Laying off around 3,700 employees at one go Twitter, Elon Musk has once again proved that he can go nuts when it comes to taking decisions. On Friday many Twitter employees found from companies' different websites their employment getting terminated as part of Musk's Twitter layoff plan. And later, in a surprising turn, dozens of Twitter employees were called back after finding out they were falsely fired or required for Musk's new Twitter plans. The Twitter layoff was described by many as a whiplash event aimed at downsizing the workforce in wake of mounting losses. Going by the tweets by staff at Twitter, along with product and engineering teams, teams working on communications, content curation, human rights, and machine learning ethics got the stick. In Musk's own words, Twitter, a company he and well-heeled partners bought for $44 billion is losing $ 4 million a day. Regarding the callback, he is yet to tweet.
Casey Newton, who works for tech news outlet Platformer, and has been procuring information from Twitter Blind chats, quoted a message from the Twitter server on the team-messaging platform Slack: "sorry to @-everybody on the weekend but I wanted to pass along that we have the opportunity to ask folks that were left off if they will come back. I need to put together names and rationales by 4 PM PST Sunday." Irrespective of his intentions, the sudden mass firing and rehiring act certainly hints at Elon Musk's whimsical take towards managing the bird bot, single-handedly or rather heavy-handedly.
Earlier Elon announced his plans to charge the Blue Tick feature by $20 only to bring it down to $8 after facing severe backlash from the Twitter community. Apparently, he has a slew of other features to ship out such as bringing down a number of ads, the ability to post long videos, and getting priority ranking in replies, mentions, and searches. The company planned to roll out the Blue Tick feature on November 7th but delayed the plan till November 9th to avoid chaos. Reportedly the company was wary of impersonations on Twitter during the campaign and election process. Thank God! Elon Musk cares for elections.
In spite of the plans Elon has announced for Twitter, the Twitter community is interestingly speculating unconventional reasons. While some are wondering if Musk is taking wrong decisions, others are speculating that it is a "loyalty test". Science writer, Andrea Kuszewski tweeted, "I wonder if Musk will be treating this like a loyalty test: if someone is willing to come back, then they are ok with being treated like garbage and yet still remain loyal to the mad king. They will regret it, most likely."
