Elon Musk culls Twitter contractors after mass employee layoffs

[PSPS]

Elon Musk culls Twitter contractors after mass employee layoffs

11/13/2022
Ina Fried


After laying off half its staff earlier this month, Twitter on Saturday started culling its vast ranks of contract staff, sources confirmed to Axios.

Why it matters: Like many companies, Twitter's staff is made up of a mix of full-time employees as well as contract workers who work for a third party.

Details: Twitter has cut an unspecified number of contractors in various fields, including content moderation, sources confirmed to Axios. Many contractors' status has been in limbo since Twitter cut half its staff earlier this month, with some not knowing whom to even report to, since their counterparts inside the company have been laid off. Now some worry about their final paychecks since their teams no longer have any full-time Twitter employees to sign off on their time cards, sources tell Axios. The contractor cuts were noted earlier Saturday by Platformer's Casey Newton.

Between the lines: In at least some cases, if not all, workers did not get any direct communication from Twitter saying that their work had ended. They instead found out by seeing their access to Twitter computer systems had been shut off. This parallels the scene when full-time employees found out they had lost their job, not from a promised e-mail on Friday, but overnight on Thursday as they lost access to e-mail and other corporate computing systems. Twitter has since reached out to re-hire some full-time employees after realizing their skills were critical to existing projects, including new features that were a priority to the company. Some contractors, meanwhile, are concerned about getting paid for the last two weeks as a number of contractors ended up on teams with no full-time Twitter employees, leaving no one to sign off on their time cards, sources tell Axios.

The big picture: Twitter has been in a state of turmoil since Elon Musk took over, with products and features launched then pulled.

More at: https://www.axios.com/2022/11/13/elon-musk-twitter-contractor-layoffs

[TlalocW]

1. We all have a little bit of a conspiracy theorist inside of us

I'm 95% sure Elon is just Dunning-Kruger'ing himself all over the place, but that 5% is asking, "Is he tanking Twitter on purpose? Would it benefit him in some way? Isn't he close with the Saudis? Would this help them?"

[ZonkerHarris]

2. He's warming up. He wants to be a James Bond super villain.

[fierywoman]

3. Is it a humongous tax write-off for him?

[ProfessorGAC]

10. Unlikely

So much of his fortune is in unrealized capital gains, he's not paying that much in taxes in proportion to his wealth.
I think overpaying by $30 billion is just a colossal miscalculation by a guy who has gotten lucky in some investing but doesn't have operational acumen.
I know twitter didn't have great financials (they weren't making a profit) but when the FIRST step in a strategic plan is layoffs, it suggests a lack of strategic thinking.
His prior successes seem to be becoming a forward thinker while taking control of companies with solid management teams already in place.
The day to day, month to month operations at Tesla are handled without his involvement, for the most part.
He's just in a new arena and seems to have overestimated his business skills.

[fierywoman]

15. Thanks!

[reymega life]

4. the saudis probably put him up to this ending free speech in the west.

[GPV]

5. Free speech will soldier on. A new platform might fill the Twitter vacuum, anyway.

[NullTuples]

6. That new platform part will likely take a decade.

Does antifascism have a decade?

[GenThePerservering]

9. Mastodon

Already here and growing.

[edhopper]

12. You underestimate the speed of technology

and the requirements of a Twitter competitor.

[agingdem]

8. Dunning Kruger is right...

impervious to introspection, regards naysayers as envious little people, craves the spotlight and only reacts if his name is misspelled...

[JHB]

14. Naw, the typical pattern for that sort of thing is for the new owners to load...

...the company up on debt, which they use to pay themselves back (through a "special dividend" or whatever) to recoup the cost of acquiring it before they start messing with it in earnest.

It's a case where he decided he wanted a media outlet to trade favors and generally feed his ego, believed his own advertising about being a tech genius, and figured he didn't need to know anything about the actual business for him to waltz in out of the blue and make it work the way he wanted it to.

And don't assume his Saudi partners are immune to the same sort of magical thinking.

[Initech]

7. He literally is like Twitter's Surtur.

Just burning the entire thing to the fucking ground. It was a nice platform while it lasted.

[exboyfil]

11. I only used Twitter a little bit to engage in various political, entertainment, and sports chats

I cancelled my account, but I was wondering why is Twitter special? Facebook has many of the same features. What gives Twitter its value, and cannot those features be duplicated in another platform?

Are the key technical employees that are leaving either through forced terminations or voluntarily because of questionable management decisions required to sign non-competes to get final payouts? If not what stops them from developing new applications that can replace Twitter?

[Gore1FL]

13. I think several things are at play.

1> His ego and deteriorating mental health are getting the better of him.

2> He never knew how to run a company as demonstrated by his management style.

3> I think he fundamentally didn't understand how Twitter makes income, decided things worked another way, and re-organzied the company based on his misconceptions.

4> He's being publicly humiliated daily, now. This is, no-doubt, providing feedback to point 1.


He will continue to make poor decisions because he is in a panic.