Elon Musk Cuts Additional 200 Jobs at Twitter, Including Key Executive: What You Need to Know
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and owner of Twitter, has reportedly fired 200 more employees from the social media company, including the director of product management, Esther Crawford.
This move comes after Elon Musk had already cut 3,750 jobs, or half of Twitter’s workforce, soon after acquiring the company in October 2022. The latest job cuts amount to around 10% of Twitter’s workforce, which has now dwindled to 2,000 employees.
The New York Times reports that the layoffs affected various roles, including product managers, data scientists, and engineers. It also impacted Twitter’s premium subscription service, which Esther Crawford oversaw.
This service, called Twitter Blue, was reintroduced in November 2022, but some users took advantage of the paid verification feature, leading to impersonator accounts. Despite this issue, Twitter Blue has gained 180,000 subscribers in the US alone, out of a total monthly user base of over 250 million people worldwide.
Elon Musk aims to increase Twitter’s subscription revenue to offset the decline in advertising revenue. However, Twitter has been loss-making historically and still carries a debt of $13bn from Musk’s $44bn takeover.
This debt costs more than $1bn annually to service, which led Musk to initiate cost-cutting measures. While Musk claims that Twitter is “not on the fast lane to bankruptcy anymore,” analysts have cautioned that he needs to turn the business around to sustain the debt long-term.
The worst take you could have from watching me go all-in on Twitter 2.0 is that my optimism or hard work was a mistake. Those who jeer & mock are necessarily on the sidelines and not in the arena. I’m deeply proud of the team for building through so much noise & chaos. ?
— Esther Crawford ✨ (@esthercrawford) February 27, 2023
The layoffs have caused concern for the remaining employees at Twitter, who face financial uncertainty. Despite this, Esther Crawford tweeted on Sunday that she was “deeply proud” of her team and their accomplishments.
Twitter has not yet commented on the recent job cuts.
