Elon Musk told prospective investors that he plans to eliminate nearly 75% of Twitter’s staff as part of his deal to take over the social media company, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.
Given that wages are almost certainly not just the largest cost but the bulk of all costs:
That would be the way to gain profitability.
Musk wants to reduce Twitter’s 7,500 employees down to a “skeleton staff” of around 2,000 people.
The layoffs will undoubtedly have an impact on Twitter’s daily operations, including its ability to moderate harmful content
Well, there’s a benefit to being a free speech absolutist then…..
One waits with bated breath for the endless legal struggles to obliterate the wicked hate speech implicit in that obscene comma.
The lawyers’ll be laughing all the way to the bank.
’…including its ability to moderate harmful content.’
And hopefully its ability to moderate views it doesn’t like…
They can always start their own new Twitter if they don’t like it.
In other news the Twitter deal may be forbidden for National Security reasons – which you could take to mean that Musk can be released from his bid, or perhaps proof that the availability of a less biased Twitter frightens the Swamp.
What the hell “research and development” do these SoMe companies do? The return on investment seems pretty shit (that said I think the social interactive part of the internet peaked with phpBB*).
* Fora mostly run by volunteers, very effectively, on shoestring budget. Facebook and Reddit have a lot to answer for.
DiscoveredJoys,
You mean the democratic party wants to stop an African American investing in a business? Golly gosh it’s like being back in the 1960s again.
BiFR, I suspect quite a lot of the R&D Budget is tied up in “AI” and tweaking all the BadSpeak filters/reporting algorythms. Plus the hardware it takes to do all that.
If Musk does manage to cut off all that crap, you get rid of a lot of costs, trickling down to the other bits as well. Probably will improve CoR as well. I bet a lot of the capacity for R&D is “in the Cloud” = damn expensive at scale…
Musk can’t say “I’ll fire all the Wokesters”, but he’s in his right to cut unnecessary costs. And WokePolicing is a very unnecessary cost on a platform that promotes Free Speech™…
You still need R&D, plenty of updates/testing/tweaking for the backbone since it runs over several platforms. But that’s core delivery. And work for people who generally don’t give a hoot about correct pronouns.
I’ve a feeling all but one token Diversity Manager and Grievance Councillor will go as well. Unless he rolls those into a Junior Intern position.
Biggest challenge would be to get rid of (most of) HRM. There’s the heart of the poison after all..