Mass Layoffs Begin In Twitter As Elon Musk Plans To Reduce Company Workforce By 50%, Pfizer And Audi Pull Out As Advertisers

50% of Twitter's 7,500 employees are likely to lose their jobs, according to various media reports. The layoffs will target sales, trust and safety, marketing, product, engineering, and legal teams.

The mass layoffs come exactly a week after Elon Musk completed the USD 44 billion acquisition of the social media company and ousted CEO Parag Agrawal, legal executive Vijaya Gadde, Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal and General Counsel Sean Edgett.

Earlier this week, Musk dissolved Twitter's board of directors and appointed himself the company's "sole director". The board was comprised of nine directors.

The decision to rationalise the workforce comes after a weeklong assessment performed by Musk. Musk has temporarily halted Twitter's internal projects and assigned a team of handpicked Tesla engineers to review the platform's code.

Musk, who has often described himself as a "free-speech absolutist", has promised a more relaxed approach to content moderation by setting up a system that only flag and deletes tweets that violate the laws.

Musk announced that Twitter would charge users $8 per month to be verified, overturning the platform's current policy of offering the blue check mark to journalists and other noted public personalities. He also suggested he may reverse Twitter's lifetime-ban policy, which has kept several prominent figures off the site, including former president Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Musk is also said to be working to double the revenue of micro-blogging site in three years and triple the number of daily users that can view ads in the same period. However, in a setback to Musk's plan to improve ad revenues, many existing advertisers have temporarily withdrawn from the site over fears that a laisse fairez content moderation policy could make the platform toxic. Cereal maker General Mills, pharma giant Pfizer and auto company Audi were among the latest pull-outs.

As speculation mounted that the new management under Musk was planning mass layoffs, a section of company employees circulated an open letter condemning the move.

"A threat of this magnitude is reckless, undermines our users' and customers' trust in our platform, and is a transparent act of worker intimidation," the letter read.

"A threat of this magnitude is reckless, undermines our users' and customers' trust in our platform, and is a transparent act of worker intimidation," the letter read.

"We demand to be treated with dignity, and to not be treated as mere pawns in a game played by billionaires," the list of demands stated.