Twitter has executed yet another round of job cuts, laying off 200 more employees in the latest round of job cuts since the company was purchased by Elon Musk last October.
Reports stated the layoffs began on Saturday night, however many employees only learned they had been laid off when they tried to access their laptops and company accounts on Sunday, and found they were locked out.
This round of layoffs were targeted at product managers, data scientists, and engineers. The layoffs included Esther Crawford, who headed up the paid subscription service at the company, Twitter Blue. Originally the founder of screen-sharing app Squad, Crawford joined Twitter when her startup was acquired by the social media platform in late 2020. During Musk’s initial takeover, she had pledged to go “all in” on the revamping of the social media giant. She had famously been pictured in November of 2022 sleeping on the floor of her office in a sleeping bag with a sleeping-mask on.
On Sunday, she tweeted about her firing, saying, “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 … I’m deeply proud of the team for building through so much noise & chaos.”
Musk issued a tweet following the firings, saying, “Hope you have a good Sunday. First day of the rest of your life.”
Twitter’s total headcount now sits below 2,000 employees, which is a far cry from the 7,500 employed by the company when Musk purchased it in late October of 2022. The tech entrepreneur immediately began cutbacks, in an effort to get the company out of the “fast lane” to bankruptcy, as he would later refer to it. His initial plan had been to cut roughly 50% of the staff.
Musk had stated earlier in the month that his plan now is to “stabilize” Twitter and then find a new CEO for the company by the end of 2023. The statement was made almost two months after a poll he ran in which Twitter users voted for him to step down from the platform’s helm.