Mass layoffs, trolling, and check marks: How Elon Musk is running Twitter.
Elon Musk has only been in charge of Twitter since late October. But already, he’s turned the company and its platform upside down.
Almost immediately after he took over, Musk booted top executives, slashed rank-and-file headcount by 50 percent, issued remaining employees an ultimatum to be “hardcore” in their work ethic or quit, and fast-tracked a hodgepodge of potentially revenue-generating features, including charging users to get or keep a verification check mark. And that was all before he allowed former president Donald Trump back on the app, reversing Trump’s former ban on the platform, and then declared “amnesty” for previously suspended accounts.
Musk’s mass layoffs and intense management style have gutted Twitter’s staff, reportedly including some key engineering functions, causing concerns about the site’s technical ability to stay up and running.
And his new check mark system — Musk’s first major product update — caused chaos in the hours after its release, as newly checkmarked users flooded the app with fake accounts, impersonating figures from Nintendo’s Mario character to former US President George W. Bush. Adding to the chaos, by November 11, less than a week since the new paid checkmark system was released, it appeared that the Twitter Blue subscription service that let you buy a checkmark was no longer working for many people.
And while Musk didn’t immediately change any of Twitter’s policies against offensive content, in the hours after Musk took over there was a notable surge in hate speech on the app. Some of the users posting felt emboldened by Musk’s “free speech absolutist” attitude, and actively tried to test the limits of what they could say on Twitter under the company’s new leadership. Others have tested the limits of Musk’s free speech stance by making fun of him personally.
Musk doesn’t want to be CEO of Twitter forever — he’s repeatedly said he wants to eventually give that job to someone else “over time.” In the meantime, many current and former employees, social media academics, and human rights advocates are concerned that Musk could change Twitter for the worse, turning it into an even more intense cesspool of negative content than it already is. But others hope Musk can breathe new life into a platform that was already bleeding its most prolific users and, for years, has struggled to turn a profit. In a staff meeting on November 10, Musk said bankruptcy was not out of the question if Twitter doesn’t figure out a way to make more money.
Here are some of the most significant ways Musk has changed the company so far.Reinstating suspended accounts
From the beginning, Musk took over Twitter with the stated goal of making it a platform that allowed more controversial speech.
A little under a month after he took over the company, Musk reinstated the account of former President Donald Trump, who was previously banned from Twitter following the the Jan 6 attack on the US Capitol. The move was highly controversial, although Trump has yet to post any new tweets, saying he prefers his own social media app, Truth Social.
Musk went even further in late November. He ran another poll asking whether he should “offer a general amnesty” to suspended accounts as long as they have not “broken the law or engaged in egregious spam.” A day after posting the poll — and after a majority of people voted “yes” — Musk tweeted that he would start reinstating suspended accounts the following week. The move raised immediate concerns about whether bringing back users who have repeatedly violated Twitter’s hate speech policies would create a flood of abuse on the platform.
In the days prior to reinstating Trump, Musk also reinstated the accounts of comedian Kathy Griffin (who was suspended after she impersonated Musk), controversial psychologist influencer Jordan Peterson, and conservative humor news site Babylon Bee. Peterson and Babylon Bee were both suspended after tweeting anti-trans comments.
These reinstatements come despite the fact that Musk said he would wait to make any major decisions about reinstating banned accounts until he forms a “content moderation council” to advise him. Gutting Twitter’s staff
Musk began his reign as Twitter’s chief by firing top executives. Within hours of the deal closing, CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and head of legal policy, trust, and safety Vijaya Gadde were shown the door. On November 10, Twitter’s top privacy and security executives resigned, including Chief Information Security Officer Lea Kissner, the company’s chief privacy officer, and chief compliance officer, according to several reports. On the same day, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, who in recent days had publicly reassured people that Twitter was still following its content moderation policies, also left.
The week after he took over, Musk continued firing executives, including Twitter’s ad chief, general manager of core tech, and chief marketing officer Leslie Berland (who just a few days earlier sent a cheery note announcing that Musk was visiting the San Francisco offices). He also pulled in more than 50 Tesla engineers to work for Twitter and assembled his own circle of trusted advisers.
Soon after, Musk started gutting Twitter’s rank-and-file staff. He laid off an estimated 50 percent — upward of 3,700 employees — from the company. Twitter informed its staff that layoffs would happen by 9 am PT on Friday in a company-wide email. By late Thursday evening, several employees told Recode or posted publicly on Twitter that they had already been locked out of their work email and Slack accounts without any formal notice of whether they had been laid off.
These cuts are the largest in Twitter’s history, and several current and former employees Recode spoke with are concerned that as a result Twitter’s operations as a platform could be at risk. Musk has also reportedly planned to slash $1 billion from Twitter’s infrastructure costs, such as server space, according to a report from Reuters, furthering those concerns.
Adding to the chaos, Twitter’s management changed its mind about some of its cost-cutting: the company reportedly asked dozens of recently laid-off employees if they wanted to come back to work soon after the layoffs, according to a report from Bloomberg.
The day after the first round of cuts, Musk tweeted about the layoffs and discussed them at an investor conference. He framed the layoffs as necessary because before the deal, “Twitter was having pretty serious revenue challenges and cost challenges,” according to the New York Times.
