Elon Musk will fire half of Twitter’s employees, leak reveals

Elon Musk is planning to gut half of Twitter’s staff, making over 3,700 people in the company unemployed.Staff will be informed on Friday, Bloomberg reports. The Independent understands the full number is 3,738 employees, with Twitter’s legal team having all-but finalised the severance calculations as of yesterday.Workers who lose their jobs will be offered 60 days’ worth of severance pay, reportedly, but the terms could still change.Mr Musk is also expected to force employees to report to offices, a move he has done for his other companies which would be in stark contrast to Twitter’s current work-from-anywhere policy.Twitter employees have reportedly been working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, under threat of firing. While previously, many Twitter employees would help each other, Slack channels have gone silent as people try to protect their livelihoods. Esther Crawford, director of product management at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, tweeted a photo of her sleeping in her office.Prospective firings have been predicted at Twitter for some time. Mr Musk had planned to reduce Twitter’s headcount from 7,500 to 2,000, the Washington Postreported, having previously complained that the company has a ‘strong left wing bias’.Twitter’s previous board had already planned to reduce wages at the company by around $800m by the end of 2023 and reduce staff by 25 per cent, according to the newspaper.Twitter employees had penned an open letter to Elon Musk in protest, asking to be treated with dignity.Elon Musk’s previously reported plan to lay off 75% of Twitter workers will hurt Twitter’s ability to serve the public conversation,’ going on to say that ‘a threat of this magnitude is reckless, undermines our users’ and customers’ trust in our platform, and is a transparent act of worker intimidation.’Twitter could roll out a number of new features in quick succession under Mr Musk’s brutal leadership. This could include rolling out the edit button to all users, paid-for verification, and a paywalled video player.The video player would let people post videos and charge users to view them, with the company taking a cut of the proceeds.However, there are concerns that users could use the tool to share copyrighted material or to scam others. Twitter employees have ‘identified the risk as high,’ according to the email, which was sent by an employee on Twitter’s ‘Product Trust’ team.The email cites ‘risks related to copyrighted content, creator/user trust issues, and legal compliance’. The feature will undergo an internal review on those issues before launching – however that review could be as short as three days.