Twitter to terminate employees amid the deal for Elon Musk take over, Management refutes reports

Twitter is reportedly planning to terminate a huge percentage of its workforce while the acquisition deal with Elon Musk is in place. It was said the job cuts are likely coming in a few months, regardless of who may own the company.

This information was first reported by The Wall Street Journal based on the interviews and documents it obtained recently. The papers allegedly stated that Musk told potential investors that in his deal to acquire Twitter, he is planning to lay off 75% of the social media’s workforce which is equivalent to about 7,500 employees. The reduction will leave the company with just around 2,000 staff.

It was added that even if the 51-year-old billionaire fails to buy Twitter, job cuts are still expected. The company is also said to be planning to cut its infrastructure, including data centers. The layoffs, which have not been reported yet, will is said to explain why Twitter’s management is eager to sell the company to the SpaceX and Tesla founder.

Edwin Chen, a data scientist that previously managed the spam and health metrics of the platform, said that the upcoming job terminations are likely to be immediately felt by users. He explained that while he agreed that Twitter is overstaffed, the rumored layoffs are quite “unimaginable” and may expose users to risks of hacking and offensive materials or content.

“It would be a cascading effect where you’d have services going down and the people remaining not having the institutional knowledge to get them back up, and being completely demoralized and wanting to leave themselves,” Chen said.

Meanwhile, Twitter denied the reports and told employees that it has no plans of firing them. The company clarified on Thursday, Oct. 20, that the rumored company-wide layoffs are not true. It explained that since it signed a deal with Musk for the buyout, the cuts are not happening.

The employees were informed about this matter by Twitter’s general counsel, Sean Edgett. He sent an email to the staff to correct the false reports, even if some documents say otherwise.