Image of Twitter, One Month after Elon Musk’s Eventful Takeover

Yesterday officially marked one month since American billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter at $44 billion.  

During that period, Musk initiated sweeping reforms on Twitter policy including reinstating the accounts of some controversial figures such as former U.S President Donald Trump.

He started by firing former CEO Parag Agrawal and other executives before making himself the CEO and sole director of the platform, according to a securities filing.

In what he described as efforts to cut down cost of operation, Musk initiated a mass layoff process across the company, reducing its overall headcount by nearly 50 per cent.   

In an internal email after the mass staff cuts, Musk reportedly “asked Twitter’s remaining employees to commit to extremely hardcore work or else leave the company with severance pay.”

“Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore…This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade,” the memo said.

The memo also outlines how Twitter will be “much more engineering-driven” and goes ahead then gives staff strict ultimatum.”

Since Musk’s takeover, Catherine Thorbecke writes, “a handful of brands – ranging from General Mills to the North Face to the Volkswagen Group – confirmed a pause in advertising on the social network as civil society organizations raised new concern over the direction of the company under Musk.”

Expressing his concern on how the platform has performed financially in recent times, Musk said the company, has seen a “massive drop in revenue.”

“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,” he said at the beginning of the month.