It is difficult to know how large the carnage is inside the micro-blogging site. Half of the company's employees are being ousted by Musk, according to the company's internal FAQ. It would be a bloodbath with few precedents in tech history.
Musk claimed on Friday that there was a massive drop in revenue due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, and that everyone who left was offered three months of severance. The offer was thought to be for a month. There is a requirement in federal law for 60 days' notice.
It's important to caution that Musk is a troll and that 50 percent may end up being lower so he can look better. You can't accuse him of having consistent business logic since he is threatening a "thermonuclear name and shame" of former advertisers.
Tweet may have been deleted(opens in a new tab)
We should caution about other things. The tech sector has shed 52,000 employees since the beginning of the year and 3,750 firings isn't much compared to that. New York's struggling bike-with-screen seller has laid off more than 4,000 people since January, but Musk can probably boast of having the single largest firing round of the year.
A lot of the tech firings weren't big news because they were being carried out compassionately. There's a fog of war in tech. Let's start with the murkiest and look for trends.
Facebook's parent company put as many as 15 percent of its workforce on "Performance Improvement Plans" in October, in the wake of the departure of its COO. Some headlines suggest Zuck fired 15 percent of the company because employees expect thePIPs to lead to their removal. We are not sure if this is the case. When fewer people pay attention to news at the holidays, Zuck may consider it a good idea to cut staff.
This is how you fire people if you want to avoid a lawsuit.
Meta has instituted a hiring freeze and has withdrawn a few job offers. It's worth pointing out that Meta has unique troubles that don't apply to the industry as a whole.
The industry as a whole is moving in the same direction. Let's take a look at that bellwether.
The dot-com crash happened in 2000. The stock market decline was sparked by the news that an antitrust judge had thrown out Microsoft's case.
The company isn't as well known in tech as it was in the Bill Gates era, but it's still out there. There was a round of layoffs at the company in October.
There is good news at Microsoft China, which is planning to increase its staff by 1,000. Despite China's weak economy and new US restrictions on chip imports, that news came.
In August, the company announced it would be cutting around 1,200 workers, or 20% of its workforce. That was a foregone conclusion. It wasn't a sustainable way to turn a profit when it was a social media icon.
The stock price of the company had already nosedived by 80%. The only reason that the company can't turn a profit is because of the $13 billion debt that was taken out by Musk.
Musk was not the only person to explode an employment bomb in San Francisco. The company did the same thing. The layoffs were due to the coming recession. Another thousand were laid off by a financial tech company. More than any other sub-group of tech firms, thecryptocurrencies industry has lost thousands this year.
Let's stick to the names we're familiar with. According to reports, Intel will cut thousands of jobs by the end of the year. It's possible that Musk will have competition soon. We've heard of hiring freezes but no major layoffs at the major tech companies. The latter will be hiring 1,500 workers for the holidays.
The layoffs suggest that a company grew too fast during that time. You could call it a post-pandemic correction if there were actual human livelihoods involved.
In the tech world outside the U.S., hiring and firing seem to be the same thing. The company slashed 10 percent, or 1,000 employees, after rapid expansion during the Pandemic. Australian business software giant Atlassian is currently trying to hire exactly the same number of people, and maybe these Commonwealth countries can work on some sort of exchange.
The trend is that there is no trend at the moment. Some tech companies are better positioned than others. It is almost as if the tech industry has been around for 20 years after the dot-com crash.
There is no excuse for Musk's pink slip.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
