The role of Twitter officials in throwing employees under Musk’s bus

Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter, the microblogging platform has become controversial with new Twitter policies and a large portion of the employees being laid off by the company.

From the beginning, when Elon Musk showed interest in buying the platform, everyone had their eyes set on what was about to happen. Initially, Elon Musk backed out after showing interest but was later forced to seal the deal.

Since that moment, Twitter employees, or as the company used to refer to them “Tweeps,” had no idea what was about to hit them. A recent study on this whole situation revealed how board members and executives played their role in going against their own words and values just for the sake of upcoming profit.

The top executives of Twitter left their stockholders at Musk’s mercy. Soon to be a trillionaire, Elon Musk offered to buy Twitter at a 38% stock price premium. Which means that he was ready to pay an extra amount to buy the platform. With this offer, the four executives collected $74.3 million. Not only this, but the restricted stock unit and performance stock unit added 138 million dollars to executives’ pockets. Eight non-executive directors also benefited from the deal, as they made 93 million dollars from it.

However, when it came to the employees’ protection, all hands were off deck. The deal didn’t include any limitations, such as how many employees could be laid off or at what pace the whole operation could take place. Not only this, but the deal didn’t include any compensatory steps that will be taken for laid-off workers.

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Back in April 2022, Parag Agrawal, the CEO at that time, told employees that the company had no intention of laying off workers. The platform even had a special webpage devoted to the employees working at Twitter. The webpage was aimed at showing how much Twitter valued its staff and supported them. But at the time of action, executives and board members went against their values.

When Elon finally took over the platform, he assigned 80 hours of work per week, with 40 hours to be spent in the headquarters. Followed by making his employees sign an agreement to either follow the long working hours or quit their job. However, the study believes that proper management could’ve prevented the long working shifts.

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World