(PresidentialHill.com)- Elon Musk has made his presence known at his new company Twitter in a shocking way.
After promising for months that he would cut back the workforce should his deal to acquire the social media company complete, he did just that on Friday, cutting almost half of the total workforce.
Sources told The New York Times that roughly 3,700 jobs in total had been cut by Musk, a massive move that comes a little more than a week after his $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter was finalized, which officially made it a private company and no longer public.
The cuts were made throughout the company, in nearly all departments. Members of some of the company’s most well-known teams — public policy, search, curation, marketing and communication, wellness and ethical AI — had tweeted that they were let go.
Many employees who were laid off took to Twitter to let the world know, and to share their disgust and dismay at not only the fact that they were let go, but the manner in which it was handled.
Simon Balmain was one of the employees who was laid off on Friday. He served as Twitter’s senior community manager. He spoke with CNN and told the media outlet that he had his access to internal systems, email and Slack turned off about eight hours before he received an email on Friday that told him he was being let go.
He said the email he received “still didn’t provide any details really” regarding why he was being let go. He said:
“The waves of annoyance and frustration and all that stuff are absolutely mitigated by the extreme solidarity we’ve seen from people that are in the company, people that are in the same position, people that left the company in years gone by. It’s like a giant support network, which has been absolutely amazing.”
While all of this was going on, Musk appeared at an investor conference, where he focused much of his time speaking about two of his other companies — SpaceX and Tesla.
The interviewer did bring up that Musk had laid off half of Twitter’s workforce, and he nodded in reply. Musk then added:
“I tried to get out of the deal … I think there is a tremendous amount of potential … and I think it could be one of the most valuable companies in the world.”
He did mention that there were “revenue challenges” that Twitter had been facing before he acquired the company, and that the layoffs were a necessary evil. Musk said “a number of major advertisers have stopped spending on Twitter” since he acquired the company.
Twitter knew that there would be backlash to the mass layoffs, so they temporary closed offices around the world and cut access for workers to internal systems I the process.
They let all employees know on Thursday that anyone who was going to be laid off would be notified via email.
