Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Saturday, defended his decision of laying off employees from Twitter and said that there was no choice as the microblogging site is losing over $4 million a day. "Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day. Everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required," Musk tweeted. On Friday, according to an unsigned internal memo seen by The Verge, Twitter employees were notified in an email that the layoffs were set to begin.
Musk is expected to cut roughly half of Twitter's roughly 7,500-person workforce. Musk's purchase of Twitter for USD 44 billion was completed last week and on that same day, he fired several of the company's top leaders, including the chief executive Parag Agrawal.
Musk also blamed the activist groups for a massive drop in revenue. He said that nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists. "Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists," Musk tweeted.
Musk had already indicated that he would make job cuts at Twitter, telling employees at a town-hall meeting this summer that there needs to be "a rationalization of headcount" at the social network. Meanwhile, talking about the new changes in the micro-blogging site, Musk said in a tweet, "Again, to be crystal clear, Twitter's strong commitment to content moderation remains absolutely unchanged. In fact, we have actually seen hateful speech at times this week decline *below* our prior norms, contrary to what you may read in the press."