Elon Musk Fires Half Of Twitter’s Global Staff: Blames Daily Losses And Advertiser Pullback

Elon Musk fired 50 percent of Twitter's workforce yesterday night after previously assuring he won't fire 75 percent of the employees. Under Musk's leadership, Twitter's HR team sent out emails to its employees forewarning them about the mass layoffs. Let's look at the justifications and possible repercussions of firing half of Twitter's global workforce.

Elon Musk Justifies Massive Downsizing With A Tweet

Twitter's workforce was halved in a single night. From a global employee count of 7,500, the micro-blogging network has reportedly lost 3,738.
Needless to mention, there was a lot of anxiety and chaos after Twitter's administration sent out an internal email to employees, which stated:

"In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday. Everyone will receive an individual email".

It appears emails went out to more than 3,700 employees, and as expected, several social media users corroborated that Twitter has begun firing people.

Twitter had announced that the company will temporarily close all offices for the safety of employees as well as Twitter systems and customer data. It is possible that yesterday's outage may have something to do with the mass exodus.

Musk confirmed the layoffs on Twitter by tweeting, "he had no choice as the company is apparently losing more than $4 million per day"

Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over M/day.

Everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2022

Twitter Facing Problems With Advertisers And Revenue Generation?

Elon Musk has been quite vocal about downsizing Twitter even before he formally signed the acquisition deal. Although he had assured Twitter employees he won't fire 75 percent of the workforce, Musk had cautioned that downsizing will happen in the near future.

Ever since Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, the platform has faced issues with advertisers. The majority of Twitter's revenue comes through advertisements and paid promotions. However, several advertisers have either scaled back their advertising budget or completely frozen all promotional activities on Twitter.

Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists.

Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2022

Musk has blamed mounting daily losses for his decision to lay off half of Twitter's workforce. As expected, the sudden exit has angered several employees. Incidentally, Twitter staff in California has sued the company for violating the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act. Disgruntled employees claim Twitter should have given 60-days advance notice of mass layoffs.

It is not clear how Twitter will manage its daily activities and critical functions. If that's not strenuous enough, Musk has several big plans for the platform and has demanded employees work harder than before.