The letter will be provided with the subject “Your role on Twitter”, the company announced on Thursday evening (local time) in a circular mail published by several US media. According to media reports, with 3700 jobs, around every second job at the short message service could be lost. Tech billionaire Musk completed the purchase of Twitter for around $44 billion last week.
According to the circular, employees who can stay on Twitter should receive the email at 9:00 a.m. US West Coast time on Friday (5:00 p.m. CET) at their company address. Anyone who loses their job will receive information about the next steps to their private e-mail address. On Twitter, it was understood that it was a “challenging experience,” said the circular email, which began with the salutation “Team” and was only signed with “Twitter”.
The Twitter offices will remain closed on Friday and all access cards will be deactivated, it said. “If you are in an office or on your way to an office, please return home.” The measure is intended to ensure the security of employees as well as the Twitter systems and user data.
The step should therefore be a precautionary measure to rule out any protest actions by those who have been laid off. That wouldn’t be unprecedented: in November 2017, on his last day on the job, a support employee deactivated the then US President’s Twitter account donald trump. It took about ten minutes for the account to be online again.
In the circular mail it said that downsizing is “unfortunately necessary to ensure the company’s future success.” Twitter was recently in the red. Musk had also taken out loans of around 13 billion dollars for the takeover deal – and according to media reports, servicing them requires more money than the Twitter business generates in free funds.
For Twitter employees, the circular was the first official communication since Musk completed the Twitter purchase last Thursday, as reported by the Washington Post, among others. A general meeting with Musk was originally announced for Friday. However, this had been canceled – as well as a later date for it, it said, citing employees.
Employees were most likely to learn about Musk’s ideas for the future of the service from the tech billionaire’s tweets. The Washington Post wrote on Friday night that his publicized plans for new functions in the paid subscription offer Twitter Blue came as a surprise to most employees in the responsible department. “We all work for Donald Trump’s White House,” she quoted an employee as saying. He alluded to the fact that Trump made announcements on Twitter, sometimes without consulting officials, and that even some of his ministers learned of their dismissal from tweets by the US president.
More and more big companies are taking Twitter ad breaks
After the takeover of the short message service Twitter by the US billionaire Elon Musk companies are increasingly stopping their advertising. The food company General Mills, the Oreo and MilkaManufacturers Mondelez International and pharmaceutical giant Pfizer were among a growing number of companies to temporarily stop advertising on Twitter, people told the Wall Street Journal.
Some advertisers feared the eccentric new owner could scale back content moderation, causing extreme and offensive posts to proliferate on the platform, the insiders said. Others held back because it was unclear where Twitter was headed following the dismissal of Twitter’s top management. Representatives from General Mills and Audi of America confirmed that they are not currently advertising on Twitter. “As always, we will continue to monitor this new direction and reevaluate our marketing,” said a spokeswoman for General Mills, whose brands include Häagen-Dazs. A Twitter spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
The car giant General Motors said last week that it would initially no longer advertise on Twitter. A number of companies have already followed suit. An executive at a major advertising agency said about 20 of his clients have temporarily halted spending on Twitter. Compared to Apple and Facebook, the Twitter platform is also not a must-have for many advertisers. Although Twitter lives from advertising, it only gets 1.1 percent of the entire digital advertising pie in the USA.
While the placement of digital ads is largely automated using technology, the business still depends heavily on the relationships between advertisers on the one hand and the ad sales executives on the platforms. There was a bloodletting on Twitter recently. Musk is currently struggling to reassure advertisers – both public and private – that the platform will remain a safe place for their brands. After tweeting last week that Twitter will not become a “hellscape for everyone,” the billionaire has since participated in several meetings and video calls with some of the world’s largest advertisers and blue-chip advertisers, advertising executives say.
For example, on Wednesday, Musk was present in a video call with WPP, the world’s largest advertising company, and some of its clients, including Coca-Cola, Unilever and Google, according to people familiar with the meeting. Musk promised to rid the platform of bots and use community management tools. It was also about how Musk wants to segment content on Twitter so that users can determine what is displayed in their feeds. Then users could build an adult version of the platform, Musk said. Advertisers would have more choices about what content to show around their ads, people familiar with the meeting said.
French advertising agency Publicis, which serves companies such as Anheuser-Busch and Samsung Electronics, is expected to host a one-hour video meeting with Musk for its clients shortly. This emerges from an e-mail from the agency to its customers.
VW plans to suspend advertising on Twitter after Musk takeover
Volkswagen has joined other companies looking to freeze advertising on Twitter following its takeover by tech billionaire Elon Musk. As a reason, the Wolfsburg called the announcement of the short message service on Friday to revise guidelines for the placement of such content. The VW Group has now “recommended its brands to pause their paid activities on the platform until further notice,” it said. This is not a definitive stop to advertising: “We are monitoring the situation closely and will decide on the next steps depending on how things develop.”
SAN FRANCISCO / WOLFSBURG (dpa-AFX) / NEW YORK (Dow Jones)
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