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Elon Musk Reportedly Plans to Lay Off Majority of Twitter Employees

Elon Musk has told investors he plans to cut nearly 75% of the workforce if he takes control of the company, The Washington Post reports.

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Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. He's been hooked on tech since learning BASIC in the late '70s. When not cleaning up after his daughter and son, Steven can be found pedaling around the San Francisco Bay Area. Before joining CNET in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers.
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Queenie Wong Former Senior Writer
Queenie Wong was a senior writer for CNET News, focusing on social media companies including Facebook's parent company Meta, Twitter and TikTok. Before joining CNET, she worked for The Mercury News in San Jose and the Statesman Journal in Salem, Oregon. A native of Southern California, she took her first journalism class in middle school.
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Steven Musil
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Elon Musk's profile picture on his Twitter page
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Twitter's workforce is expected to be gutted in the coming months, regardless of who owns the social media company, The Washington Post reported Thursday, citing interviews and internal documents.

Billionaire Elon Musk, who launched a hostile takeover bid for the company earlier this year, told perspective investors that he planned to cut nearly 75% of the company's 7,500 employees, the Post reported, leaving a workforce of 2,000.

Even without Musk's deal, cuts are still imminent, the Post reported. Twitter's current leadership plans to trim the company's payroll by about $800 million by the end of next year, meaning roughly a quarter of the company's employees would be laid off.

Twitter employees are reportedly protesting plans to cut workers, circulating a letter on Monday addressed to Musk, Twitter's board of directors and staff. In a letter published by Time, Twitter workers say that layoffs "will hurt Twitter's ability to serve the public conversation."

"A threat of this magnitude is reckless, undermines our users' and customers' trust in our platform, and is a transparent act of worker intimidation," Twitter workers said in the letter. 

Musk and Twitter are expected to close the $44 billion deal for the company on Oct. 28, after a months-long legal battle that involved Twitter suing the Tesla and SpaceX CEO after the billionaire said in July that he no longer wanted to buy Twitter and take the company private.

Musk has said Twitter misled him about the number of spam or fake accounts on the platform and violated the merger agreement by not disclosing a $7 million settlement with its former security head, Peiter Zatko.

Twitter responded in July with a lawsuit against Musk to enforce the merger agreement and alleged that the billionaire is trying to get out of acquiring the company because his personal wealth has fallen and the purchase has thus become more expensive.

Musk's lawyer sent a letter to Twitter that said Musk intends to move forward with purchasing the company for the original offer price of $54.20 per share.

Twitter and Musk representatives didn't respond to requests for comment.