Elon Musk has said that he will lay off 75% of Twitter staff if his takeover of the company goes through. He is reported to have told potential investors that this is going to be his primary way of cutting costs.
The deal to purchase the company is in its final stages, and needs to be completed by October 28th. If a deal cannot be reached by this time, then it will end up in court. Twitter has said that they will not agree to the sale if Musk can’t prove that the finances are in place.
Job losses have been expected at Twitter, although not to the degree suggested by Musk. He is now in the position where he needs to reassure investors that they will get a good return on the money they put in. Cuts were to be made to around a quarter of the workforce, which would save the company $800 million per year. This was considered to be the maximum number of staff that could be reduced without the platform being impacted in terms of service.
There are concerns that if the majority of the workforce are dismissed, then Twitter will almost instantly become a less user-friendly platform. There will almost certainly be an increase of spam and hacking on the site. While it might save money initially, it can be costly to put things right again when they perhaps should never have gone wrong to begin with.
