After the $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, Elon Musk has already started work on Twitter 2.0. But with layoffs and charging for verification, the future of the platform looks bleak in India
On October 28, 2022 Elon Musk finally acquired Twitter for $44 billion. The first plan of action on his agenda was layoffs. A week post the acquisition, the workforce reportedly received an email stating, “If your employment is not impacted, you will receive a notification via your Twitter email. If your employment is impacted you will receive a notification with next steps via your personal email.”
As expected, about 50 percent of the staff received emails on their personal email. Globally, Twitter has laid off close to 3,700 employees and from the India team, 180 of the 230 employees have been fired. On the layoffs he tweeted, “Unfortunately there’s no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day.”
With Musk at the helm, a shake-up was expected and the mass layoffs are just the beginning. The board has been dissolved, including the chair, Bret Taylor, making Musk the sole director of Twitter. Top executives have also been fired, including chief executive Parag Agrawal, the chief financial officer, Ned Segal, and the head of legal, policy and trust, Vijaya Gadde. He has already signalled that users will be charged for verification, amongst many other changes. If implemented, it would mean a complete overhaul of Twitter as we know it—while some think it might be for the worse, some agree that it might be for the better. But in India, the future of the platform looks bleak.