Musk threatens to name & shame advertisers who ditch Twitter, defends layoffs

Tesla CEO Elon Musk threatened to name-shame the advertisers who are backing out from Twitter after the micro-blogging site announced mass layoffs.

While replying to a user on Twitter, Elon Musk said, "Thank you. A thermonuclear name & shame is exactly what will happen if this continues."

Mike Davis, a user on Twitter said, "Dear @elonmusk: You have nearly 114,000,000 Twitter followers. Name and shame the advertisers who are succumbing to the advertiser boycotts. So we can counter-boycott them. And get your USD 8 monthly subscription going asap. So we can start to makeup for lost revenue now."

In a series of tweets, Tesla CEO has blamed "activist groups pressuring advertisers" for a "massive drop in revenue" as the company engages in mass layoffs.

"Twitter had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists. Extremely messed up! They're trying to destroy free speech in America," he further tweeted.

To defend his decision over mass layoff, Elon Musk said that Twitter was losing more than $4 million per day and that impacted the employees who were given severance packages.

Taking to Twitter, Elon Musk said, "Regarding Twitter's reduction in force, unfortunately, there is no choice when the company is losing over USD 4M/day. Everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required."

"Again, to be crystal clear, Twitter's strong commitment to content moderation remains absolutely unchanged. In fact, we have actually seen hateful speech at times this week decline *below* our prior norms, contrary to what you may read in the press, he added.

On Friday, as per an unsigned internal memo seen by The Verge, Twitter employees were notified in an email that the layoffs were set to begin. Musk is expected to cut roughly half of Twitter's roughly 7,500-person workforce.

Meanwhile, talking about the new changes in the micro-blogging site, Musk said in a tweet, "Again, to be crystal clear, Twitter's strong commitment to content moderation remains absolutely unchanged. In fact, we have actually seen hateful speech at times this week decline *below* our prior norms, contrary to what you may read in the press."

The entrepreneur's purchase of Twitter for $44 billion was completed last week and on that same day, he fired several of the company's top leaders, including the chief executive Parag Agrawal.

Musk had already indicated that he would make job cuts at Twitter, telling employees at a town-hall meeting this summer that there needs to be "a rationalization of headcount" at the social network. (ANI)