Twitter will cut its staff by at least 25% even if Elon Musk’s takeover bid doesn’t go through–and the company’s prospective new overlord himself said he would only keep 2,000 of the company’s 7,500 employees, the Washington Post reports.
The lower level of cuts would likely impact things like customer service and marketing efforts. Experts say cuts at the level Musk has suggested would directly impact user experience because it would reduce the technical teams’ ability to respond to hackers, and per Musk’s dicta, monitors and moderators would be cut allowing more spam and porn to overtake the platform.
“It would be a cascading effect,” Edwin Chen, a data scientist formerly in charge of Twitter’s spam and health metrics and now CEO of the content-moderation start-up Surge AI, said, “where you’d have services going down and the people remaining not having the institutional knowledge to get them back up, and being completely demoralized and wanting to leave themselves.”