Being fired is not easy and it is even more cruel when you are the CEO of the company. This happened with Indian-origin techie Parag Agrawal, who became Twitter CEO just 11-months back, as he was fired by the company’s new boss Elon Musk .
Tesla boss and the world’s richest man Musk on Thursday became the new owner of the microblogging site as he completed the Twitter takeover. After his acquisition, Musk sacked Twitter CEO Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and legal policy, trust, and safety head Vijaya Gadde among others.
While he recently assured Twitter employees that he will not sack 75 per cent of the workforce as was reported in media, Musk’s first day as Twitter boss will be remembered as the one when he fired the company’s CEO and other high-level execs.
This is the current situation of the company and its employees in the US, there’s still much ambiguity about their fate. With this, confusion lingers over what is it in store for Twitter employees in India as Musk becomes the platform’s new owner.
What about Twitter India employees?
Employees engaged in product engineering and development teams have been asked to maintain status quo and “avoid” working on any new services, sources have told Economic Times. Moreover, several teams are in a “wait-and-watch” state except for those working in routine maintenance, according to a mid-level Twitter executive.
“Right now, none of us know whether we will still have jobs at the end of the day. There has been no official communication. We are waiting,” the executive said.
In view of this confusion, some have even started hunting for new jobs while most employees working out of the country were “in suspended animation”, shared another employee.
Aggressive and abrupt’
Former India head of Twitter Manish Maheswari calls Musk’s move to terminate the services of some of the company’s top executives “an aggressive set of plans”. While he termed the firings “aggressive and abrupt”, Maheshwari added that it is not quite unlike Elon”.
The future for Twitter could be a product that adds more value to advertisers by making it “less toxic” and delivering more meaningful content to users for which they pay, he told the publication.
“I think he (Musk) has been coming down very heavily on the quality of conversation (on Twitter) and addressing the bot and spam issues. In addition, he has hinted at having a thriving creator economy on Twitter and subscription revenues. Those are the areas that I think could see massive changes,” Maheshwari said.
