Elon Musk Begins Wide-Scale Layoffs at Twitter

Facts

• Elon Musk began mass layoffs at Twitter on Friday, sharply reducing the social media platform’s workforce. Employees began reporting being locked out of the social media platform's information systems on Thursday night and Friday morning.
• Per a reported internal memo, Twitter management informed employees it will be “reducing our global workforce.”
• The cuts will reportedly affect roughly half of Twitter's workforce — around 3.7K jobs — in an effort to cut expenses following Musk's $44B takeover.
• Expenses at Twitter have increased 31% year-over-year. The company reported a decline in revenue of $1.18B in its final quarter as a public company.
• Twitter is undergoing major changes under Musk — including changing its verification process to integrate paid subscriptions, re-establishing the short video app, Vine, that Twitter shut down years ago, and reviewing content moderation practices.

Sources: CNN, Verge, Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance, and Business Insider.

Narratives

• Right narrative, as provided by FOX News. Musk's acquisition is a real opportunity for Twitter to become free of biased censorship. With the billionaire entrepreneur at the helm, he can retain the general code of conduct to fight deceitful foreign influences while also allowing the marketplace of ideas to flourish, freeing it from so-called "fact checkers" with ill intentions.
• Left narrative, as provided by DW. While billionaires like Elon Musk may have the money to buy and influence social media platforms, they don't possess the character to manage them properly. Musk's Twitter history reveals an erratic personality with the potential to vastly alter the market with a single tweet simply to advance his self-interest. With Twitter set to have no barriers to what can or cannot be said, the app is looking like a disaster waiting to happen.