And it is a mean axe. Fully 50% of the staff. Including full teams who have enhanced the Woke "inclusivity" of Twitter. Some other teams are useful but are also going as the new broom sweeps clean.
Human Rights. Gone.
Accessibility experience. Gone.
Communications. Unclear but a large chunk including the head, gone.
Machine learning ethics, transparency and accountability. Gone.
Curation. Gone
Public policy. Half gone.
I'm sure this will expand. I've been reading tweets from those who have received their notification. I must admit if I adopt my military persona it is world full of self opinionated and self aggrandised bleating. My non military persona recognises a whole group of people who have found a very comfortable group of other people to find common cause with and reject all change they don't agree with.
Musk buying twitter was an E.L.E for these Twitter staff. The rest are going to face a simple ultimatum. "Root hog or die". At least half of the remainder won't make it.
At least it appears that Twitter have done this with full compliance for the laws of each staff member wherever they are in the world. It looks like the cost will be between $40m and $60m to lay them off legally.
What this means for Twitter in the long term? Who knows, the company goes private again on Tuesday and then a great big wall will surround the company and what it is doing.
So far activists have been bombarding the platform with abusive and racist content (defeated) and advertisers have been bombarded with activists demanding that they withdraw advertising. The costs of getting rid of the staff will have been known up front and priced in. The loss of revenue is a bit more serious and it will remain to be seen how it works out.
The short version, though, is that with only $5bn in revenue coming in in recent years, Musk has the resources to keep Twitter going for at least a decade whilst he transitions it even if every advertiser did a bunk. Which they won't do because there are simply too many people in the community to sell to.
If you are a Twitter user, it is going to be "living in interesting times". I will patiently wait until the platform pivots to a new place before passing judgement.