Elon Musk Complains About Twitter Losing Revenue As He Lays Off 50% Of Employees

On the same day as mass layoffs of 50% of Twitter staff were announced, its new owner Elon Musk also wrote a Tweet complaining about how unnamed “activist groups pressuring advertisers” are causing a dip in revenue of the platform.

He also wrote bizarrely that advertisers choosing not to pay to be on his site is somehow an example of activists trying to “destroy free speech in America.”

For a brief period, Musk’s own Tweet was flagged with a “notes” feature adding extra context, but that eventually got scrubbed.

Seeing Elon try to blame anonymous activists for tanking the site and not his own erratic behavior for putting advertisers off is pretty baffling.

He has been revealing himself to be increasingly right-wing this past year, and also recently elevated an untrue right-wing conspiracy theory about the recent assault of Paul Pelosi on Twitter that he later deleted.

Internal memos told staff to wait until Friday to hear about their job status, and would know whether they got fired by which email account the message came in.

Several team members have taken to the very platform they were fired from to announce the firing.

Joan Deitchman, a former senior manager at Twitter announced that she and her entire team were laid off, and they were “inventing and building ethical AI tooling and methodologies.”

 

Another ex-employee put Musk on blast for firing an entire team who was working on a feature he teased as part of his plan to charge $8 per month for verification. Many teams had been working exhausting overtime hours through the weekend to try and execute elements that Musk demanded.

 

Twitter has already been hit with a class-action lawsuit regarding the layoffs, which was filed on November 3 the day before in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California.

The filing claims plaintiff Emanuel Cornet was one of the first people laid off without written notice on November 1, which may be in violation of both the California WARN Act and the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.

Musk pulled the same move earlier this month at Tesla, and there is also a lawsuit in the works on behalf of those employees.