Elon Musk cuts more fat off at Twitter, 'say what you want about me'

A new report claims that Twitter has laid off at least fifty workers over the weekend, with some discovering their firing by being locked out of their email accounts.

The report comes from The Information, which recently published claims that Twitter fired "dozens" of employees on Saturday, with some of those affected employees being engineers that were responsible for keeping Twitter's underlying systems up and running. Other employees affected by the layoffs were those responsible for advertising technology, the main app of Twitter, and technical infrastructure.

These job cuts are now the eighth round of layoffs since Elon Musk took over the company in October and are a response to Twitter's overall dip in revenue caused by advertisers pulling out ad expenditure on the platform. Advertisers began slowing down or halting advertising on Twitter shortly after Elon Musk took over the company and revised the platform's content moderation policy. Many brands were hesitant about Musk's new vision for Twitter and, as a result, thought it would be safer to reduce spending or stop altogether.

• Read more: Elon Musk says the recent UFO sightings are his alien friends

Following this cratering of advertising expenditure Elon Musk responded by cutting running costs at the company, which led to 3,700 employees being fired. Since the Tesla CEO took over the company, Twitter's total headcount of staff has reduced by at least 70% down to approximately 2,000.

Simultaneously, Musk has been attempting to increase Twitter's revenue with new strategies such as the revised Twitter Blue subscription, which gives buyers the verification checkmark badge and a range of other features such as a reduction in the total amount of ads seen, longer tweets, custom app icons, spaces tab, top articles, bookmark folders and the option to edit tweets. Furthermore, Twitter Blue subscribers get their posts prioritized in the Twitter feed, longer video uploads, and the ability to undo tweets.

Musk has not been silent on the struggles of owning Twitter, with the SpaceX CEO taking to his personal Twitter account only recently to write that he's acquired the world's largest non-profit for $44 billion. The joking sentiment throughout Musk's tweet speaks volumes, as there is a vein of truth that runs through it.

Previously, Musk has described the situation at Twitter as dire, with the CEO even saying the whole Twitter situation is like a "flaming dumpster ro0lling down the street".

Within the same Twitter thread as Musk says that Twitter will be making its algorithm open source next week and that whoever is interested in looking at it will be disappointed.