Elon Musk's Twitter Makes a Big U-Turn: It's Hiring

Twitter is hiring. 

The social network lost in less than a month some 5,000 employees, or 67% of its workforce. This hemorrhage is due to the decisions of its new owner Elon Musk. 

The billionaire took over the platform on October 27 after six months of tension and twists and turns for a whopping $44 billion. Under pressure to find new sources of revenue for the firm which does not generate profits despite being influential in the public debate, Musk has embarked on an austerity cure. 

He cut half the workforce in one day. But he wasn't done: In an email sent to the platform's 3,700 employees on November 16, Musk asked them to choose between working long hours to help revamp Twitter 2.0 or leaving the company with three months of severance pay.

Ultimatum

"Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade," the billionaire wrote.

"If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below," he continued. "Anyone who has not done so by 5pm ET tomorrow (Thursday) will receive three months of severance."

But while Musk had hoped the number of employees choosing to leave would be manageable, he found himself with a significant surge. More than a thousand employees decided to leave the company, which may pose risks to Twitter's business and the entire platform. All of this caused confusion because the company no longer knew who was going to have access to the premises and its assets. As a result, Musk  decided to momentarily close the offices.

A few days after these events, the social network finds itself again in an unenviable position: it is recruiting. The announcement was made in company slides shared on November 26 on the platform by Elon Musk himself.

On one of the slides it is written: "We're recruiting." It is not specified how many positions are to be filled or the nature of the jobs - engineers, sales etc...

In the rest of the slides, the platform displays the progress made in recent weeks. Twitter claims that "New User signups" are at an "all-time high". In detail, the group said it has registered an average of 2 million new users per day during the week of  November 16. This is up 66% compared to the same week in 2021. 

"User active minutes" are also at an "all-time high."

Ambitious Goal

The platform, one of the major challenges of which is the management policy for hateful content, also ensured that hateful posts are down: "Hate speech impressions are lower," it said. This point is important because many advertisers have suspended their commercials to see what direction Musk intends to give the platform on the "hate speech".

Twitter also said the impersonation that soared in Musk's early days are down, no doubt due to the microblogging website's decision to permanently suspend anyone found guilty of pretending to be someone else.

Musk had to pause Twitter Blue, an $7.99 a month service for users to receive the once hailed blue check mark. But after many public companies such as pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly  (LLY) - Get Free Report were impersonated and lost millions of dollars in market capitalization overnight, several ad and media buying agencies told their clients to stop advertising on the microblogging website.

Musk said on November 15 that a revamped Twitter Blue will be launched on Nov. 29. When Blue returns, the check marks will have three different colors and a big change, Musk said on November 25.

"Sorry for the delay, we’re tentatively launching Verified on Friday next week," Musk said. Gold check for companies, grey check for government, blue for individuals (celebrity or not) and all verified accounts will be manually authenticated before check activates. Painful, but necessary."

The billionaire is now very ambitious.

"I think I see a path to Twitter exceeding a billion monthly users in 12 to 18 months," he said on November 27.