(San Francisco) Only four months have passed since Elon Musk bought out Twitter and abruptly fired half of the staff, but the boss continues to lay off employees and stir controversy, casting doubt on the platform’s ability to survive.
This weekend, the Californian company again laid off at least 200 employees, or 10% of its workforce, according to the New York Times.
Since the end of October, between social plans, resignations and engineers personally fired for criticizing Elon Musk, the company had already gone from 7,500 to 2,000 employees, according to estimates from the daily and other specialized media such as The Information.
“The light is still on at Twitter, but really just barely,” comments Jasmine Enberg, analyst at Insider Intelligence.
She predicts that the social network, which had more than 368 million monthly users worldwide in 2022, will lose some 32 million between 2022 and 2024, put off by the proliferation of toxic content and / or by the increase in the number breakdowns.
“The staff is reduced to a skeleton, so there are very few people to solve technical problems and those relating to the moderation of content,” she explains to AFP.
Knowing that the leader does not seem to seek to appease either advertisers or associations.
Popularity
This weekend, he defended cartoonist Scott Adams, who said he “wants nothing to do with” the black population.
Several newspapers announced that they would no longer publish his cartoons, but Elon Musk on Sunday accused the American media of being “racist towards whites and Asians” after having been “long racist towards non-white people”.
Under his leadership, “Twitter has become a machine for distributing conspiracies and hate messages,” said Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, recently.
According to this NGO fighting disinformation, advertisements for various companies have appeared alongside “accounts of anti-Semites who deny the Holocaust”.
“Twitter has lost hundreds of its major advertisers, and its revenue has plunged compared to last year,” notes Jasmine Enberg.
The brands do not have “trust” in the owner of the platform, whose audience has always been limited compared to its neighbors, the giants Google and Meta (Facebook, Instagram), she explains.
And this trend will get worse: “Twitter managed to avoid a decline in its user base in 2022 in particular because people wanted to watch the saga between Musk and the network live,” she believes. But the entrepreneur “is no longer up to date”.
That’s what an engineer at the site tried to explain to Elon Musk earlier this month, according to The Verge.
The multi-billionaire had asked developers why his messages were read less than before. A computer scientist explained to him that it was a problem of popularity and not an algorithm – he was fired.
“On the Key”
At the same time, many ex-employees and companies have filed complaints against the San Francisco company for abusive breaches of contract or non-payment of rents and bills.
And Blue, the paid subscription launched last year in the greatest confusion, as an alternative to advertising revenue, is not a hit. In mid-January, only 180,000 people had subscribed to the formula in the United States, according to The Information.
“Twitter would have to almost multiply by 100 its number of subscribers worldwide to compensate for its loss of advertising revenue,” notes Jasmine Enberg. “It’s not a badly started battle, it’s an insurmountable task”.
Esther Crawford, the architect of this product, is among the employees thanked this weekend. She had been one of the few managers to show her support for the new boss, even retweeting a photo where she was seen sleeping in a sleeping bag at her workplace.
“Those who mock and mock are bound to be on the sidelines and not in the arena,” she tweeted on Monday to defend her “optimism and hard work.”
Elon Musk – once again the richest man in the world according to Bloomberg – is looking for someone to replace him at the helm of Twitter, a move that could help the platform rebound.
Until then, “unless it makes a decision to end the service, Twitter will survive,” thinks Jasmine Enberg. “There is a loyal user base, and the network can survive even with technical problems and an unpleasant atmosphere.”