‘Many angry with me’: Twitter founder’s apology amid mass layoffs under Elon Musk

NEW DELHI: A day after Twitter fired nearly 50% of its staff worldwide, founder Jack Dorsey on Saturday owned up to the current situation at the company and said he realises that many people are “angry with him”.
“Folks at Twitter past and present are strong and resilient. They will always find a way no matter how difficult the moment. I realize many are angry with me. I own the responsibility for why everyone is in this situation: I grew the company size too quickly. I apologize for that,” Dorsey said on Twitter.

In another apologetic tweet, the former company CEO said that he loves everyone who has ever worked on Twitter. “I don’t expect that to be mutual in this moment…or ever…and I understand,” he added.

Dorsey’s tweets come amid massive layoffs at Twitter across the world following Elon Musk‘s takeover of the microblogging platform.

Hundreds of employees were handed the pink slips at Twitter on Friday as Musk, 51, started overhauling the social media platform which he bought for a whopping $44 billion late last month.
Justifying the move, Musk said that he had no other choice since Twitter was losing over $4 million every day.
The company posted a net loss of $270 million in the second quarter ended June 30, 2022 compared to a profit of $66 million in the same period a year ago.
Twitter has also fired the majority of its over 200 employees in India. Sources said the layoffs are across engineering, sales and marketing, and communications teams.

Musk has blamed activists for a significant drop in the company’s revenues.
“Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists. Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America,” Musk tweeted on Friday.
Twitter’s roughly 7,500 employees have been expecting layoffs since Musk took the helm of the company. After he completed the acquisition of Twitter, Musk ousted CEO Parag Agrawal, legal executive Vijaya Gadde, Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal and General Counsel Sean Edgett.
(With inputs from agencies)