Twitter Fires 100 Employees Because Of Elon Musk And His Ambiguous Plans To Acquire The Company

Twitter has sacked 30 percent of its talent acquisition team, impacting 100 employees.

Background

This comes amidst a hiring freeze and an impending $44-billion acquisition by Elon Musk.

The layoffs are the result of the micro-blogging platform’s revised business needs, coming from Musk who stated that Twitter needed to get healthy, implying possible layoffs.

Back in May, Twitter announced that it would be freezing hirings in order to cut costs.

Now that hiring has been put on hold, the company decided to reduce its talent acquisition team which mostly consisted of recruiters and employees in charge of bringing on new hires.

Musk’s orders

When Musk met with Twitter staff for the first time in June he expressed that the firm “has to get healthy” financially and reduce costs, saying that currently “costs surpass income.”

When questioned about the likelihood of layoffs he replied with “It depends.”

Musk had once again threatened to pull out of the Twitter deal.

He accused the company of “actively resisting and thwarting his information rights” as outlined by the deal.

Neverending issues with bots

He has continually raised his voice over the issues of the number of spam and bot accounts on the social media platform.

He said in May that he is putting the deal on hold until the company proves that fewer than 5% of its accounts are fake.

Twitter said in a May 2 SEC filing that fewer than 5% of accounts on its platform were fake.

It came at this number after manual reviews of thousands of accounts that take place each quarter.

It uses internal data to confirm the bot number, including things like IP addresses or phone numbers to determine if an account is run by a human.

Demanding confidential data

However Musk believes the number to be much higher and demanded an audit of Twitter’s estimates to conduct an independent assessment.

Twitter said they have been sharing some data with Musk but declined to comment on what data was being shared, since it does not share internal data with outsiders due to privacy concerns.

Musk’s team writes “Twitter has failed or refused to provide this information.”

Deal called off 

It appears now that as of early Saturday or July 9, Musk has officially terminated his $44 billion deal for Twitter Inc, citing material breach of multiple provisions of the agreement.

This marks the end of a long drawn saga after the richest man in the world clinched a deal for Twitter in April but then put the buyout on hold over the issue of fake accounts. 

However now remains the issue of justifying his decision to back out. 

He must prove that Twitter has breached their agreement, as he can’t just pull out of the signed agreement simply because he feels like it.