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Although reports are going around that says Elon Musk is set to terminate a few more people from Twitter’s ad sales team, the current CEO of Tesla and Twitter, in a recent all-hands meeting with Twitter employees, said that he is done with the process of terminating people from the organization and will now start hiring “the right people” soon.
When Musk took control of Twitter, the social media company employed about 7,400 people. This figure does not include the thousands of external contractors that Twitter had signed, which mainly included content moderators. Now, after all the terminations and resignations, the total number of people working at Twitter, as of Monday, stands at 2,700. As we said, a few reports suggest that a few more people might be terminated, mainly from the ad-sales team.
Musk informed the remaining staff at Twitter that they are actively recruiting for roles in engineering and sales and that employees are encouraged to make referrals. Musk didn’t specify the kinds of engineering or sales roles Twitter was hiring for, and the company doesn’t currently have any open roles listed on its website. “In terms of critical hires, I would say people who are great at writing software are the highest priority,” he said during the meeting.
Since the former staffers at Twitter rejected Musk’s idea of Twitter 2.0, a much more “streamlined and efficient workforce with the right work ethics,” recruiters have been busy hiring people, mainly engineers, who could join the company on short notice.
During the meeting, Musk acknowledged that his reorganization of the company would have a lot of mistakes but would stabilize as time passed. He also suggested it would be a good idea to decentralize certain things” by setting up engineering teams in Japan, India, Indonesia, and Brazil.
When asked about team member compensation, Musk revealed that employees at Twitter would be given stock options in the company, which they be able to cash out regularly, a practice prevalent in SpaceX.
At SpaceX, a liquidity event takes place every six months, where the company buys back shares from its employees and invites new investors to buy shares. Musk plans on operating Twitter in the same way.
Ever since Musk took control of Twitter, the top-level managers of several teams have either been terminated or have chosen to resign. The departures include long-tenured engineers, some with more than a decade of experience at the company.
Twitter’s CEO, CFO, and chief legal officer were all fired by Musk on the very first day. People leading Twitter’s ad sales and content partnerships have either resigned or been fired, and the layoffs and resignations entirely gutted multiple “critical” teams. These teams include Twitter’s communications team, which no longer exists, and Twitter’s finance, US tax, and paycheck processing teams.
