Elon Musk is once again slashing Twitter’s operating costs.
What happened: Twitter has laid off roughly 200 more employees, or about 10% of its remaining workforce. The move brings the company’s headcount to less than 2,000, down from 7,500 seen in October last year—before Elon Musk took over the social media platform.
Bottom line: Twitter hasn’t been profitable since 2019, and ad revenues (its main source of income) took a 40% hit last year. To turn things around, Musk has launched a premium subscription-based version of the platform called “Twitter Blue” and sent employees packing, including workers from key departments.
- The latest round of layoffs include engineers involved in site maintenance, as well as staffers from Twitter’s monetization team, which shrank from 30 to fewer than 8 and lost the famously loyal Twitter Blue director Esther Crawford.
Not even internal communications systems were spared from the haircut: Late last week, Twitter’s management shut down its Slack messaging platform, grinding work to a halt for many and leaving Twitter staffers to speculate that it was another cost-cutting measure.
What’s next: Musk’s latest innovation for the platform is a plan to share ad revenue with content creators that use Twitter Blue, which could help to drive subscriptions going forward.