Elon Musk is going to fire 50% of the Twitter workforce!

Elon Musk, is set to lay off up to 50% of the company’s total workforce in order to simultaneously reduce headcount and costs. The news was reported by Bloomberg News, citing people familiar with the matter.

According to Bloomberg, affected staff will be notified as early as this Friday. With Twitter’s total workforce at 7,500 worldwide, the planned reduction will be about 3,750 people in total. It’s not immediately clear what criteria will be used to fire these employees, but one of the things Elon Musk has asked is for social media staff to return to the office.

Twitter was one of the first companies to institute the “work from anywhere“Work from anywhere” during the lockdowns that took place during the most difficult days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The policy was made permanent and some employees have been taking advantage of this leverage since 2020. With Elon Musk’s reversal, his hope is high that some staff will take the initiative to leave, helping the firm downsize.

Elon Musk did not come out to officially announce the job cuts. When he spoke to Twitter staff on Friday, he confirmed that reports that he would be cutting 75% of the workforce were false. This statement leaves room for a lot of ambiguity, but one thing is for sure, Musk needs to cut costs in all areas.

Given Twitter’s new trajectory regarding free speech and content moderation, a number of advertisers are already currently discontinuing their use of the platform, which is detrimental to the revenue generation and flow the platform so desperately needs. By going into debt to meet the acquisition demand and avoid the ensuing lawsuit, Elon Musk needs to generate revenue and offset it by significantly reducing costs.

Elon Musk’s Twitter downsizing is already underway

The idea that Elon Musk is going to cut jobs is no longer a point of contention, as he has already started doing so as soon as he took over. The billionaire entrepreneur has fired former CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, general counsel Sean Edgett and head of legal policy, trust and security Vijaya Gadde.

It was also reported that some of Twitter’s engineers were either fired or put on the shelf, while Musk brought in 50 advisors from his other companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company and Neuralink, to help with the restructuring.

While Elon Musk appears to be paying close attention to his Twitter Blue subscription, which he has now valued at $8, the decision to stabilize the workforce remains a key factor in charting a positive future for the social media company.