After getting rid of half of the company, Twitter's new CEO Elon Musk is planning another round of layoffs across sales and partnership teams. More layoffs are expected as early as Monday after Elon Musk, the interim CEO of Twitter, ordered the heads of these two departments -- Robin Wheeler and Maggie Sanuewick -- to fire more staff. They refused and both were later shown the door before it was finally decided to further trim their teams, suggest media reports.
More firings at the microblogging platform come days after the Tesla CEO gave a clear ultimatum to the remaining employees, saying those interested in working at Twitter must be ready to go hardcore or quit. “Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”
Musk also presented a poll via Google Forms to the employees, giving options of ‘yes’ confirming their desire to remain with Twitter 2.0 or to leave with three months of severance pay.
After Musk's latest call, several employees are reportedly also planning to leave the company. Sensing chaos, the company also decided the offices will remain shut till November 21. Notably, Twitter laid off 50% of its workforce or 3,700 employees of the company’s total strength earlier this month.
On Wednesday last week, Musk said he is “punting relaunch of Blue Verified” to November 29 to make sure that it is rock solid. “With the new release, changing your verified name will cause loss of checkmark until the name is confirmed by Twitter to meet Terms of Service,” he said, adding that all unpaid legacy Blue checkmarks will be removed in a few months.
Twitter had recently suspended its new verification scheme that allowed anyone to buy a blue check mark after the $8 blue tick subscription wiped out billions of dollars from many companies’ m-cap. Their official Twitter handles were impersonated to spread disinformation.
The company had launched the Blue service to end the fake accounts and raise spammers' costs. However, numerous accounts impersonating political leaders, celebrities and brands soon became a new headache for Twitter management.
Not just Twitter but big companies across the globe are cutting workforce to save costs. According to the data tracked by Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks layoffs, as many as 1,36,989 employees have been laid off this year so far, by 849 companies globally. Earlier this month, Meta sacked 11,000 employees or 13% of its workforce. In October, Microsoft fired as many as 1,000 employees, or 1% of its workforce, in the third round of downsizing. Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, sacked 20% of its workforce to restructure its business.
Notably, India, which is one of the biggest markets for companies like Google, and Meta, among others, has around 23.6 million Twitter users in the country, the Statista data as of January 2022 shows. The only two countries that have more Twitter users than India are the US and Japan at 76.9 million and 58.95 million, respectively.
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