After firing or losing more than half the staff in the company, in a big turn of events Twitter is now hiring.
Key Details
- Elon Musk has made many big changes to Twitter since he acquired the platform on October 27.
- Musk cut 50% of Twitter’s workforce almost immediately after his acquisition; now the platform has lost around 67% of its total workforce.
- Musk gave workers an ultimatum to either work hard or leave and to his surprise nearly 1,000 workers decided to cut ties with Twitter.
- Now he can determine what staff are needed now a great number have left the company.
Why it’s news
Elon Musk has a specific vision he is trying to bring to life with Twitter calling it “Twitter 2.0” and he is changing anything that doesn’t fit that vision.
When he first acquired Twitter in late October, he began immediately making changes by firing the entire Twitter board and around 3,700 employees.
Later on he emailed the remaining workers an ultimatum to work hard or leave the company.
“Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade,” he writes in the email.
Around 1,000 employees decided to leave after he sent the email. Twitter needs all hands on deck to achieve Musk’s goals and after he has lost around 67% of employees he is in trouble.
Musk tweeted a series of slides from a Twitter company talk and one says “We’re recruiting,” but does not state how many employees or what positions are available.
The rest of the slides detail the achievements Twitter has made since Musk’s acquisition. Musk says that Twitter signups and active user minutes are at an “all time high.”
He goes on to say that during the week of November 12 Twitter had an average of 2 million new users per day, which is up 66% compared to the same week in 2021.
The slides also said that “Hate speech impressions are lower,” which was a big concern for many investors when Musk said that he wanted to turn Twitter into a free speech platform.
Despite setbacks and the need to hire more employees, Musk is ambitious about the future of Twitter. “I think I see a path to Twitter exceeding a billion monthly users in 12 to 18 months,” he says.
Other changes
Musk has made a plethora of other changes to Twitter including revamping the verified Twitter check mark and adding a fact-checking feature called Community Notes.
Musk launched a paid subscription where users could pay to get a verified checkmark on Twitter, but the idea backfired causing Musk to rework the subscription with plans to relaunch it.
Many were unhappy with the $8-per-month service due to the fact that anyone who paid the fee was able to get verified resulting in many impersonation accounts.
The new verification system will feature different colored check marks for different accounts to better differentiate verified users, according to Musk.
With the new system Twitter will manually authenticate each user who pays for the check and each check will be a different color. “Gold check for companies, grey check for government, blue for individuals (celebrity or not),” Musk says on Twitter.
Another change was adding a fact-checking feature called Community Notes.
Community Notes was formerly known as Birdwatch and was created to put a stop to the spread of false or misleading information on the platform. The feature works by adding a note from Twitter users under a tweet to explain the context and tell users if the Tweet is misleading in any way.
