Twitter logo on rubber stamps

200 Lose Jobs in Latest Round of Twitter Layoffs

Including founders of tech companies Twitter has acquired in recent years

Twitter has laid off another 200 employees, representing about 10% of the company’s remaining 2,000 employees, reports The New York Times. This fourth round of layoffs contradicted Elon Musk’s promise in late November that no additional staff cuts were planned. When Musk took over Twitter in October, Twitter employed about 7,500. Layoffs and resignations reduced Twitter’s headcount to around 2,000 staffers.

Last week, employees got the first hint of pending layoffs when they had trouble communicating internally through Slack when the communications platform was manually taken down. On Saturday, some employees were logged out of their company email accounts and laptops and lost access to Google Chat using their work emails.

Impacted employees include product managers, data scientists and engineers who worked on machine learning and were focused on keeping the site up. Twitter’s monetization team, which previously employed about 30 people, now has fewer than eight employees, a source told The Times.

Among the notable losses was Esther Crawford, a product manager at Twitter who headed up Twitter Blue, the social media platform’s subscription service, says The Verge. Crawford was also the chief executive of Twitter Payments, an upcoming payments platform. Other members of the product team were also laid off. Prior to her time at Twitter, Crawford was the founder of screen-sharing app Squad which was acquired by Twitter in December 2020, according to TechCrunch.

The Verge’s Alex Heath tweeted about Crawford’s depature on Sunday, speculating that Twitter may be in the process of replacing the team with new leaders.

Crawford stands by her work for Twitter and her belief in what she and her team were trying to accomplish at the social media platform.

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Martin de Kujiper, the founder of newsletter platform Revue, and Haraldur Thorleifsson, founder of Ueno, were also among those to lose their jobs. Twitter acquired Revue in January 2021 to help creators monetize content through paid newsletters. Twitter shuttered Revue in January 2023, The Verge reports. Twitter also acquired Ueno, a full-service creative agency, in January 2021 to help the social media platform design new products, says TechCrunch.

De Kujiper discovered he had been let go on Saturday when he was locked out of his email.

If Musk’s Twitter feed is any indication, the billionaire does not seem affected by his decision to lay off key employees or to further reduce his staff. In addition to quirky memes about mousetraps, clickbait, WWIII and Einstein, Musk also posted this which drew nearly 17,000 comments.

Insider Take

Elon Musk makes the headlines virtually every day, and so many of those tweets directly impact Twitter operations and staff. This is the fourth round of layoffs since the billionaire begrudgingly bought the company last fall, and his decisions seem anything but strategic. While Musk is arguably a genius, he is also volatile and changes course on a whim. Who knows what the thinking is behind the latest move, but we tend to agree with Heath that there is a bigger plan at play here. Musk could be cleaning house to put his own people in place, or he may be pivoting in an entirely new direction. This seems particularly risky at a time when Twitter Blue subscriptions are not nearly as successful as he’d hoped and when former advertisers are running for the hills.

Copyright © 2023 Authority Media Network, LLC. All rights reserved. Reproduction without permission is prohibited.

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