Twitter has been in flux since Elon Musk took over in October 2022. The billionaire has been eyeing on acquiring the platform for a long time. He has been the biggest shareholder in the microblogging site before the buyout. But, the purchase went through a tumultuous time. Elon faced a lawsuit from the company due to the long delays in the purchase. But, in October 2022, he finally completed the historic deal with $44 billion.
Since the acquisition, he has been at it to make Twitter the “digital town square of democracy”. He has executed many policy decisions to revamp the microblogging site into ‘Twitter 2.0’. But, when he started as the CEO, he initiated the saga of firing the employees including the previous top-tier executives. Then, after incurring huge losses, he fired more than half of the employees overnight. Later, he even fired janitors, contract workers, and veteran engineers. With a little progress and a handful of engineers, he is still sacking the workers.
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Elon Musk Reprimanded His Employees
In December 2022, along with the analytics feature, Elon Musk introduced the ‘View Count’ feature. Like the view counts on videos, the users can now see the counts on their tweets. He tweeted, “Twitter will start showing view count for all tweets, just as view count is shown for all videos. The system is far more alive than it would seem”. He also complained that many famous personalities have reduced their Twitter engagement.
Twitter will start showing view count for all tweets, just as view count is shown for all videos. The system is far more alive than it would seem.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 1, 2022
Twitter is rolling out View Count, so you can see how many times a tweet has been seen! This is normal for video.
Shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 22, 2022
Amidst all revamps like these, the Tesla owner has been rampantly reducing the head count at Twitter. In a mass layoff, he fired around 3,700 employees at Twitter. But, the layoffs continued with other contractors and even engineers as well. Some engineers were fired when they opposed recent policy decisions of Elon publicly.
Now, on February 7th, 2023, Elon Musk conducted a meeting with engineers and advisors. Recently, he went private with his account when many right-wing accounts complained that their engagement is affected due to new Twitter changes. So, he asked his employees for the solution and the reasoning behind it. The Verge reported that Musk reprimanded his employees. He said, “This is ridiculous. I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions”.
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During the engineers’ meeting, the employees shared with him data with the help of Google Trends regarding his Twitter engagement. He had a perfect “100” score in April 2022, but now the score has dropped to “nine”. After intense research, the employees did not find any discrepancies with regards to his engagement being artificially hampered. Musk was enraged and he yelled, “You’re fired, you’re fired”, he told an engineer.
In 2018, Elon Musk inflated the price of Tesla stocks after announcing that he will be going private with Tesla at $420. However, he did not keep his promise to go private and the stockholders lost a huge amount of money. The Securities and Exchange Commission conducted a probe and penalized them. Tesla and Elon Musk had to pay $20 million each and Musk had to step down from the Chairman position on Tesla’s board.
In 2023, the Tesla owner had to face court in January 2023 after the shareholders filed a lawsuit. On February 3rd, 2023, jury deliberation took place. During the jury deliberation, he was pronounced not guilty of charges of being responsible for causing loss to the shareholders. Elon Musk may have to pay billions to the shareholders from his already reduced wealth.
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