Elon Musk has now purged roughly half of Twitter’s 7,500 employee base, leaving whole teams totally or near completely gutted, including those tasked with defending against election misinformation ahead of the US midterms next week, The Verge has learned.
The areas of Twitter impacted the most by Musk’s cuts include its product trust and safety, policy, communications, tweet curation, ethical AI, data science, research, machine learning, social good, accessibility, and even certain core engineering teams
:melon-musk: .
Given the sweeping nature of Musk’s layoffs and his mandate to cut costs in areas like cloud hosting, employees who remain at Twitter told The Verge that they expect the company to have a hard time maintaining critical infrastructure in the short term. “Shit is gonna start breaking,” said one current employee who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission, while another called management’s layoff process “an absolute shit show.”
Also an illegal move so now he’s forced to keep those employees on a payroll for 3 months without them doing anything, and he’s trying to spin it as something he did out of the goodness of his heart. This is seriously one of the most insane sagas I’ve ever seen, I’m seriously losing my mind a little bit.
It’s illegal and Twitter is also still now being sued in a class-action lawsuit by multiple former employees: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23264409-1-main
Right? Full support, honestly. Twitter employees were getting paid well, but they were still having the majority of their labor value stolen.