Report: 50% of Twitter Workers Will Lose Their Jobs on Friday

Reports that Elon Musk plans to cut somewhere between 25% and 75% of Twitter's workforce were on the nose, sources tell Bloomberg. The insiders say Musk plans to cut 50% of jobs at the company and around 3,700 affected employees will be informed on Friday. According to Bloomberg's sources, senior employees who weren't canned immediately after Musk's acquisition of Twitter last week were told to come up with lists targeting a 50% reduction in headcount—and the lists ranking employees by their contributions were reviewed by senior Tesla staff. The sources say Musk, who has long criticized remote work, plans to end Twitter's "work from anywhere" policy, though some exceptions could be made.

Twitter investor Changpeng Zhao, chief executive of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, said Thursday that the company should have a "slimmer workforce," the Guardian reports. "I do feel that Twitter, given the 7,500 people they have, the amount of new features that have been rolled out is quite slow," Zhao said at the Web Summit in Lisbon Portugal. Zhao, who invested $500 million in Musk's $44 billion deal, says he doesn't know Musk's exact plan for job cuts but he trusts the new owner "will do the right thing for the organization."

Beyond cutting costs by eliminating jobs, Musk also plans to turn the Twitter Blue subscription into an $8 per month service that would include user verification and priority in search results. He has also floated ideas including a paywall for videos. "This is the sort of thing you do when you’re desperate to improve your new company’s balance sheet and you’re willing to consider just about anything," writes Russell Brandom at the Verge. He notes that while Musk insisted earlier this year that the acquisition was about free speech and "not about the economics at all," his thinking has probably "evolved" after a closer look at the company's finances. The loans Musk took out to finance the deal brought the company's interest payments to around $1 billion a year, more than its total profit for 2021. (More Twitter stories.)