Elon Musk appears to make jibe at 200 Twitter employees he just fired

Elon Musk has appeared to make an unsavoury jibe at the hundreds of Twitter employees he just plunged into unemployment.

The tech billionaire posted a cryptic tweet on Sunday, as it emerged that up to 200 additional employees had been laid off from the social media platform just months after he took the helm.

“Hope you have a good Sunday. First day of the rest of your life,” he wrote.

Multiple media outlets said on Sunday that between 50 and 200 people had been ejected from the troubled social network as Mr Musk troubles to right the ship.

The New York Times put the number at around 200, roughly 10 per cent of the company’s remaining 2,000 workers, while Silicon Valley insiders’ news site The Information said it was at least 50.

The layoffs reportedly included employees who had been publicly loyal to Mr Musk, such as payments chief Esther Crawford, as well as founders of smaller companies that Twitter had acquired before Mr Musk’s takeover.

It comes after successive rounds of brutal job cuts and divisive ultimatums to remaining employees that together shrunk the company by almost 75 percent from around 7,500 to only 2,000. Mr Musk told workers in late November that he had no plans for further layoffs.

Twitter, which abolished its media communications team last year, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Independent.

Hope you have a good Sunday.

First day of the rest of your life.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 26, 2023

These latest layoffs were first reported byThe Information on Saturday, when some Twitter employees began to be locked out of their company systems.

The firm’s internal messaging system had already gone offline for several days earlier in the week, reportedly because Twitter bosses manually shut it down.

A team that maintains Twitter’s monetisation infrastructure was reduced from 30 people to fewer than eight, the Times said, while other cuts hit teams responsible for keeping the site online in challenging circumstances.

Wow the layoffs last night included a ton of surprises. Hardcore Musk loyalists (more on that soon…) and the founder of the newsletter platform Revue that Twitter acquired in 2021. https://t.co/zO06QbhNpn

— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) February 26, 2023

Just got confirmation that Esther Crawford, chief executive of Twitter Payments, is out.

— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) February 26, 2023

Musk has vowed to make Twitter consistently profitable and free it of political bias, claiming that he believes its viability as a "public square" is crucial to the future of civilisation.

However, the company has been beset with problems since his takeover, including worsening glitches and outages as well as lawsuits from its suppliers alleging $14m in unpaid bills.