Chaos continues to reign at the Twitter group after Elon Musk took power. It was only on Friday that the company fired masses of employees by email, almost half of the 3,700 employees are affected. Now the management team around Musk is apparently trying to bring back some of those who have been laid off. This is reported by the Bloomberg news agency and other US media.
According to Bloomberg, dozens of employees who lost their jobs have already been contacted by the new Twitter leadership with a request to come back to work. Some of the employees were "accidentally" fired, writes Bloomberg, citing insiders. For others, the new management only realized after the dismissal that they needed the skills and experience to implement the new features Musk requested on Twitter.
Musk announced last week that the blue verification hook would cost $8 a month in the future. Musk also thought aloud about other innovations such as the revival of the short video service Vine. There have also been reports that Musk and his associates have been rushing Twitter developers through demanding tasks on tight schedules. Employees got the impression that if you don't deliver, you'll soon lose your job.
The old management fired Musk on his first day at work. Last Friday, the large mass dismissal of about half of the workforce followed, which was announced via e-mail. Employees report that access to the company notebook was immediately blocked. Musk tweeted that he had "no choice" as Twitter was losing over $4 million a day.
The Tesla boss bought the loss-making company for around 44 billion dollars and owed Twitter around 13 billion of the purchase price himself. So not only is Twitter not making any money, it now has to pay off debt and pay interest.
Therefore, Musk now wants to save massively on costs and rebuild the short message service in such a way that it generates income. Technical chaos is also inevitable. "There will be massive failures on Twitter," said an ex-employee who was responsible for a critical part of the technical infrastructure, the Handelsblatt. The only question is how bad it will be.
The subscription model for the blue tick is to be launched after this week's US midterm elections, with further changes to follow in the near future. On the other hand, Twitter is threatened with a decline in its main source of income, advertising, since numerous companies are suspending their advertising bookings on Twitter. They fear that Musk could once again increasingly offer a forum on Twitter under the label of free speech, radicals and conspiracy theorists.
