Elon Musk Savagely Laid Off 200 More of His Remaining Twitter Employees

OLIVIER DOULIERY. Getty Images.

You know, you're average, ordinary, run o' the mill World's Richest Man would scrub the launch of one of his rockets carrying four astronauts to the International Space Station at the last minute over technical problems and call it a day:

But say what you will about Elon Musk, no one ever accused him of being average when it comes to anything he does. Quite the contrary. When it comes to ridiculously eccentric billionaires, he is, as you kids would say if this is was still 2015, extra. Because at the same time his literal rocket scientists were handing a crushing a quartet of dreams, he was firing a substantial chunk of what's left of his workforce at Twitter. Meaning the ones we can presume to have been loyal to Musk back when a very vocal percentage of his employees were issuing demands and threatening to quit if he didn't comply.

There's multitasking, then there's the sort of multitasking where you're supervising a rocket launch while simultaneously handing moving boxes to your tech people and telling them they've got 10 minutes to clear their offices before security sees them out. Employees like this young woman:

Daily Mail - Twitter has laid off another 200 employees, around 10 percent of its remaining workforce, in the latest round of job cuts since Elon Musk took over last October.

The layoffs, announced Saturday, bring Twitter's workforce down to under 2,000 - a sharp fall from the 7,500 employed when the billionaire first took over.

On Sunday, Musk Tweeted:

Saturday's cuts targeted product managers, data scientists and engineers and include product manager and Musk devotee Esther Crawford who led the launch of paid subscription service Twitter Blue.

Crawford famously backed Musk's 'extremely hardcore' Twitter 2.0 culture when he first took over. …

Musk told employees during a meeting in late November that no more plans for staff reductions were being made.

At the time, Musk defended the decision to fire 3,700 people, saying: 'There is no choice when the company is losing over $4mn/day.' …

[S]taff suspected another wave of cuts was coming this month after they suddenly lost access to their Slack channel last week.

On Saturday night, some found they had been logged out of their emails and laptops.

Ouch. I mean, there's no good way of telling someone they're about to lose their livelihood. I've mentioned before in this context and will again, I got laid off due to staff cuts once. One month into my first mortgage and with a baby on the way. And I never spent a night in a sleeping bag on the floor of the conference room in order to help the partners in the firm stop losing $4 million a day. It's a feeling I wouldn't wish on Jackson fucking Mahomes. But this? It is brutal. Just brutal. At that point, Elon might've been better served by just taking a knee for a few hours on the socials. No one wants to hear from the boss who just fired them, period. But least of all, with a platitude that sounds like the caption under some vapid Instagram model's bikini pic. 

I still remain an Elon fan. I truly believe that what he did in grossly overpaying for Twitter was noble. An act of selflessness that probably no other human on Earth would have done, in order to restore some semblance of free speech back to the most influential social media site in the western world. It was probably naive, but also idealistic. He's to be admired for it. As far as the layoffs go, all you do is presume they were necessary. The company has been hemorrhaging money, and even the World's Richest Man can't do that for long. And given that the site seems to be functioning every bit as efficiently as it did back when it had 7,500 employees - and a yoga room, meditation room, afternoon cocktails and evening games of cornhole on the roof - it's fair to say they were overstaffed then. But when you're shitcanning a woman who stuck by you through all that and slept at work like a DI football coach, that's not cutting fat; it's cutting flesh and bone. And not the time for insincere well-wishes. 

As a final note, take this into consideration next time your employer really, really needs you to go the extra mile, work late, come in when you're sick, help out when it's supposed to be your day off, bring work home with you, or whatever. Loyalty is supposed to be a two-way street, but rarely is. The vast majority of companies, the big ones especially, would grind you up and put you in the American Chop Suey in the employee cafeteria if they thought it would improve the bottom line. Unless they're going to make you rich and therefore it's worth your while, find a job where you'll get treated right. Thus endeth the lesson.