"Elon Musk capped off his tumultuous first week as owner of Twitter Inc. by carrying out sweeping job cuts while complaining that advertisers have slashed their ad spending on the platform over concerns about how he will handle content moderation.
Mr. Musk blamed what he called "a massive drop in revenue" on "activist groups pressuring advertisers." He said in tweets that Twitter hadn't changed content moderation and had tried to address activists' concerns.
"We've done our absolute best to appease them, and nothing is working," Mr. Musk said at an investment conference in New York on Friday. "This is a major concern," he said, casting the ad pullback as an assault on free speech.
Mr. Musk later Friday appeared to threaten to expose advertisers that were withholding business from Twitter even though many have been public about their decision to suspend placing ads as they watch what the new Twitter owner does with the platform. "A thermonuclear name & shame is exactly what will happen if this continues," he tweeted.
The comments came as Twitter was notifying about half its staff that they were being let go. The layoffs were broad-based, ranging from the communications team to people working on machine learning. The cuts would put Twitter's head count back to levels not seen in years when it was a smaller business.
In the eight days since Mr. Musk took over the social-media platform, change has been swift. The Tesla Inc. chief executive removed most of the previous leaders, brought in staff from elsewhere in his business empire, and pushed to raise the price of Twitter's subscription service in a bid to be less dependent upon ads.
Meanwhile, several big-name advertisers, including food companies General Mills Inc. and Mondelez International Inc. and drug maker Pfizer Inc. have temporarily paused their Twitter advertising, The Wall Street Journal has reported.
Twitter, by early Friday, began notifying employees about their future employment status, according to documents viewed by the Journal. In the layoff emails, Twitter said employees assigned "non-working" status would continue to receive compensation and benefits through a separation date, which for one person was designated as early February and for another early January.
The company told employees they could expect to receive one month's base pay in severance approximately 45 days after the termination date, in addition to providing instructions for returning company property such as laptops. Twitter didn't say whether employees should expect to receive year-end bonuses, which current and former employees said have historically been based on individual and company performance.
Staffers retaining their roles were informed that they are still Twitter employees and that Mr. Musk is looking forward to communicating with them about his vision for the company soon, according to an email seen by the Journal. The email added that Twitter's offices will reopen on Monday. In Thursday's email about pending head-count reductions, Twitter had said its offices were being temporarily closed and asked employees to go home.
The constant drumbeat of news and change created anxiety among workers there, with some responding with humor.
Parker Lyons, a senior financial analyst at Twitter, fired off a series of gallows-humor tweets late in the week joking about LinkedIn recruiters circling and about angst over checking his email.
On Thursday night, with staff awaiting layoff news, he tweeted: "do I check my work or my personal email tomorrow?"
The next morning, he tweeted a meme about a restaurant on fire from the TV cartoon "SpongeBob SquarePants," likening it to Twitter. He captioned the image: "back to work."
Signs of pushback against Twitter's actions emerged in the wake of the dismissals. In a federal lawsuit dated Thursday, a handful of Twitter employees accused the company of violating federal and California law in failing to provide enough warning of a mass layoff.
The lawsuit, filed in California federal court by five former employees of Twitter who said they were terminated this week, said the company's layoffs violated the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act and its California equivalent, which require giving 60 days of advance written warning of dismissing a large number of employees of a company at once.
The lawsuit asked the court to issue an order blocking Twitter from its alleged violations of the acts.
Twitter didn't immediately respond to a request for comment about the lawsuit or layoffs.
At the company, more than 100 people who worked in design and research roles were laid off, the communications team has been shrunk to just a few members from about 80, and the roughly 15 people who worked across two teams to provide resources for employees with disabilities and platform tools for disabled users were among those let go, the people said. The legal, revenue product and machine-learning teams were also among those impacted.
The billionaire spelled out some of his vision at the New York investment conference. The goal, he said, is to create a super app called X.com, building on plans he hashed out more than 20 years ago when he helped build what is now PayPal Holdings Inc. Such super apps like WeChat, which has a large user base in China, allow users to message others and send people money, among other features.
Mr. Musk also further discussed his plan developed over recent days, at times through interactions he had on Twitter, to raise the price of Twitter Blue, a subscription service, from $4.99 a month to $7.99, and to give people who sign up for it the ability to post long-form videos and podcasts, among other features. Twitter doesn't currently allow videos longer than two minutes and 20 seconds.
Subscribers would also have their accounts verified, he said, a status Twitter so far has granted only to users it deems as notable at no cost to them.
He said users who subscribe to the service would have their content shown at the top of feeds, above spam tweets. Currently, he said, it costs less than a penny to create a bot. But with the Twitter Blue subscription model, "it's too expensive now to have 100,000 fake accounts." That might discourage bot account operators from paying to be verified.
"Our goal is with Twitter, how do we get 80% of the public to join a digital town square and voice their opinion and exchange ideas and once in a while change their mind?" he said." [1]
1. Musk Fires Half Of Twitter's Staff
Needleman, Sarah E; Corse, Alexa.
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 05 Nov 2022: A.1.
