Even though he has only been “Chief Twit” for three days, Musk has moved quickly to make changes at Twitter, beginning with changing the homepage for logged-out users. He’s also planning mass layoffs of middle managers and engineers who haven’t recently contributed to the code base with the help of Tesla engineers he’s brought in as advisors at Twitter. Managers are already compiling lists of employees to lay off, and the cuts are expected to begin this week. Employees tasked with carrying out Musk’s projects since his takeover Thursday evening have been working late into the night and over the weekend.
The Twitter Blue subscription became widely available almost a year ago as a way to view ad-free articles from select publishers and make other changes to the app, such as changing the color of the home screen icon. Advertising remained the vast majority of Twitter’s revenue in the few quarters following its initial public offering. Musk wants subscriptions to account for half of the company’s total revenue.
