Elon Musk has made massive layoffs at Twitter, the social media platform he now owns. The 51-year-old billionaire defended his shooting spree by saying he had no choice. After handing out pink slips to employees via email, the world’s richest man shared a tweet that, like his other posts, went viral. “Power to the People,” tweeted Musk, which received more than 14,000 retweets and more than one million likes. Musk later took to Twitter to defend the $8 verification fee, saying, “Fall me all day, but it’s going to cost $8”.
Twitter’s boss has been coming up with new ways for Twitter to make money after its buyout, the most talked about being an $8 verification fee. There have been reports that the social media giant will charge $20 per month for a blue verification badge. After defending the verification fee by saying the company needed to pay bills, Musk announced that users would be charged $8 a month for verification.
On Friday, the social media giant laid off half of its 7,500 employees in Musk’s major overhaul of the company. According to an report, the fired employees were immediately denied access to company computers and email. “Unfortunately, there is no choice when it comes to reducing the power of Twitter when the company is losing more than $4 million a day,” Musk wrote Friday night.
The job cuts are Musk’s next step in figuring out ways to pay for the $44 billion deal, in which he took on billions of dollars in debt and sold $15.5 billion worth of Tesla stock. According to the report, Musk owes $1 billion in annual interest to pay for the deal, which he tried to back out of just days after making the offer. The moves would help offset the potential loss of advertisers, Twitter’s main source of revenue, with many of the world’s top brands suspending ad purchases, alarmed by Musk’s known disdain for content control.
