No matter if Elon Musk buys Twitter, which might happen as soon as this Friday, the company is preparing to lay off employees. On the one hand, Musk has informed potential investors that he intends to fire 75% of Twitter’s 7,500 employees once the acquisition closes, a move that would probably cripple the website’s operations and impair its capacity to police material and guarantee users’ security. Internal company documents, on the other hand, show that, prior to the Musk deal, the company’s current leadership intended to “pare the company’s payroll” by about $800 million, which would have resulted in a relatively modest 25 percent workforce reduction that would only have left 1,900 people unemployed, along with “major” infrastructure cuts and data centre closures.

Edwin Chen, a data scientist formerly in charge of Twitter’s spam and health analytics, told The Post that Musk’s cuts would be “unimaginable.” It would have a cascading effect, he explained, where services would decline and those already in place wouldn’t have the institutional expertise to bring them back up, leaving them completely discouraged and wanting to quit. Musk advocated for staff reductions when questioned about prospective layoffs at a Twitter Town Hall meeting in June, saying he didn’t see a reason why underperforming employees should be kept on the job. Musk has also argued in favour of relaxing the rules on content filtering and enabling accounts that had been suspended to be reinstated.