The owner and Chief Executive Officer of Twitter, Elon Musk has defended the ongoing mass layoffs at the microblogging firm.
Nearly half of Twitter’s workforce was laid off and many of those affected received job termination notifications on Friday.
Thereafter, some of the affected staff took to Twitter to vent their frustration exiting their job at one of Silicon Valley’s most iconic companies.
However, Musk explained that Twitter has been losing $4 million per day due to its large workforce, a situation which left the company with no choice but to let some people go.
Musk noted that everyone affected by the layoffs was given three months of severance packages, which is 50% higher than legally required.
He said “Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately, there is no choice when the company is losing over $4m/day. Everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required.”
Musk has been exploring options to pay for the mammoth $44 billion deal for which he took billions of dollars in debt and sold $15.5 billion worth of shares in Tesla, his electric car company.
Musk’s teams were said to have been imposing a furious pace on the remaining employees, bringing in Tesla developers to oversee the work of Twitter workers.
The Tesla and SpaceX chief is said to owe $1 billion in annual interest alone to pay for a deal he tried to wiggle out from almost as soon as he made it in April.
