Twitter began widespread layoffs Friday as new owner Elon Musk overhauls the social platform
The company had told employees by email that they would find out by 9 a.m. PDT (noon EDT) if they had been laid off. The email did not say how many of the roughly 7,500 employees would lose their jobs
Musk didn’t confirm or correct investor Ron Baron at a conference in New York on Friday when he asked the billionaire Tesla CEO how much money he would save after he “fired half of Twitter”
Musk, speaking at Baron’s annual investment conference, responded by talking about Twitter’s ongoing cost and revenue challenges and blamed activists who this week called on big companies to halt advertising on the platform
“The activist groups have been successful in causing a massive drop in Twitter advertising revenue, and we’ve done our absolute best to appease them and nothing is working,” Musk said
Some employees of the San Francisco-based company tweeted earlier that they had already lost access to their work accounts. They and others tweeted messages of support using the hashtag #OneTeam
The email to staff said job reductions were “necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward”
Twitter’s employees have been expecting layoffs since Musk took the helm of the company. Already, he has fired top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, on his first day as Twitter’s owner