SAN FRANCISCO : Keeping everyone curious about his next surprise move as owner of joint social media platform, Ellon Musk has dropped another bomb shell by scrapping Twitter’s working from home policy and ordered its staff back to the office. This sudden move came days after Musk fired 3,700 employees in a jiffy.
Musk fired about half of the company’s 7,500-strong workforce last Friday, having bought it for $44bn (£38.7bn) the previous week. At the same time, he said Twitter had been hit by a pause in spending from advertisers that had caused “a massive drop in revenue”. Twitter makes most of its more than $5bn in annual revenue from advertising.
The company has begun rolling out Twitter Blue, its new subscription service, in the UK. Users who pay £6.99 a month get a blue tick next to their username, as well as early access to forthcoming features such as bookmark folders and the ability to change the colour of the app icon. Musk is hoping that Twitter Blue will reduce the company’s reliance on advertising.
Despite the chief executive’s promise last week that the international pricing of Blue would be adjusted “proportionate to purchasing power parity”, an economic measure of exchange rates that takes into account the cost of living in various countries, Musk seems to have given ground to Apple. The subscription service is billed through Apple’s in-app purchases, which locked Twitter into charging £6.99 in the UK to match the $7.99 in the US.