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Twitter’s workforce is likely to experience significant reductions in the coming months regardless of who owns the business. This change is likely to have a significant impact on Twitter’s capacity to regulate harmful content and avert security crises. When Elon Musk announced his intention to purchase Twitter, he informed potential investors that he intended to fire approximately 75% of the company’s 7,500 employees, leaving just over 2,000 employees.
Big savings are anticipated even if Musk’s Twitter purchase fails, although there is currently little evidence that it will: According to business records and conversations with persons familiar with the company’s planning, Twitter’s current management intended to reduce the company’s payroll by around $800 million by the end of next year, which would result in the departure of close to a quarter of the workforce. The business reportedly intended to make significant changes to its infrastructure, including the data centers that power the website’s more than 200 million daily users.
The size of the cuts, which have not yet been disclosed, sheds light on Twitter managers’ eagerness to sell Musk their stock: Musk’s aggressive $44 billion offer is a lifeline for the faltering company, maybe saving it from humiliating disclosures that would have demoralized the team and possibly made it impossible for the service to fight spam, hate speech, and misinformation. According to the data scientist working on the growth of content moderation who formerly worked on Twitter’s spam and health metrics, the effect of such employment losses is likely to be noticed right away by millions of users. remarked Edwin Chen, chief executive officer of Surge AI.
The changes Musk is proposing are “unimaginable” and would expose Twitter users to hacking, child pornography, and other undesirable material, despite the fact that he thinks Twitter is overstaffed. He predicted it would have a “cascading effect” where services would be lost, people lacked the institutional expertise to reestablish services, and people would feel hopeless and desire to give up.
Wedbush Securities financial analyst Dan Ives stated, “It was simple for Musk to buy Twitter, but difficult to fix. “It will be difficult to reverse this,” Corporate Nell Minow, his governance expert and vice chairman of ValueEdge Advisors, said Musk is likely to put forward an ambitious plan to potential investors, but it would be difficult to implement his proposal. You said you are facing challenges.
By next Friday, Twitter and Musk hope to get the transaction closed. Plans for the merger appear to be moving forward in good faith after months of legal battles, according to people familiar with the negotiations who asked not to be named to disclose internal deliberations. If the acquisition closes, Musk will take immediate ownership of Twitter. A request for comment from Twitter did not immediately receive a response.