Mass Layoff of Twitter Employees

 Mass Layoff of Twitter Employees

    Since the acquisition of the company on October 27th, Elon Musk has made plenty of moves to try to better his new company, however many of these actions have been scrutinized heavily by Twitter users and the overall public. The unrest and unsteadiness of the company can be considered to be a cause for the current drama due to the release of the algorithm, and looking deeper into the chaos that was caused by the layoffs within the company might be able to shed a little bit of light on the issue. 

    Upon Musk's takeover, he promptly fired approximately half of his workforce which inevitably led to an incredible amount of worry from the tech industry, Twitter users, and Twitter employees. This unannounced and sudden layoff wave led to a lot of breached contracts from Twitter's end, resulting in severance packages getting paid out to employees, and enormous amounts of money being paid out to the executives who were also fired in a breach of their contract. The payouts from these firings led Musk to realize that Twitter was in fact in a very tough financial spot, which he aimed to solve through the monetization of his platform's verification system. 

    Twitter's subscription-based verification was faced with an immense amount of push-back, however, ended up being cemented in the app without too much issue. However much of the after-effects of the layoffs are not linked to Twitter itself, and are more focused on both the ethical issue that laying off so many employees at once has and the butterfly effect this would proceed to have on the tech industry as a whole. Approximately 3,700 employees left the company by either firing or quitting after being offered an ultimatum. This immense amount of talented workforce with plenty of grade-A work experience now flooded into the tech market taking up jobs all over the place, leading to a form of job offer drought in bigger tech companies such as Amazon and Microsoft. 

    On top of this displacement of the work force, these ex-employees were also extremely dissatisfied with Elon Musk's actions, leading to increasing acts of leaking company information. A recent example of such behavior comes from the source code for Twitter being leaked about a week ago, suspected from an employee that was fired in those waves "Twitter has been investigating the leak, and the executives looking into the issue believe that the individual who shared parts of the source code is a former employee who left the company last year". Yet another issue that was not commented on by either Twitter or Elon.

    Elon Musk's past acts in managing the Twitter platform have led to the chaos that ensues today and can tell us a lot about how unethical firing practices can generate animosity among ex-employees and can lead to increased risk for the company. It also sets a poor example for current employees and the risks that they entail when working for Twitter.

Sources:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk

https://aakashgupta.substack.com/p/the-real-twitter-files-the-algorithm

https://news.yahoo.com/analysis-twitter-algorithm-code-reveals-072800540.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon_Musk

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/27/technology/elon-musk-twitter-deal-complete.html

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/31/23664849/twitter-releases-algorithm-musk-open-source

https://africa.businessinsider.com/news/twitter-executives-reportedly-think-an-ex-employee-leaked-the-companys-source-code/cx15zjq