Just four months have passed since Elon Musk bought Twitter and abruptly fired half the workforce, but the boss continues to lay off employees and stir up controversy, raising doubts about the platform’s viability.
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This weekend, the California-based company again laid off at least 200 employees, or 10% of its workforce, according to the New York Times.
According to estimates by the daily newspaper and other specialist media such as The Information, the company had already grown from 7,500 to 2,000 employees since the end of October, between social plans, layoffs and engineers personally fired for criticizing Elon Musk.
“Twitter’s lights are still on, but just barely, really,” comments Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg.
She predicts that the social network, which had more than 368 million monthly users worldwide in 2022, will lose about 32 million between 2022 and 2024, startled by the proliferation of toxic content and / or by the increase in the number of glitches.
“The staff is reduced to a skeleton, so there are very few people solving technical issues and those related to content moderation,” she told AFP.
Knowing that the leader does not seem to mollify advertisers or associations.
popularity
This weekend he defended cartoonist Scott Adams, who said he wanted “nothing to do with black people.”
Several newspapers announced they would no longer publish his cartoons, but Elon Musk on Sunday accused the American media of being “racist towards whites and Asians” after being “long racist towards non-whites”.
Under his leadership, “Twitter has become a machine for spreading conspiracy and hate speech,” said Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America recently.
According to this NGO, which fights disinformation, ads for various companies have appeared alongside “reports by anti-Semites who deny the Holocaust”.
“Twitter has lost hundreds of its top advertisers and its revenue has plummeted compared to last year,” notes Jasmine Enberg.
The brands have no “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 that trend is set to intensify: “Twitter just managed to avoid a decline in its user base in 2022 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 Elon Musk site tried to explain earlier this month, according to The Verge.
The multi-billionaire had asked developers why his messages were being read less than before. A computer scientist explained to him that it was a problem of popularity and not the algorithm – he was fired.
“On the Key”
At the same time, many ex-employees and companies have filed lawsuits against the San Francisco company for abusive breach of contract or non-payment of rent and bills.
And Blue, the paid-for subscription launched last year in great confusion as an alternative to advertising revenue, isn’t a hit. According to The Information, as of mid-January in the United States, only 180,000 people had subscribed to the formula.
“Twitter would have to increase its number of subscribers almost a hundredfold worldwide to compensate for the loss of advertising revenue,” notes Jasmine Enberg. “It’s not a badly started fight, it’s an insurmountable task.”
Esther Crawford, the architect of this product, is among those who received thanks over the weekend. She was one of the few managers to show her support for the new boss, even retweeting a photo of her sleeping in a sleeping bag at work.
“Those who mock and mock are bound to be on the sidelines, not in the arena,” she tweeted Monday, defending her “optimism and hard work.”
Elon Musk – 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 bounce back.
Until then, “Twitter will survive unless it makes the decision to end the service,” believes Jasmine Enberg. “There is a loyal user base, and the network can survive even with technical problems and an uncomfortable atmosphere.”