Anatomy of the week the Elon Musk tornado hit Twitter
The whirlwind week that Elon Musk took over Twitter began with sleepless nights for company engineers -- and ended with half the staff getting the axe.
"It was a strange week," said one former employee speaking on condition of anonymity.
"Executives were getting fired or were resigning, but there was basically no official communication until 5 pm Thursday," some seven days after the deal was made official.
The employees received a first email Thursday informing them that they would know their fate the next day. On Friday, the second email confirmed the rumors: 50 percent of the staff lost their jobs.
The cull hit the marketing department hard, took two-thirds of the design department and maybe 75 percent of managers. Content moderation was somewhat spared, with a layoff rate of only 15 percent, according to Yoel Roth, head of safety at the platform.
After 24 hours without addressing the layoffs, Musk finally tweeted that "unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day" and that all those who lost their jobs were "offered three months of severance."
The layoff decision did not come as a surprise to employees -- rumors had been growing -- but they were shocked by how brutally it was carried out.
"People would find out not by any phone call or any email... but just by seeing their work laptop automatically reboot and just to go blank," Emmanuel Cornet, a French engineer who had been at Twitter for a year and a half, told AFP on Friday. - Class-action suit - Cornet was dismissed Tuesday after being told in an email he had "violated" several company policies, without further explanation, after spending an entire weekend in the office on projects launched by edict of the new owner.
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