According to a sacked manager Elon Musk’s takeover ruined Twitter’s purpose to help lives. A former Twitter manager has expressed “worry” to the BBC about the company’s future now that Elon Musk owns it.
Amir Shevat told the media outlet, “We wanted to make people’s life more pleasurable and productive.” When Elon bought the company, everything was thrown out.
To “leverage the positive power of Twitter to strengthen our communities through our platform, people, and earnings,” as stated by Twitter, is the company’s objective. This, it argues, entails protecting individual rights, combating bigotry, and fostering equality.
Twitter’s customers, employees, advertisers, and tech analysts have all been critical of Musk’s management since he purchased the business in late October for $44 billion.
Read more: Sensible Vs. Sprout Social: Which One is Better for Social Media
Musk has made significant changes to Twitter in the less than four months since he became CEO. This includes reintroducing divisive figures like conservative parody site The Babylon Bee and former president Donald Trump and updating the site’s paid subscription program, Twitter Blue.
With allegations of an uptick in hate speech, advertisers have departed the site, and Musk’s apparent introduction and later abandonment of new policies on a whim adding fuel to the fire, moderators have been left scrambling to keep up.
Musk, for his part, has boasted that Twitter’s daily active user base has grown to new heights under his leadership.
In December, he announced his intention to stand aside from his position as CEO once a poll on the website yielded a candidate who was “foolish enough” to replace him.
Among Musk’s first actions as CEO was the dismissal of four of the company’s highest-ranking officials. On November 4, he fired over half of Twitter’s staff a week later. As the company was losing over $4 million per day, Musk said he had “no choice” but to lay off thousands of employees. Since then, more employees have been let go, laid off, or quit.
On November 4th, Shevat was one of the workers let go. A former head of product for Twitter’s developer platform revealed to Insider that he was responsible for a staff of over 150 people, the vast majority of whom were also let go. Shevat said that his staff found out they had been laid off after they were denied access to corporate resources. After being shut out of his Slack and work emails on his phone, Shevat discovered he had been fired.
An email was issued to affected employees explaining that they were being let go as part of a “workforce reduction to help improve the health of the organization.”
According to Shevat, Twitter ought to have conducted its layoffs “in a lawful, sympathetic, and highly communicative way.”
These were areas where “Elon, in his leadership, failed,” he claimed. To treat Twitter employees the way Musk had been “unjustifiable,” he said.
Shevat has filed a claim for damages with an arbitration firm against the firm. Many Twitter workers have signed arbitration agreements as part of their employment contracts, agreeing to resolve any legal disagreements with the company through arbitration rather than in court and waiving their rights to participate in a class action lawsuit.
Attorney Lisa Bloom, who represents Shevat, told the BBC that her client roster includes “about a hundred” former Twitter employees in the United States and that “the number goes up constantly.” In mid-January, attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, who also represents terminated Twitter employees, revealed that she had filed 500 individual demands for arbitration on behalf of former workers.
