Musk defends Twitter layoffs: company is ‘losing over $4 million/day’

Twitter’s new owner said he had “no choice” but to cut half the company’s workforce because the platform was losing over $4 million per day.

Reports of Twitter employees being remotely logged out of company email and messaging emerged Thursday night, just hours after Musk announced that layoffs were coming the next day.

CNN reports that workers from a wide range of departments, including ethical AI, public policy, wellness and marketing and communications, were cut by Friday morning.

“Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day,” he tweeted Friday evening.

He added that the employees who were fired was offered three months of severance pay, which he claimed “is 50% more than legally required.”

Tech billionaire Elon Musk is playing defense as advertisers and prominent users raises concerns about content moderation and hate speech under his ownership.

He reshared a tweet thread from his Head of Safety & Integrity Yoel Roth, who said that while the moderation team was temporarily locked out of internal systems along with the rest of the company, the department was among the least impacted by layoffs and would regain access in the coming days.

“tl;dr: While we said goodbye to incredibly talented friends and colleagues yesterday, our core moderation capabilities remain in place,” Roth said, noting that his Trust & Safety team was only reduced by 15%, compared to 50% cuts company-wide.

He said that “front-line moderation staff” that review incoming claims was least affected by layoffs, saying, “Last week, for security reasons, we restricted access to our internal tools for some users, including some members of my team. Most of the 2,000+ content moderators working on front-line review were not impacted, and access will be fully restored in the coming days.”

Musk had complained earlier on Friday that Twitter had experienced a “massive drop in revenue” due to activist groups pressuring advertisers even though nothing had been changed in content moderation.

“We did everything we could to appease the activists,” he said. “Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.”