It has almost been a week since Elon Musk led the layoffs at Twitter. In a sudden move on Friday, the microblogging platform let go of half of its 7,500 employees that they had. The sudden move did not sit well with the employees and they filed a class lawsuit via an attorney. But, when the employees got the hint of an impending layoff, they compared it to a significant episode of ‘Game Of Thrones‘.
The series gained a cult following which led to the creation of the mega-hit series, the prequel to ‘Game of Thrones’, the ‘House of the Dragon’. Even before layoffs, Elon Musk fired some top-tier executives including the CEO Parag Agrawal. So, there is an episode which, after employees were sacked, Twitter took the reference and started calling the mass layoffs by that name. What was the ‘Game of Thrones’ episode that Twitter is referring to in the wake of the layoffs?
Also Read: Elon Musk Twitter Takeover: Employees Are Suing The Platform For ‘Mass Layoffs’
Twitter Compared The Mass Layoffs To The ‘Red Wedding’
On October 27th, 2022, Elon Musk completed the acquisition of the micro-blogging platform. Since then, there were hints that the Tesla owner may reduce the employee headcount. It was not new for the business mogul as he already did so at Tesla sacking 10% of its employees during the inflation period.
So, when he acquired Twitter, layoffs were predicted. On November 4th, 2022, he finally implemented it and fired half of its workforce citing the reason for the loss of $4 million per day.
Since the layoff, Twitter got inundated with posts and retweets comparing the sacking of the employees to the ‘Game of Thrones’ third season’s ‘The Rains of Castamere’ episode. In that episode, one of the most brutal scenes in the history of television was shown.
To the people unaware, the massacre takes place due to Lord Walder Frey breaking the marriage pact between House Stark and House Frey during the War of the Five Kings. In a New York Times article, one of the employees wrote on Slack, “Has the red wedding started?” referencing this episode of the ‘Game of Thrones’.
Also Read: What Was The Viewership Of ‘House Of The Dragon’ Finale? Was It More Than ‘Game Of Thrones’?
Meta Has Also Implemented A Mass Layoff
In the same move as Twitter, the Facebook parent company Meta also implemented the biggest layoffs of the year. The company fired 11,000 employees from its 87,314 people. On November 8th, 2022, Mark Zuckerberg told the executives that his missteps and “over-optimism” led to staffing and hence the company decided to sack its employees. The business and hiring teams received the biggest brunt with the layoff decision.
During his Q3 meeting, he discussed “shrinking the size” of the workforce to “focus on a small number of high-priority growth areas”. He also added, “So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year. In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”
Also Read:“Over-Optimism”: Mark Zuckerberg Confirms Implementation Of Mass Layoffs At Meta
