- The new owner of the social network plans personnel cuts that vary from 50 to 75% according to different sources.
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| Elon Musk. |
Musk lands on Twitter with Tesla advisers while outlining layoffs in an atmosphere "of fear and suspicion"
Tycoon Elon Musk, sole owner of the Twitter social network since last Thursday, has landed in the company with dozens of advisers from his other companies, mainly Tesla (manufacturer of electric cars) while outlining a layoff strategy and studying changes in order to monetize the use of the application. According to various media reports today with internal sources within the company, Musk has brought fifty Tesla employees -mostly software engineers- plus some specific profiles from Boring (underground tunneling company) and SpaceX in order to reconfigure Twitter's functionalities.
Plans to monetize the company may not be as fast as Musk hopes: the Financial Times notes that the banks that lent Musk $12.7 billion to finance his $44 billion purchase of Twitter already have rescheduled the debt until the beginning of next year or even later. Among these banks are Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Barclays, which are waiting for Musk to present a clear business plan to gauge the profitability of a company that in its last ten years has lived eight in the red.
According to The Verge and confirmed by the New York Times, one of the specific plans that Musk raises is to charge 8 dollars for a "verified account" -something that can now be obtained for free and translates into a small blue icon-, supposedly making it a requirement that the plaintiff is a Twitter Blue subscriber, the premium service that until now has not responded to the expected demand.
This plan has raised a real dust in the same social network, with profiles as notorious as Stephen King, one of the most-read authors in the United States and the world, who tweeted last night: "Twenty dollars a month to have a verified. Fuck it, they should pay me," and threatened to go off the grid.
King was answered shortly after by Musk himself - thus indirectly confirming his plans -: "We have to pay the bills somehow! Twitter can't just rely on advertisers. What do you think of $8?" he tweeted, without clarifying if the amount is still to be decided.
The atmosphere of fear and suspicion
Within the company, the media allude to the atmosphere of mistrust that is breathed in the face of the certainty that Musk plans staff cuts, in proportions that vary from 50 to 75% according to different sources, and without the millionaire having confirmed them until now. time, beyond firing the previous board of directors. The businessman arrived at the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco last Thursday -in an already famous image in which he was carrying a sink- accompanied by several people he trusted, among whom several names were repeated: his personal lawyer Alex Sapiro, the investor in technology Jason Calacanis or the head of the Musk family company Jared Birchall.
Musk himself or his advisers have begun to question employees on Twitter to explain how algorithms or content control work, how work teams operate, and the functions of each one. "The threat of dismissal hangs if you can't impress them," says a source quoted by CNBC. That same channel wonders how expert electrical automotive engineers can contribute to improving Twitter when they are two unrelated activities, and when Twitter is affected by legislation on content that changes from country to country and can highly affect its very essence.
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