In the biggest move, Musk launched mass layoffs late Thursday, cutting a wide swath of workers and leaving the future of the company uncertain.
On Friday, Musk alluded to the challenges he faces in a tweet which said Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue because of activists pressuring advertisers. He reiterated that nothing has changed with the company’s moderation.
“Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America,” he tweeted.
His first round of layoffs, which struck across the workforce — impacted teams including sales, engineering and product, and trust and safety and legal. In all, around half the staff was expected to be cut, casualties of Musk’s debt-financed $44 billion purchase of the site, which is expected to saddle the company with bills the new CEO will face pressure to quickly address.
Twitter and Musk did not respond to requests for comment about the layoffs.
Workers had been told they would receive an email by 9 a.m. Pacific time, with the subject line reading: “Your Role at Twitter.” If they were let go, a notification would go to their personal emails. If they were retained, they’d receive a ping in their work inboxes.
The layoffs set the tone for how Musk, a notoriously hard-charging boss known for tough work environments, will be expected to run the company. His tenure began last week with the firing of top executives and the turmoil continued Friday with the job cuts. That all came before Musk had found the time to formally introduce himself as the new boss, either via email or a town hall, one of which was canceled earlier this week.
“We acknowledge this is an incredibly challenging experience to go through, whether or not you are impacted,” a Thursday night email said, the first known companywide acknowledgment of the new regime. It was signed, “Twitter.”
The fallout was swift. A coalition of more than 50 civil rights groups urged top advertisers to suspend their marketing spending on Twitter in protest of new Musk’s decision to let go of scores of employees, arguing the company will be less equipped to police its platform.
The call for a boycott from the groups follows a tumultuous start for the relationship between the new owner of Twitter and the civil rights groups, who have long been concerned about Musk’s early promises to ease content moderation practices and reinstate former president Donald Trump. The organizations included social justice groups and anti-big-tech groups such as Color of Change, Free Press, and the Anti-Defamation League among others.
They said Friday during a call with reporters that they were escalating a previous request for advertisers to consider backing out if Musk scales back the company’scontent moderation practices.
Throughout the week, employees described an anxious wait for the final word on their job status as an information vacuum took hold over the company of 7,500.
Workers said their goodbyes to one another on Thursday, and some attempted to make their documentation easily retrievable for the staff left to run Twitter in their absence.
One worker, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, said that layoffs or not, employees simply wanted to learn their fate.
This version of the company “isn’t what we all signed up for,” the person said. The person described the new environment as “cruel, toxic, padding Elon’s debt pockets.”
Gerrit De Vynck contributed to this report.
