Social media giant Twitter has fired two of its top executives and has decided to freeze most hiring and backfills starting this week ahead of Tesla CEO Elon Musk's $44 billion acquisition.
A spokesperson for the social media company confirmed that the hiring freeze would not impact the platform's business-critical roles. They added that the social media giant will cut "non-labor" spending to ensure that it is being "responsible and efficient."
Twitter in a Panic
Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter's general manager of the consumer product division, and Bruce Falck, the revenue product lead, are the two executives who were let go. Beykpour, who has worked at Twitter for more than seven years, said that he was not expecting this to be the way he separates from the company.
While disappointed, Beykour said that he was proud of his team, which he believes has "changed the perception around Twitter's pace of innovation." He also said that his team has "shifted the culture internally to make bigger bets, move faster, and eliminate sacred cows," as per Fox Business.
The head of consumer product, Jay Sullivan, will be taking over Beykpour's responsibilities once he steps down. The company's CEO, Parag Agrawal, was the one that made the announcement in a memo that was released online. It also noted that there are currently no plans to lay off staffers.
Agrawal said that the recent decisions were made because Twitter failed to hit audience and revenue growth goals. The situation comes after the company has been thrown into chaos after the board of directors announced last month that it accepted Musk's offer to buy the social media giant.
According to the New York Post, the Tesla CEO previously said he intends to buy out shareholders and make the company private. Furthermore, he revealed plans to institute changes to Twitter's content moderation policy.
Elon Musk's Takeover
Musk's acquisition is a cause for concern since he has vowed to revamp the company's content moderation policies that have resulted in banks of controversial figures. Many of whom are from the political right-wing. The company is fearful that employees would decide to resign en masse ahead of the takeover.
In recent weeks, the social media company has taken steps to boost sagging morale as employees dread Musk taking control. Sullivan convened a meeting of staffers last week and urged them to stay motivated despite the specter of significant changes on the horizon.
In a separate threat, Falck expressed his gratitude to the engineers he had worked with. He noted that when all was said and done, it was their work that mattered. Falck added that they were able to upgrade the company's ad serving, prediction, analytics, attribution, billing, API, and many more systems. All of these are believed to have substantially improved the company's reliability and scalability.
While Falck's work has been much less visible than Beykpour's, he has popped up in the news about Twitter's changes in how the company serves to advertise. He said that it would also look into subscriptions to reduce its reliance on ad revenue, The Verge reported.
