3. Immediately fired most of Twitter's staff
Twitter was barely solvent when Musk took over, with income about equal to costs, so nobody could blame him for taking some difficult steps. But he took it to extremes.
The Washington Post suggested Musk planned to fire 75% of Twitter's staff. Ross Gerber, a shareholder in both Twitter and Tesla, countered the claim, saying that the figure was more like 50%.
Very reassuring.
The cuts didn't take long to start. First, Musk weeded out upper management; then, he started on the operational staff, telling them to accept a "hardcore culture" or leave.
If you can think of a team that might be important for legal or compliance reasons, it was probably affected.
Those included: the legal department; Trust & Safety; communications (totally gone - the PR address auto-responds to journalists' emails with a poo emoji); human rights; accessibility experience; machine learning ethics, transparency and accountability (META); public policy; content curation; and the entire Brussels office.
Some executives quit, rather than waiting to be fired.
In total, Musk slashed the workforce from more than 7,000 employees to about 2,000, losing valuable talent in the process. He would come to regret it.
Twitter was heavily criticised worldwide for how it handled the sudden dismissals. One former employee called the situation "carnage." The firings came so thick and fast that many didn't know they had lost their jobs until they lost access to corporate systems. WhatsApp became the main medium of communication, with some managers forced to text their teams to find out which of them still had jobs.
