San Francisco: Elon Musk, who is busy promoting Donald Trump for the keenly-watched US presidential election on November 5, has reportedly laid off more employees from his X social media platform. According to a report in The Verge, a new wave of layoffs has hit X, primarily affecting its engineering department, citing sources inside X and posts on the workplace forum Blind.
"The exact scale of the job cuts remains unknown. These cuts come just two months after staffers were required to submit a one-page summary telling leadership their contributions to the company,” the report claimed. Musk or X were yet to comment on the report.
Recently, the tech billionaire had reportedly sent an email to X staff about their much-anticipated stock grants — although with a catch. In an email to staff seen by The Verge, the social media platform planned to award stock options based on the anticipated impact of employees.
“That means staff have to submit a one-page summary telling leadership their contributions to the company in order to get their stock,” said the report.
Keeping in mind how the company has continued to struggle under Musk’s ownership, employees have been bracing for more layoffs. Musk bought X (then called Twitter) in 2022 and laid off more than 6,000 employees- roughly 80 per cent of the company’s staff. The workforce was forced to justify their roles and even judge whether their own colleagues should be retained.
The job cuts affected departments like diversity and inclusion teams as well as product development and design. Even, Twitter’s content moderation team was not spared. In January this year, X reportedly fired 1,000 employees from its ‘safety’ staff which was responsible for stopping abusive content online. Out of these 80 per cent were software engineers that were focused on “trust and safety issues”.
