Twitter to pause most hiring, executives fired ahead of Elon Musk's arrival
Twitter's board accepted Musk's offer in late April to take the social media giant private at $54.20 per share
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Twitter will pause most hiring and backfills starting this week ahead of the possible closing of Tesla CEO Elon Musk's $44 billion acquisition.
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A Twitter spokesperson confirmed to FOX Business that the hiring freeze will not impact business critical roles. The spokesperson added that social media giant will cut "non-labor" spending to ensure it is being "responsible and efficient."
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In addition, Twitter's general manager of the consumer product division, Kayvon Beykpour, and revenue product lead, Bruce Falk, will both depart the company after being asked to leave by CEO Parag Agrawal.
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Beykpour, who has worked at Twitter for over seven years and is currently on paternity leave, confirmed the news in a Twitter thread on Thursday.
"The truth is that this isn’t how and when I imagined leaving Twitter, and this wasn’t my decision," he said. "Parag asked me to leave after letting me know that he wants to take the team in a different direction."
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Though he expressed his disappointment in the decision, he said he was proud that his team "changed the perception around Twitter’s pace of innovation" and "shifted the culture internally to make bigger bets, move faster, and eliminate sacred cows."
"I hope and expect that Twitter’s best days are still ahead of it," he added. "Twitter is one of the most important, unique and impactful products in the world. With the right nurturing and stewardship, that impact will only grow."
Falck, who has worked with Twitter for five years, thanked his team for their hard work.
"We upgraded our ad serving, prediction, analytics, attribution, billing, API, and many more systems, substantially improving our reliability and scalability," he said. "Everything this team has done and will do sits on the shoulders of the giants that did this work - those dedicated IC engineers who seldom see the spotlight or get the recognition they deserve. The unsung heroes that make Goldbird (and Twitter) what it is."
Jay Sullivan, Twitter's vice president of consumer products, will become the general manager of BlueBird and interim general manager of Goldbird.
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Musk's deal, which will take Twitter private at $54.20 per share, is expected to close in 2022, subject to the approval of Twitter stockholders, the receipt of applicable regulatory approvals and the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.
Musk, a self-described "free-speech absolutist", has expressed interest in open sourcing Twitter's algorithm and cracking down on spam bots in order to increase transparency and improve the user experience on the platform. He is reportedly expected to become Twitter's temporary CEO once the deal closes.
In the first quarter of 2022, Twitter's monetizable daily active user base grew 15.9% year-over-year to 229 million. The figure includes 39.6 million daily active users in the U.S., up 6.4% year-over-year, and 189.4 million international daily active users, up 18.1% year-over-year. The social media giant reported net income of $513 million, or 61 cents per share, compared to $68 million, or 8 cents per share a year ago. Revenue for the quarter increased 16% year-over-year to $1.2 billion.