Twitter Layoffs: Elon Musk Asks Employees To Justify Their Roles, Rate Colleagues

New Delhi: Elon Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 and later rebranded it as X. The company has undergone various changes since its acquisition which includes laying off around 6,000 employees which is roughly 80 percent of its workforce.

After the tech billionaire took over Twitter in 2022, Musk made the company private which reduced the transparency of his decisions. Shortly after he acquired Twitter for 44 billion dollars he fired half the staff. Musk warned the remaining employees to prepare for “extremely hardcore” working hours with “high intensity. He also brought in Steve Davis and James Musk  to evaluate whether the remaining employees were providing good value for money. (Also Read: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Says He 'Doesn't Fire' Employees, Rather ‘Torture Them Into…’)

Twitter employees had to justify their roles and even assess whether their colleagues should be retained. The job cuts impacted various departments which includes diversity and inclusion, product development and design. Even Twitter’s content moderation team was not spared from the layoffs. (Also Read: Zerodha Investors Made Rs. 50,000 Crore Profit In Four Years, Announces CEO Nithin Kamath)

In October 2022, reports surfaced that Elon Musk planned to cut Twitter’s workforce. Around the same time Brad Gerstner, an investor at Altimeter Capital wrote to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stating, "It is a poorly kept secret in Silicon Valley that companies ranging from Google to Meta to Twitter to Uber could achieve similar levels of revenue with far fewer people."

After Twitter’s layoffs, other major tech companies like Meta, Amazon and Google also reduced their workforces. According to layoffs.fyi, these tech giants laid off 165,269 employees in 2022, 263,180 in 2023, and 96,551 so far this year.