Twitter announced a number of cost-saving measures as the social media platform waits for Elon Musk to assume command.
The company enacted a hiring freeze on May 12 and could rescind some offers made to potential new hires.
Chief Executive Officer Parag Agrawal sent a memo to Twitter staff noting that travel, consulting, and marketing will be reduced. According to the executive, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and supply chain issues have hurt the social media platform’s business.
“Please continue to treat Twitter’s resources as you would your own, and manage tightly to your budgets, prioritizing what matters most,” Agrawal told employees.
The company will still hire for a limited number of business-critical roles and, at this time, does not plan to cut jobs.
“At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, the decision was made to invest aggressively to deliver big growth in audience and revenue, and as a company we did not hit intermediate milestones that enable confidence in these goals,” Agrawal said in the memo initially obtained by Bloomberg. “In order to responsibly manage the organization as we sharpen our roadmaps and our work, we need to continue to be intentional about our teams, hiring and costs.”
Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter’s consumer product and design chief, announced that Agrawal asked him to leave.
In a thread on Twitter, Beykpour said leaving was not his decision and that the CEO said he planned to “take the team in a different direction.”
“I’m proud that we changed the perception around Twitter’s pace of innovation, and proud that we shifted the culture internally to make bigger bets, move faster, and eliminate sacred cows,” he wrote online, noting that he is currently on paternity leave.
Interrupting my paternity leave to share some final @twitter-related news: I’m leaving the company after over 7 years.
— Kayvon Beykpour (@kayvz) May 12, 2022
Revenue lead Bruce Falck confirmed in a since-deleted tweet that he too had been fired by Agrawal. In the memo, the CEO said the company will be “opening the search for a new GM of Goldbird” – the company’s revenue team.
“When all is said and done, it’s the work that matters: We upgraded our ad serving, prediction, analytics, attribution, billing, API, and many more systems, substantially improving our reliability and scalability,” wrote Falck in a separate post.
Agrawal announced that Jay Sullivan would become the permanent GM of Bluebird, the platform’s product-focused side.
Hiring freezes are not uncommon among technology companies amid downturns in profitability.
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, announced it would reduce hiring in early May, as did ride-hailing platform Uber, per The Street.
Musk, the technology entrepreneur and co-founder of PayPal, bought Twitter for $44 billion in April. The deal is still being finalized. Musk said he wants to increase the platform’s revenue by a factor of 5 by 2028 while speaking with investors.
