnaud Weber, VP of consumer product engineering, and Tony Haile, a senior director of product overseeing Twitter’s work with news publishers.
It was expected that Musk would make sweeping changes, after saying that the cost base of the company just didn’t make any sense. He is also planning to cut costs in areas like cloud hosting, according to employees who have remained at the company but wanting to remain anonymous. “Shit is gonna start breaking,” said one current employee who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission, while another called management’s layoff process “an absolute shit show.”
Employees who have been impacted will continue to be paid and receive benefits until dates that appear to match the length of the mass layoff notice required by US federal and state law. If they sign a “Release of All Claims” document and separation agreement, all US employees will then receive one month of base pay as severance that is taxed at the higher supplemental income rate.
“Throughout the last week, Elon has spent time with a number of employees, customers, partners, policymakers and Twitter users,” an unsigned email to remaining employees reads, according to a leak. “He is looking forward to communicating with everyone about his vision for the company soon.”
