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The first day new Twitter owner Elon Musk walked into its San Francisco headquarters, he quickly fired former CEO Parag Agrawal. Soon after, he fired roughly half the company’s workforce. Reports indicate that in the week after the $44 billion aquisition, the social media platform lost more than 1.3 million users. Now, the Tesla founder has sold $3.95 billion worth of the EV stock, around 19.5 million shares. Straight Arrow News contributor Adrienne Lawrence fears Musk will end up ruining the company its employees worked so hard to build.
Last week closed out with chaos on Twitter and at Twitter. The social media platform’s new owner, Elon Musk, terminated the positions of nearly half of Twitter’s workforce, which stood around seventy-five hundred employees until Friday, 9 AM PT.
The bombastic billionaire left most of Twitter’s internal teams gutted, just days before the midterm elections when misinformation and disinformation campaigns were expected to surge. Not to mention that we’re in the midst of a rise in anti-Semitism sparked by the dangerous nonsense of an asinine rapper and idiotic NBA player.
Because of a billionaire, no one is safe at Twitter or on Twitter… and the end result will harm the people. From the start it was crummy how Musk moved to kill Twitter from within. Sure, when he took control of the company in the close of last month, Musk was open about the fact that he’d be slashing much of the platform’s workforce. But how he did it was cowardly. Sending out an unsigned email on Thursday basically telling people they’d be locked out of their offices and would know if they still had a job by way of an email the next morning. How long of a night that must’ve been for more than three thousand employees, many of whom were devoted to Twitter, and were left wondering if they’d be employed during the holiday season.
Not only did it appear that Musk failed to abide by state and federal laws ensuring advance notice of mass layoffs, but he also ignored any sense of decency.
Musk didn’t just kill the town square but he dismissed those who threw their heart into Twitter and he diminished a place where people could go to learn and be heard. For the sake of democracy, billionaires shouldn’t be able to buy social media platforms.
