Twitter in freefall: After firing 50 top executives on the weekend, Musk sacks 200 more workers

Over the weekend, Elon Musk fired 50 top-level executives from Twitter, including some of Elon Musk’s most loyal employees, people who have often defended some of Twitter’s most recent, questionable decisions. Now, we are learning that Musk has terminated 200 more employees or roughly 10 per cent of Twitter’s workforce, bringing the total number of terminated employees over the weekend to 250.

Among those that were laid off over the weekend, was long-term Musk loyalist Esther Crawford, who was also the Chief Executive of Twitter Payments. The reason, reports claim, why Crawford was terminated, is because of the lacklustre response to Twitter Blue.

Sleeping in the office not hardcore enough. pic.twitter.com/l1d4dT1PUZ

— bö (@ThBenkoe) February 26, 2023

Twitter Blue’s failure
Leaked documents from early February show, that barely 3,00,000 users have opted to subscribe for Twitter Blue. Apparently, Elon Musk has been hedging his bets on the subscription model and was hoping that more and more people would take the service up given the features that the subscription package offers.

However, despite repeated attempts to get people to sign on to Twitter Blue, and pulling off some seriously questionable moves, like limiting SMS-based 2FA to Twitter Blue, not even 1 per cent of Twitter’s userbase has opted for the service.

Twitter’s latest round of layoffs
According to a report by the New York Times, the layoffs on Saturday night which affected over 200 employees saw several product managers, data scientists, and programmers being terminated. Most of the workers who were terminated recently, worked on machine learning and site reliability, which helps keep Twitter’s different features online.

The newest layoffs follow a major layoff in early November when Musk struck off about 3,700 workers as part of a cost-cutting move.

The latest round of layoffs are also because of plunging revenues, something that Musk had predicted earlier in the year.

The curious case of Esther Crawford
The termination of Esther Crawford has been particularly surprising for most people who are aware of the situation. Crawford was one of the most vocal supporters of Musk taking over Twitter, and musk’s Twitter 2.0 vision. Crawford also made headlines back in November, when images of her sleeping on the floor at Twitter’s offices during a massive and prolonged crunch session.

Crawford was Chief Executive of Twitter Payments and was also heading the company’s new Twitter Blue product. The confirmation about her departure comes from Platformer’s Zoe Schiffer and The Verge’s Alex Heath. The reports also suggest that Twitter has laid off the entire Twitter Blue product team during the weekend.

As Chief Executive of Twitter Payments, Crawford was responsible for pushing Twitter Payments in as many easy as possible that would make the programme, the platform’s number one revenue source. However, if sources are to be believed, Crawford wasn’t able to meet Musk’s unreasonably high expectations.

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