Elon Musk says no more layoffs at Twitter

After laying off nearly two-thirds of Twitter’s 7,500-person workforce in three weeks, Musk said in an all-hands meeting with employees on Monday that the company is done with layoffs and recruiting for roles in engineering and sales and that employees are encouraged to make referrals – an indication that Twitter is hiring again. 

The hour-long meeting took place at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters for the first time after Musk declared an “extremely hardcore” work regime, which led to roughly 1,000 resignations last week. The Twitter boss also discussed several other questions raised by employees during the all-hands meeting as listed below: 

Musk done with firing 

Musk told staff in the all-hands meeting that the company does not plan more layoffs and is recruiting for engineering and ad sales roles. However, he did not specify the kinds of engineering or sales roles Twitter intends to hire. 
“In terms of critical hires, I would say people who are great at writing software are the highest priority,”  he said.

Currently, the company doesn’t have any open roles listed on its website. However, As reported by The Verge last week Twitter recruiters were already reaching out to engineers asking them to join “Twitter 2.0 — an Elon company.” 

Since Musk's takeover, Twitter has witnessed massive layoffs. The new chief first fired the top executives, followed by mass layoffs of more than half of its employees. Musk even fired around 80% of contractual Twitter workers.  

No allowances, perks for employees  

Employees will reportedly miss out on some important benefits such as allowances for quarterly team activities, day-care, wellness and even home internet.

 An internal memo from Twitter as seen by The Verge also mentioned that has asked the employees to submit weekly reports with details about their work. The Twitter employees working technical positions will also have to include samples of their work and the non-technical employees will have to submit a summary of their work. 

The memo said, “Looking forward to making Twitter the highest performing tech software company in the world.”   

No plans to move headquarters 

Musk said there are “no plans” to move Twitter’s headquarters to Texas like he did with Tesla, but that it could make sense to be “dual-headquartered” in California and Texas. 

“If we want to move the headquarters to Texas, I think it would play into the idea that Twitter has gone from being left-wing to right-wing, which is not the case,” he told employees. “This is not a right-wing takeover of Twitter. It is a moderate-wing takeover of Twitter.” 

Deferring relaunch of blue check subscription service

Besides the townhall, Musk also said that Twitter will be holding off the launch of the new and revamped Blue Verified subscription. Earlier this month, Musk said he is postponing the launch date to November 29th. Now he took to Twitter to announce that the launch has been deferred indefinitely. Musk claimed that the company is doing this because it still "doesn't have high confidence in stopping impersonation on the platform".  

Musk in a tweet also claimed today that Twitter has added 1.6 million daily active users in the past week. He claimed this is an all-time-high for the micro-blogging platform. The daily active users showed a spike at the end of October, when Musk took over the platform. It went up to 259.4 million from the daily active user based of around 250 million at the beginning of October. 

Musk also said that Twitter will soon be competing with YouTube in terms of video streaming service, hinting that Twitter might soon offer good video experience with 'higher compensation for creators.'