Elon Musk, finally “decided” to buy back twitter, wishes to part with 3 out of 4 employees of the social network, once the operation has been completed. The company now has 7,500 employees.
As often, Elon Musk does not go there with the back of the spoon. This time it’s the washington post which makes some pretty startling revelations about the billionaire’s takeover of Twitter. Can you imagine that the workforce of the social network with the little blue bird is likely to be drastically reduced, since Elon Musk would have warned potential investors that he intended to dismiss 75% of the employees of the company, which would then no longer count than 2,000 souls.
Even before Musk, Twitter had already planned budget cuts
Nothing very surprising in what the American media reveals, you may tell us. It is true that Elon Musk has already railed against what the takeover of Twitter will cost him, an amount of 44 billion dollars which he estimates “ too high to give you the short version. Specifically, Twitter could cut about $800 million from its payroll by the end of the year, a process led by current management. More or less, this already corresponds to a quarter of the workforce. And the procedure is official, the discussions and the social documents having already been consulted.
That’s not all, since in a desire to save some money, the company planned to make significant cuts to its own infrastructures, which included data centers in particular. These drastic budget cuts explain, in part, why Twitter executives accepted the offer from the founder of Tesla and SpaceX. But this is in no way comparable to what Elon Musk plans for Twitter.
Security, moderation of content… the risks of severely cutting staff numbers are not lacking
Twitter may be in a situation of overstaffing, but a reduction not of a quarter, but of 75% of the workforce would necessarily have consequences on the very functioning of the service. ” It would be a cascading effect “, says Edwin Chen, boss of the content moderation start-up Surge AI, to our colleagues at washington post. The latter believes that the will of Musk and his investors could play on security and in fact expose Twitter users to the risk of hacking, not to mention the moderation of content which could take a back seat.
Twitter has tried to put out the fire, through an internal note sent this Thursday to all of its employees. Officially, the discussions that were being held to achieve certain savings were suspended once the takeover agreement was signed.
However, social media employees no longer have any illusions. They are now waiting for the operation to become final, which should be the case before the end of next week, after a long legal battle that will have weighed on the morale of the troops. As if they needed it…
Source : The Washington Post
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