Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) cut at least 50 employees on Saturday, including senior staff members who had previously been told they would be heading new projects at the social media company.
Esther Crawford, due to lead the way on Twitter’s proposed payment feature, was among those laid off, despite the PayPal-rivalling tool only being confirmed in late January.
“I’m deeply proud of the team for building through so much noise and chaos,” she tweeted in response to the news.
The worst take you could have from watching me go all-in on Twitter 2.0 is that my optimism or hard work was a mistake. Those who jeer & mock are necessarily on the sidelines and not in the arena. I’m deeply proud of the team for building through so much noise & chaos. ????
— Esther Crawford ✨ (@esthercrawford) February 27, 2023
Martin de Kuijper, another senior product manager, was another casualty, discovering he had been among the latest culled when he was locked out of his email.
The fresh cuts include “a ton of surprises,” commented Platformer editor Zoë Schiffer, given “Musk loyalists” were now being targeted.
Around 70% of Twitter’s original 8,000-strong workforce has been cut since Elon Musk bought the firm for US$44bn in October, to stem losses that in November hit US$4mln a day.
Twitter has faced a series of outages lately, with Musk even ordering staff to pause work on new products in mid-February to fix bugs.
The Tesla CEO last week that Twitter’s algorithm would be made public, opening the door for external coders to work on the site’s code.