Susannah Streeter, senior investment and markets analyst, Hargreaves Lansdown:
‘’Elon Musk’s impulsive nature is again causing mayhem at Twitter, with his order to close down offices in response to mass walk-outs being seen as an existential threat.
A weekend re-boot to assess core staff levels to ensure operational capability isn’t in itself a sign of Twitter’s imminent decline, but the chaotic nature of his short tenure of CEO so far is a clear cause for concern.
Advertisers who had stayed loyal despite concerns over the direction the company was taking, are likely to re-assess their deals with a boss who appears to hold so little regard for his employees.
The nature of the redundancies, the banning of employee criticism on a platform which is meant to stand for ‘free speech’ and demand that staff sign up for long hours at high intensity are not social values companies will want to align with.
While losing key editorial staff will be a blow, particularly amid key promotional periods such as the World Cup, Black Friday and the festive season it’s the exodus of crucial engineering staff, which could prove particularly onerous for the functionality of the platform.
On the app, it appears to be business as usual, with fears of Twitter’s demise circling as tweets proving that it’s still clearly operational. But as fast as employees leave through the doors, users seem to be deserting to other platforms.
Elon Musk has had form in attaining what appears to be unattainable, not least sending rockets into space, so he’s clearly confident he can survive these latest challenges.
However if, as rumoured, he is faced with a highly demoralised and skeleton workforce, he’s going to have to pull off yet another remarkable feat to turn Twitter around.’’
