Jason Ryan, Staff

Twitter Inc. is heading into its second full workweek under Elon Musk with half its workforce, mounting losses and a couple of expected reversals to its plans\

The social-media company, Twitter Inc. laid off close to 3,700 people on Friday, only to reach out soon thereafter to dozens of employees where it was decided they were either fired in error or are just too essential to the changes the billionaire businessman, Elon Musk, wanted to make. 

The layoffs hit across many divisions, including the engineering and machine learning units, the teams that manage content moderation and the sales and advertising departments.

These stroke events, as described by people familiar with the situation or in an internal company memo posted on Slack, follow Musk’s own acknowledgment in a tweet that the company he and wealthy partners bought for $44 billion is losing $4 million a day.

Twitter Inc. decided to go after its workforce  to trim costs following Musk’s acquisition, which finally closed in late October. Many employees learned they lost their job after their access to companywide systems, like email and Slack, were suddenly suspended. The sudden requests for employees to return to office demonstrate how rushed and disorganized the process was.

Some regions were hit harder than others. For example, the company fired more than 90% of its staff in India over the weekend, severely depleting its engineering and product staff. The job cuts left the company with a little over a dozen staff in the growth market.

That being said, Twitter is rolling out new features such as its Twitter Blue subscription plan. To elaborate, Twitter will issue the new blue verification check marks to users who pay $7.99 a month for the service starting on Nov. 9. The company had previously planned to roll out the subscription feature Nov. 7, the day before the election; however, one of Musk’s early goals for the company is  delayed until Wednesday to avoid potential chaos during the U.S. midterm elections.

The company received internal and external feedback that the verification process for its Twitter Blue subscription program could be prepared for abuse. This has raised concerns that candidates and other political figures might be impersonated on site in the days before the US election. 

Late Sunday, Musk said Twitter would ban accounts that impersonate others, after several high-profile users changed their names and pictures to match the billionaire. Any name change at all will cause a temporary loss of a verified check mark.

Though the company needs some technical staff to return, the platform is not likely to be forgotten about. They surely need to figure out a way to get out of this mess and control Musk’s short temper.

  ryanj21@lasalle.edu