Twitter’s wide-ranging layoffs include nearly 900 jobs in the Bay Area and about 1,000 total in California, a huge portion of the company’s local workforce, new state filings show.
The company’s disclosures to the state’s labor agency are the first official notices that reveal the impact in the Bay Area of the mammoth employment cutbacks new owner Elon Musk has orchestrated.
Musk said Friday he has “no choice” but to engineer huge layoffs to help Twitter climb out of a lake of red ink. On Saturday, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder, apologized to the company’s employees in a tweet. “I realize many are angry with me,” he wrote. “I own the responsibility for why everyone is in this situation: I grew the company size too quickly.”
California layoffs also occurred in the Los Angeles County city of Santa Monica, the filings with the state Employment Development Department show.
Here’s how the layoffs affected three cities in California, including the two in the Bay Area:
—San Francisco, 784 job cuts
—San Jose, 106 positions lost
—Santa Monica, 93 jobs eliminated
This means Twitter jettisoned 890 jobs in the Bay Area and eliminated 983 positions in California, the EDD filings show.
Worldwide, Twitter chopped half of its workforce, according to a tweet by Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity.
“Approximately 50% cuts company-wide” was the estimate sketched out by Roth in a Nov. 4 tweet.
Half of the Twitter workforce would equate to about 3,700 to 3,800 jobs, based on the company’s employment levels worldwide of at least 7,500 workers at the end of 2021, as detailed in a Twitter regulatory filing.
Russell Hancock, president of civic nonprofit Joint Venture Silicon Valley, said while other large tech companies have laid off thousands of local workers as uncertainty about the economy grows, Musk’s sudden decision to carry out the steep job cuts amid public debate over misinformation and hate speech on the platform stands out as unique.
“This isn’t the Silicon Valley way,” he said. “The fact that they’re laying off people is in some ways their own making.”
Increasingly, companies including Volkswagen and REI have paused advertising on Twitter over fears of Musk’s professed plan to relax content moderation standards on the platform. Hancock said the moves by advertisers could be viewed as part of the return of a larger “tech-lash,” fueled by concerns about the concentrated power of big tech and the “addictive properties” of social media.
“Now that the pandemic is on its heels, the old familiar refrains are coming back,” Hancock said.
The Bay Area layoffs came at offices at 1355 Market St. in San Francisco, which is the Twitter headquarters; and 3055 Olin Drive, which is in Santana Row, where Twitter has been renting office space.
“Executive/senior-level officials and managers, first/mid-level officials and managers, professionals, sales workers and administrative support workers” were the job categories of the Bay Area Twitter employees who lost their jobs in the staffing reductions.
In all three California locations, the affected employees were scheduled to be terminated Jan. 4, 2023, the so-called WARN notices filed with the EDD show. The employees who were affected were notified Nov. 4, according to the official letters.
“The workforce reductions are expected to be permanent,” Twitter stated in the WARN notices.
The staff reductions in California equate to roughly 13% of Twitter’s worldwide workforce prior to the job cuts and the employment cuts in the Bay Area represent 12%.
“No affected employee is represented by a union, and no affected employee will have bumping rights,” Twitter stated in the WARN notice.
A class-action lawsuit filed in a Bay Area federal court claims that some Twitter employees were terminated earlier in the week without advance written warning, as required by law. Some workers discovered they had lost their jobs only when they realized they had been locked out of work accounts.
Provisions in California WARN labor laws could enable Twitter to skirt the 60-day notice provision and still lay off workers abruptly, but the workers would have to be paid for the 60 days, according to labor law experts.
Twitter attempted to address this issue in the WARN notices related to the California job cuts.
“Affected employees will be paid all wages and other benefits to which they are entitled through their date of termination,” Twitter stated. “The company provided notice to the affected employees via email on Nov. 4, 2022.”
On Oct. 27, Musk completed a $44 billion acquisition of the social media giant through a transaction that also took the tech company private.
Returning Twitter to profitability is a daunting task. Musk asserts that the wrenching employment cutbacks are necessary to help Twitter stem the waves of red ink that have deluged the social media platform for years.
During the 12 months that ended on June 30, Twitter lost $111.9 million on revenue of $5.23 billion. In 2021, Twitter lost $221.4 million on revenue of $5.08 billion.
“Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately, there is no choice when the company is losing over $4 million a day,” Musk said in a tweet Friday.
