Elon Musk to Lay Off 25% of Twitter Staff; Fires Entire Board: Report

elon musk twitter sink

According to a report from The Washington Post, 25% of Twitter’s staff will get the axe as part of the first round of Elon Musk’s planned layoffs at the social media company. Twitter currently employs over 7,000 people.

The publication learned that Musk and his inner circle spent the weekend discussing the future direction of content moderation at Twitter and job cuts with what remains of the company’s executive leadership.

Employees across almost all teams at Twitter will be let go, with the sales, product, engineering, legal, and trust and safety departments likely to be hit the hardest in the coming days.

Musk completed his $44 billion USD acquisition of Twitter on Thursday after see-sawing for months. He fired CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, head of legal Vijaya Gadde, and general counsel Sean Edgett as soon as he took control of the company.

According to an 8-k filing from Twitter on Monday, Musk also terminated the entirety of Twitter’s board of directors and became the company’s sole director.

ln accordance with the terms of the Merger Agreement, effective as ofthe effective time of the Merger, the following persons, who were directors of Twitter prior to the effective time of the Merger, are no longer directors of Twitter: Bret Taylor, Parag Agrawal, Omid Kordestani, David Rosenblatt, Martha Lane Fox, Patrick Pichette, Egon Durban, Fei-Fei Li, and Mimi Alemayehou

It looks like Musk’s power walk into Twitter headquarters last week should have featured a toilet instead of a sink, given how the eccentric entrepreneur is flushing jobs at the company.

Over the weekend, Musk said the biggest problem at Twitter right now is too many people “managing.”

Four sources with knowledge of the matter told The Washington Post that Musk’s longtime lawyer, Alex Spiro, has taken up the helm of several teams at Twitter, including legal, government relations, policy, and marketing.

What’s more, Musk is joined David Sacks and Jason Calacanis, longtime associates from the billionaire’s PayPal days, in his crusade to reform Twitter. Both Sacks and Calacanis showed up in the company directory with the title of “staff software engineer” over the weekend.

Calacanis posted a Twitter poll on Sunday evening, asking users how much they would pay to get verified on the platform. Musk has reportedly ordered Twitter engineers to develop a $20/month subscription service that would encompass both Twitter Blue and verification.

Musk, meanwhile, holds the title of CEO in Twitter’s company directory. However, the celebrity billionaire hasn’t publicly announced that position, opting instead to dub himself “Chief Twit.”

“My title is Chief Twit right there in the bio. No idea who the CEO is,” Musk said in a Sunday tweet.

A Saturday report from The New York Times claimed that Musk was planning to start firing Twitter employees to avoid paying stock grants that would be due on November 1, but the billionaire has denied having any intentions of the sort.

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