Musk Wants To Fire More Than Half Of Twitter Staff

Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and a controversial “visionary”, is about to be forced to take over the micro-blogging service Twitter. Once the purchase is complete, he wants to throw out most of the employees, according to a US media report.

According to the Washington Post, citing a number of documents available to the newspaper related to the Twitter acquisition, Musk plans to sharply reduce the number of employees at the service once the deal is complete. While around 7,500 employees have worked for Twitter so far, Musk wants it to be just a little more than 2,000.

That would mean nearly three-quarters of Twitter’s jobs would be eliminated, the report said, citing documents Musk had provided to potential other investors. According to Musk’s plans, the layoffs will come within months of the takeover of Twitter by the group of financiers led by the multi-billionaire.

Twitter already planned layoffs but not rigorous

Twitter itself already had plans to sharply reduce its spending. One of the aims of the job cuts is to ensure that only around 800 million dollars have to be spent on employee wages. This goal can be achieved by the end of 2023, should the takeover by Musk fail. However, it is now much more likely that the deal will take place.

Furthermore, it was actually intended to reduce the number of data centers used to operate Twitter. Most recently, there had been massive criticism from the company’s former head of security, who accused the current management of massively increasing the risk of failure with the planned cost-cutting strategy.

According to his statements to investors, Musk himself wants to use the layoffs to create the basis for new growth and an increase in profitability on Twitter. It is said to be primarily about bringing new, more productive employees on board who could then provide profitable innovations.

However, some observers fear that the drastic cuts planned by Musk could ensure that users are confronted with hate speech, pornographic content, spam, and other negative developments much more frequently than before. In addition, failures are to be expected if the infrastructure of the service is further cut.