Elon Musk asked Twitter managers to curate a list of their best subordinates with one twist: many of them were hand-picking their replacements, according to a report.
Musk reportedly made the move to cut costs, a decision which struck a chord with Twitter’s employees, iNews reported.
“A big part of the way we think about our jobs is having a sense of pride about the job we do and where we work,” Bruce Daisley, a former Vice President of Twitter in Europe, said, according to iNews. “The more Musk behaves like the local drunk – getting into slanging matches with disabled ex-employees – the less current employees will be proud to say they work there.”
Under Musk’s ownership, Twitter employees have seen rapid change and little job security. Twitter cut its number of employees from 7,500 to 2,000 since Musk acquired the company in October 2022, The Street reported. Musk reportedly asked Twitter employees to commit to a “hardcore” version of the company or leave and take three months’ worth of severance in November 2022.
Elon Musk asked managers at Twitter to nominate their best employees for promotion, then fired the managers and replaced them with their lower paid nominees https://t.co/ngOh68eEZ5
— Luke Bailey (@imbadatlife) March 9, 2023
Twitter has suffered a spate of technical issues in the past month in which functions such as sharing, retweeting, and direct messaging stopped working, Vice reported. On Monday, links and pictures weren’t functional on the site, The Verge reported.
Twitter Support claimed that the problems were due to “internal changes” which resulted in “unintended consequences.”
A single Twitter engineer made a change to the platform’s internal API, which caused problems throughout the site, according to Platformer. The outlet also pointed to the layoffs as a reason for Twitter’s recent technical issues.
Twitter once had a risk evaluation team whose job entailed looking for potential bugs before large-scale product changes, according to reporting by The Washington Post. Musk reportedly laid that team off, which has resulted in more bugs whenever Twitter makes changes.