Elon Musk’s first tweet after Twitter layoff: ‘No choice if the company loses…’

Volkswagen AG, General Motors, Pfizer Inc and United Airlines are among the major brands that have already stopped their ads on Twitter. Twitter has been under increasing pressure for companies to make decisions about whether to continue spending after Musk took over the company last week and made sweeping changes, including an $8 monthly fee for blue ticks and content moderation,

Musk blamed the loss on a coalition of civil rights groups that are pressuring Twitter’s top advertisers to act if they don’t protect content moderation. The groups said Friday they are stepping up their pressure and demanding that brands pull their Twitter ads globally.

Yesterday Musk tweeted, “Twitter Active groups putting pressure on advertisers have resulted in a huge drop in revenue, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we have done everything we can to make workers happy.

Very fucked up! They are trying to destroy freedom of expression in America.”

And later, Twitter Inc. Fired about half of its employees, alerting about 7,500 of its employees about their job status by email.

On Saturday, Musk posted his first tweet since the layoff. The tech mogul said he had no other choice as the social media site was losing more than $4 million per day.

He also said that the employees who have been laid off have been offered a severance of 3 months.

“With respect to Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately, there is no alternative when the company is losing more than $4M/day.

Everyone who opted out was offered a 3-month severance, which is 50% more than what is legally required,” Musk tweeted.

Employees working in engineering, communications, product, content curation and machine learning ethics were among those affected by layoff,

Shannon Raj Singh, a lawyer who served as Twitter’s acting head of human rights, tweeted on Friday that the company’s entire human rights team has been cut.

Employees said on stage, Twitter’s curation team, which is responsible for “highlighting and referencing the best events and stories that ever surfaced on Twitter,” had been fired. company communication team India According to a Twitter executive in Asia, it has also been shut down.

According to the Reuters news agency, a team that focused on researching how Twitter employed the algorithm, an issue that was a priority for Musk, was also eliminated.

Senior executives, including Vice President of Engineering Arnaud Weber, also said their goodbyes on Twitter on Friday: “Twitter still has a lot of unlocked capabilities but I’m proud of what we’ve achieved,” he tweeted.

Last week, Twitter fired top executives, including CEO Parag Agarwal, and removed the company’s board of directors since Musk took over.