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Twitter joins the list of companies to have a mass firing event leaving hundreds unemployed overnight. These firings were brought on once ownership switched from Jack Dorsey to Elon Musk following a buyout that no-one, but Elon Musk and his stock bros wanted. The top executives at Twitter tried everything they could to put a stop to the takeover starting in April when Elon first showed interest in twitter’s stock.
Elon Musk announced that he had bought more than 9% of twitter’s shares on April 5,2022. This prompted the board of directors to adopt a strategy known as the “poison pill” strategy. This strategy was to be put into effect once Elon’s shares reached 15%. This strategy is when a company discounts their shares and forces any new shareholders to negotiate with them. This plan fell short when Elon Musk decided that he was going to take out billions of dollars in bank loans to acquire Twitter. Twitter at the time was worth $20 billion, however Elon Musk bot Twitter for a whopping $44 billion.
By October, Elon Musk had his mind set on firing most of the current staff in order to cut costs. He proceeded to order the manager of the engineering department to fire hundreds of people. Some employees found out that they were fired when trying to log into their work email and not being able to while others received emails saying that they had been fired.
This took place despite their contracts stating that they were not to be fired without receiving a certain amount of money, and that they were set to get raises and bonuses by November 1. This caused a social media meltdown on Twitter with former and current employees speaking out against Elon Musk, and venting about how the employees that were left oftentimes had to sleep in their offices in order to meet Elon’s new demands for the site. The staff continued to dwindle yet, the workload increased.
After a while, Elon had to come to terms with how expensive it is to run and operate a social media platform and the debt started to become too much. Elon Musk call a meeting with staff and told employees “that the Twitter situation was grim and that there was a negative cash flow and bankruptcy is out of the picture.” Elon then made the biggest firing yet by getting rid of over 50% of Twitter’s staff. This included people that have been working for the social media site for 10+ years with no prior issues, mishaps, or mistakes.
Former employees that have been promised remote positions are now suing with one person stating “Real people were affected by this, I have a family, I have kids to support. All that we’re looking for is fairness.” Another stated “It seems like the layoffs have been done in a way that’s really clumsy and inhumane and potentially illegal … and this is the aftermath.”
