(Bloomberg) — Twitter Inc. enters its second full week of work under Elon Musk with half its workforce, mounting losses and a couple of unexpected setbacks to its plans.
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The social media company laid off nearly 3,700 people on Friday, only to contact dozens of employees soon after that it decided were either mistakenly let go or too essential to the changes the billionaire entrepreneur wants to make.
Another of Musk’s key early goals, adding verification marks for members of his monthly subscription service, is being delayed until Wednesday to avoid potential chaos during the US midterm elections.
The whiplash events, as described by people familiar with the situation or in an internal company memo posted on Slack, follow Musk’s own acknowledgment in a tweet that the company he and his wealthy partners bought for $44 billion is losing $4 million a day.
Twitter cut its workforce as a way to cut costs after Musk’s acquisition, which closed at the end of October. Many employees learned they lost their jobs after their access to company-wide systems, such as email and Slack, was suddenly suspended. The employee return requests show how rushed and chaotic the process was.
A Twitter spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. Twitter’s plan to hire back-office workers was previously reported by Platformer.
“Regarding reducing Twitter’s strength, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4 million a day,” Musk tweeted on Friday.
Some regions were more affected than others. The company laid off more than 90 percent of its staff in India over the weekend, severely draining its engineering and product staff, people familiar with the matter said. The cuts left the company with about a dozen workers in the growing market, they said.
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Read more: Twitter fires more than 90% of India staff, leaving only a dozen
Meta Platforms Inc., which is also struggling to contain costs after investing heavily in its metaverse project, may announce major job cuts this week, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing unnamed people with knowledge of the plans. . Layoffs at the Facebook owner, which are expected to affect thousands of workers, could begin as early as Wednesday, the newspaper reported.
Twitter has about 3,700 employees remaining, according to people familiar with the matter. Musk is pushing those who remain at the company to move quickly in shipping new features, and in some cases, employees have even slept in the office to meet the new deadlines.
Twitter has said it is rolling out new features to its Twitter Blue subscription plan, offering a verification checkmark for any user who pays the monthly fee. The company also said it will soon roll out other features, such as halving ads, the ability to post longer videos, and get priority ranking in replies, mentions and searches.
Twitter will issue the new blue verification marks to users who pay $7.99 a month for the service starting Nov. 9, according to an internal company message posted on Slack. The company had previously planned to launch the subscription feature on November 7, the day before the election.
“Widespread verification will democratize journalism and empower people’s voices,” Musk said in a tweet.
The company received internal and external feedback that the verification process for its Twitter Blue program could be ripe for abuse, according to one of the people, who asked not to be identified. This raised concerns that candidates and other political actors could be impersonated on the site in the days leading up to the US election.
On Sunday afternoon, Musk said Twitter would ban accounts that impersonate other people, after several high-profile users changed their names and pictures to match the billionaire. Any name changes will result in the temporary loss of a verified verification mark.
–With the assistance of Sankalp Phartyal.
(Updates with Musk’s tweet about the verification in paragraph 13)
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