Last week, Elon Musk, who took over Twitter at the end of October, announced the current number of employees on the social network, which is just over 2,000 people. Before the transaction, the company employed 7,500 people. The scale of cost savings has reached the point where security guards and cleaners are losing their jobs and the remaining staff are starting to bring toilet paper from home.
Image source: Patrick T. Fallon, Bloomberg
Musk recently admitted this within five weeks of buying Twitter Cutting costs like crazy. Since the beginning of November acc The New York Timesthe company was able to save around $500 million in non-employee-related expenses alone. As the Twitter boss explained, without such measures, the company would have faced the formation of $3 billion in negative cash flow in 2023.
Though Musk and his associates fired nearly three of the four employees who worked at Twitter at the time of the deal, some of the vacancies have been “recruited.” According to the publication, they were given no more than 90 minutes to get up to speed, rather than the typical three days, and as a result, newly hired specialists had a very vague idea of their new job responsibilities.
Closure of a large data center in Sacramento for last weekcould be one of the reasons for recent technical errors in Twitter’s user authentication system, according to unofficial sources. Elon Musk himself demonstrated the stable operation of the social network after the outage, but former employees of the company responsible for maintaining the infrastructure called the billionaire’s actions destructive. According to the study, shutting down data centers could result in information loss and reduce Twitter’s backup processing power by around 30%. Any increase in Twitter traffic could eventually overload the remaining equipment. Experts estimate that Twitter’s recent outage would certainly have been avoided if the Sacramento center had continued to operate.
The office rent was another targeted saving by the new Twitter leadership. At the company’s headquarters in San Francisco, Musk concentrated employees on two floors and cleared four more. He simply fired those who tried to raise the cleaners’ salaries. In New York, not only were all cleaners cut, but 10 security guards as well. Eventually, as expected, Twitter’s local office will also be abandoned, as happened recently in Seattle.
The costs of contractor services are actively reduced. Contracts with consulting and auditing firms such as Deloitte and KPMG are being reviewed and will probably not be renewed next year. Twitter employees have also been lost as medical support, as some programs related to employees’ reproductive functions are now losing matching funding. At the same time, Musk is trying to combat information leaks about his actions as Twitter boss by trying to avoid publicity in some places.
In general, according to anonymous sources, Musk’s henchmen at the top of Twitter adopt “zero funding” tactics, forcing lower-level executives to fight to prove the validity of each issue. Contracts with contractors are carefully analyzed for the possibility of a reduction in the amounts paid to them, as a result of which the payments themselves are constantly delayed. At the same time, Musk does not feel shamed in paying out bonuses from Twitter’s budget to those employees at his other companies (Tesla and SpaceX) whom he has recruited as consultants — say until January or February of next year.
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