Cost Cutting: Elon Musk Lays Off 50% Twitter Staff

The CEO of Twitter, Elon Musk has laid off at least 50 per cent of his employees as efforts to offset a plunge in revenue, thereby, shrinking the staff strength by at least 70 per cent to roughly 2,000, a report has revealed.

The report by ‘The Information’ 

disclosed that this recent lay off is the eighth round of job cuts since Musk took over the social network in late October. 

The report explained that the social media platform would be firing 50 employees across multiple engineering teams, including those supporting advertising technology, the main Twitter app, and technical infrastructure to keep its systems up and running.

Last week, Twitter laid off employees from its ad sales team, the report disclosed, adding that, the social media company had about 800 sales and marketing employees as of last month.

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Recall that the first round of layoffs at Twitter began in early November when 3,700 employees were fired in a cost-cutting measure by Musk, who acquired the company for $44 billion.

A day before firing these employees from the ad sales team, Twitter shut two of its three India offices and told its staff to work from home, underscoring Musk’s mission to slash costs and get the struggling social media service in the black.

Having fired more than 90 per cent of its roughly 200-plus staff in India late last year, it went on to close its offices in New Delhi and Mumbai, as per Bloomberg report.

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Musk in November said the service was experiencing a “massive drop in revenue” as advertisers pulled spending amid concerns about content moderation.

The report by ‘The Information’ averred that Musk’s attempt to generate revenue from subscriptions has gotten off to a slow start as only 180,000 people in the US were paying $8 to $11 per month to subscribe to Twitter Blue as of mid-January, two months after its launch.

Twitter Blue’s monthly cost is higher than Netflix, Spotify, Apple Music, and several other global services which are generally cheaper in markets with low Gross Domestic Product growth rates.

“In India, too, the adoption of Twitter Blue as a subscription service has been tepid as people are reluctant to shed Rs 900 per month for mobile devices and Rs 650 for web devices,” it added.