By Oyintari Ben
Employees of Twitter may soon be facing the widespread layoffs they have been anticipating ever since Elon Musk started his takeover.
According to reports, the website’s new owner and “Chief Twit” intends to lay off 3,700 workers, which would reduce the company’s headcount by half and help cut costs. While Musk and a group of advisers are apparently still working out the details of the layoffs, one possibility they’re thinking about is giving the employees they fired a 60-day severance package.
By Friday, the executive might have informed the impacted employees.
Those who retain their jobs might need to adjust to working from the office once more, as Musk also intends to discontinue Twitter’s policy of allowing workers to work remotely and require them to report to offices, with some exceptions.
The media previously revealed that before Musk even came onboard, Twitter employees had concerns about the modifications Musk would make to this specific regulation. It’s no secret that the executive isn’t a fan of remote working arrangements; in the past, he’s threatened to fire Tesla and SpaceX staff if they don’t spend 40 hours a week in the office.
There were rumors that Musk would fire 75% of the company’s employees before he took control of the social network. Although he apparently refuted such figures when he went to Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, it was very obvious that layoffs were still a possibility.
Musk was the first to fire former CEO Parag Agrawal, Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, and other top executives after the deal to buy Twitter was finalized.
Over the weekend, more director and vice president positions were eliminated, and some senior Twitter employees were requested to compile names of people that could be eliminated. Musk reportedly sought Tesla’s directors and engineers for assistance in evaluating those layoff lists, which were apparently rated according to each person’s contribution to the code of Twitter.
