Elon Musk Fired 148 People In The Dead Of Night After Twitter Takeover

Zinger Key Points
  • Amir Shevat said between the hours of 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. on Nov. 4, he saw 148 team members get fired.
  • The lack of communication at Twitter permeated its layoffs, with many staff receiving no advance notification that they would be let go.

A recently laid-off Twitter manager said he saw nearly all of his 150-person team fired in the span of just four hours, one week after Elon Musk entered the building.

What Happened: Amir Shevat, former head of product for Twitter's developer platform said between the hours of 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., he saw 148 team members get fired.

"That was a hard night," Shevat told Insider earlier this week.

Shevat said that one of his engineers sent him a message during the social media platforms' mass layoffs saying, "My computer is bricked," meaning that he had been locked out of the company.

Another former employee also said their laptop had shut down, Shevat reportedly said. 

Shevat said that around 1 a.m. on Nov. 4, he accessed Twitter's Slack account and found that he had been locked out.

Read also: What Gives, Elon Musk? Twitter 'Nukes' Accounts Of High-Profile Journalists Over New 'Doxxing' Policy

The former engineer said that Twitter informed him of his dismissal via an email addressed to his personal account. Shevat says that despite Twitter claiming to have delivered him details on the severance payout the next week, the company never did.

Shevat said that he went to Twitter's HR division and legal team to talk about the layoffs, but because of the widespread firings, "there wasn't a single person as a point of contact that we could talk to."

"What Elon did was not right. It was not right on multiple levels," Shevat said, who has since filed an arbitration claim against Musk with the help of an attorney.

Why It Matters: The lack of communication at Twitter permeated its layoffs, with many staff receiving no advance notification that they would be let go.

The former manager said that in the week between Musk's hiring and Shevat's termination, he was given arbitrary assignments with no clear purpose.

He was instructed to "stack rank" his team one day by Twitter from top to bottom. The higher ups told him they didn't know if this was based on performance, impact or seniority.

"The Twitter post-Elon was ‘sit there and don't do anything' basically, and 'don't talk to your team, don't calm them down, don't do anything'," Shevat said.

The ex-employee found it startling that his colleagues, who had joined Musk's Twitter with "an open heart" and a desire to develop new features for the service, were mostly fired.

"If this would have gone differently, Elon would have won a team that is deeply passionate, that deeply cares about Twitter and its platform," Shevat said.

Read next: Elon Musk's Twitter Ordered By Judge To Inform Sacked Workers About Severance Lawsuit

Photo via Shutterstock.

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