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Twitter headquarters in San Francisco.
Adam Jeffery | CNBC
On Elon Musk’s first day in control of Twitter, the company has started laying off employees, including data engineers, self-identified former employees told CNBC.
A person who walked out of Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters and identified themselves as a Twitter data engineer said they were just laid off by their director in-person. CNBC was not able to immediately verify the identity of the people who left Twitter’s headquarters and spoke with reporters.
One employee at Twitter, awaiting information about layoffs or projects, told CNBC they were in the dark for the most part. Musk was meeting with relatively low ranking engineering managers, this person noted —a welcome gesture to some. Press reports before the deal closed said that Musk had planned cuts as deep as 75% of headcount.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment about layoffs.
Musk finally took over the company on Thursday, ending a months-long legal saga. The billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO initially agreed to buy the company for $44 billion, but soon after tried to get out of the deal because he claimed Twitter was not forthcoming enough about spam accounts on the platform. Twitter has denied that and went to court to try to get Musk to complete the deal.
Prior to the original trial date earlier this month, Musk agreed once again to close the deal. The judge gave Musk until Friday at 5 p.m. to close the deal, or else set a new trial date.
On Thursday, several top executives departed the company, including CEO Parag Agrawal and CFO Ned Segal, CNBC’s David Faber reported. Twitter’s head of legal policy, trust and safety Vijaya Gadde was also fired.
This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.
-CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.
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Image and article originally from www.cnbc.com. Read the original article here.