Twitter Inc. To Cut Annual Bonuses For Employees To 50%

Micro Blogging and Social Networking site; Twitter says the company is dealing with economic uncertainty and this could affect employee bonuses.

According to The New York Times, employees were told on Friday that they may only receive half of their normal annual bonus.

Twitter’s chief financial officer Ned Segal told the company’s employees that global market conditions would affect the annual bonuses they receive, with the “bonus pool currently at 50 percent of what it could be if the company met its financial targets,” reports The New York Times.

The annual bonus figure could fluctuate even further throughout the year based on Twitter’s upcoming earnings, according to Segal who wrote an email to Twitter employees on Friday. The company employs more than 7,500 people globally.

Twitter had earlier on in July, laid off 30 percent of employees from its talent acquisition team. Twitter earlier paused most hiring and backfills, except for business-critical roles as determined by ‘Staff’ members.

Twitter is currently embroiled in a legal battle with Elon Musk after he terminated the $44 billion takeover deal over the actual number of bots on the platform. The US judge in the Twitter vs Musk legal battle has set October 17 as the beginning date of the high-profile trial for five days. The tech billionaire has also filed a countersuit against Twitter as part of the ongoing legal dispute, challenging CEO Agrawal to have a public debate on fake accounts and spam.

The tech billionaire also posted a poll that asked the microblogging platform’s users. “Less than 5 percent of Twitter daily users are fake/spam,” and during the first five hours of the polls, 66 percent of the users chose “Lmaooo No”. According to Musk, he was hoodwinked by Twitter into signing a $44 billion merger agreement.

Twitter said in July that it incurred a total of $270 million net loss in the second quarter (Q2), largely owing to uncertainty related to the pending acquisition by Musk that adversely hit its advertising business. The company said that its Q2 revenue totaled $1.18 billion, a decrease of 1 percent year-over-year, “reflecting advertising industry headwinds associated with the macro-environment as well as uncertainty related to the pending acquisition of Twitter by an affiliate of Musk”.