According to a report by the platformer, Elon Musk has almost halved Twitter’s workforce. Some of the surviving employees were asked to listen to a podcast hosted by two of the billionaire’s close aides.
The publication reported that a Twitter vice president told employees of the company’s health team that the podcast would provide some insight into why this is necessary.
The latest all-in podcast aired just a day after the layoffs were announced and is co-hosted by four top Silicon Valley investors, including billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya and tech investor David Friedberg. David Sachs and Jason Calacanis, two close aides of Elon Musk, have taken to Twitter to help him.
In the one-and-a-half-hour podcast, investors share some dire warnings about the future of the economy and discuss everything from their participation on Twitter to their outlook on layoffs at the company.
During the podcast, Sachs and Calacanis attempted to clarify their new roles on Twitter. Sachs, who runs venture capital firm Craft Ventures, said the news of his involvement on Twitter was “baseless and blown out of proportion”.
Jason and I are just helping and establishing our permanent team at the Elon company, Sachs said. Elon’s CEO He’s driving it He’s making the decisions and helping some of us in any way possible and that’s really the limit. This is a very part time thing.
The Washington Post reported that Sachs and Calacanis were just a few of the many personal acquaintances that Musk had brought to the company. Elon Musk previously worked with Sachs at PayPal and Calacanis was an early investor in Tesla.
Researchers at Montclair State University found that hate speech on the site increased shortly after Musk’s Twitter takeover. Sachs blamed a burst of hate speech that included a nearly 500% jump in the use of the N-word on the platform.
Sachs said the people on this message board originally created bots to post hundreds of thousands of spam messages that contained racist words and adjectives. And wanted the event they could use it to hurt the company.
Musk expressed a similar sentiment last week, tweeting that advertisers had boycotted Twitter because of pressure from activists. Investors took several minutes to joke about a recent hoax by Musk on Twitter.
A day later, CNBC interviewed two people who claimed they had been taken off Twitter Rahul Ligma and Daniel Johnson. It was later revealed that the men had never worked for Twitter.
Friedberg said the situation is a perfect example for journalists “to parrot a story as it feeds their narrative.” And Palihapitiya said that even fifteen of his children were able to detect the deception on their own. Sachs said he didn’t explore it because he didn’t want to because it fit his narrative.
Investors said they expect large-scale technical layoffs to continue in the coming months. As a result, companies need to prioritize short-term profits, Palihapitiya said.
He said companies are going down now and they’re realizing oh man, I need to get my cost structure in line. In the past few months, many tech companies have started announcing layoffs and hiring freezes. But Sachs said he expects layoffs to increase as the year ends.