Elon Musk had no idea what he was in for when he took over Twitter. Even the employees of the company did not know what would happen to them.
On the first day, Musk fired Twitter’s CEO, CFO and legal advisor. And in one week, he abruptly laid off 50% of all workers, or about 3,700 employees, and many of them weren’t paid until months later.
The laid-off employees are going to arbitration against Musk and Twitter for allegedly failing to meet financial promises made to employees by the company before the $44 billion acquisition in October, as well as fraud and cheating.
Among the many employees laid off was Aamir Shevat, the former head of product on Twitter’s developer platform, who joined a year ago when Twitter acquired his company, Rashful. He described the abrupt end of his tenure as well as that of his team.
Shevat explained, “We had received an email saying that some kind of restructuring was being done and then what happened, I was communicating with my team, and one after the other they were telling me that they The computer has become ‘briquetted’.” BBC on Friday, referring to losing access to everything stored on employees’ computers.
“We wanted to make people’s lives more enjoyable and more productive. And all of that fell apart when Elon bought the company,” Shevat said.
He told the BBC he is not against layoffs, but does object to how it is done. For one, the company promised employees four months’ severance pay, but ultimately gave them a month’s worth, according to Shevat.
“The way to do it is in a legal way, in a sympathetic way and in a highly interactive way. And Elon, under his leadership, failed at all of these,” Shevat said, adding that he is “worried” about Twitter’s future.
He has joined scores of employees entering an arbitration process with Twitter, which involves a private arbitrator deciding how to resolve the claims. Several former Twitter employees are represented by California-based attorney Lisa Bloom.
twitter didn’t respond fate’s Request for comment. Shevat did not immediately respond fate’s Request for comment.
In recent months, several tech companies have announced massive layoffs, including Meta, Salesforce, Google and Microsoft. Since the start of 2023, nearly 300 tech companies have cut more than 94,000 jobs, according to Layoffs.fyi, a layoff data aggregator.
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