Twitter Is Drafting Broad Job Cuts in Whirlwind First Weekend Under Elon Musk

Mr. Musk fired Twitter Chief Executive Parag Agrawal and three other top executives for cause and is saying he isn’t required to pay them multimillion-dollar severance packages that had been expected, according to two people familiar with the matter. Departed executives are weighing their options, one of the people said. Mr. Agrawal didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Twitter’s top two executives were set to collect more than $100 million in severance packages, according to previously disclosed figures in securities filings, according to an estimate from Equilar, a compensation data and analysis company.

After the takeover, Mr. Musk has been working with a team of associates that includes former Twitter product leader and venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan and attorney Alex Spiro. Mr. Krishnan tweeted Sunday that he was helping Mr. Musk with Twitter “temporarily with some other great people.”

Twitter has posted a loss in eight of its past 10 fiscal years, according to FactSet, and Mr. Musk’s takeover comes as the social media industry faces the most tempestuous business environment in its history.

Facebook

parent Meta Platforms Inc. spooked investors with a revenue slowdown and a commitment to spending tens of billions more toward the building of the metaverse, which has yet to attract a significant user base. Meta’s market value dropped below $300 billion for the first time since early 2016. YouTube posted its first decline in advertising revenue, while

Snapchat

parent Snap Inc. warned investors that it is operating on an assumption of no revenue growth this quarter from a year earlier.

One of the first issues Mr. Musk is aiming to tackle is costs, according to people familiar with the matter. He told employees in June that he believed costs were “not a great situation” at Twitter, according to people who viewed a virtual meeting then. He didn’t rule out layoffs at the time, adding that anyone who is a significant contributor shouldn’t worry, according to the people. The New York Times earlier reported about Twitter’s plans for job cuts and the severance issue.

Several employees have said they are worried that Mr. Musk could move to cut jobs before Nov. 1, which is a vesting date for Twitter’s compensation program. Employees’ grants were expected to be paid as cash after Mr. Musk’s acquisition, according to people familiar with the issue. A number of employees have said they are concerned Mr. Musk could try to avoid making those payments if their employment is terminated before Nov. 1.

“This is false,” Mr. Musk tweeted Sunday evening, replying to a tweet that highlighted the concern in a New York Times article.

On Thursday, Mr. Musk took steps to assure Madison Avenue, publishing a letter saying that he very much believed “that advertising, when done right, can delight, entertain and inform you.” On Friday, he told advertisers that Twitter would be “forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints.” He added: “No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.”

Some advertisers have expressed concern that Mr. Musk’s stated commitment to free speech will lead to a surge of content that is offensive to some users or at least not advertiser-friendly.

“Twitter’s ad business is already on shaky ground,” said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, a market-research firm. In coming days, she said, Mr. Musk will need to “set clear guidelines for what content moderation will look like if he wants to keep advertisers around.”

Twitter spent part of the weekend addressing some content issues that sprung up in the wake of Mr. Musk’s takeover.

Several nonprofits have in recent days pointed to a sudden rise in hate speech on the platform, including the Anti-Defamation League and the Network Contagion Research Institute.

The ADL, a Jewish advocacy group that examines anti-Semitism in the U.S., said it identified more than 1,200 tweets and retweets spreading anti-Semitic memes and called it a coordinated effort that followed Mr. Musk’s takeover. The Network Contagion Research Institute, which studies online social threats, tweeted data Friday showing that the use of the N-word on Twitter jumped 500% in the previous 12 hours.

The National Basketball Association star LeBron James quoted the data Saturday, tweeting, “I dont know Elon Musk and, tbh, I could care less who owns twitter. But I will say that if this is true, I hope he and his people take this very seriously because this is scary.” He added: “So many damn unfit people saying hate speech is free speech.”

Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, said Saturday that a small number of accounts were behind many of the tweets of slurs or hateful content, including 50,000 tweets of one racial slur from 300 accounts. The company is taking action to ban the users involved in the “trolling campaign” and will continue to work to address the issue, he said.

Mr. Musk also waded into controversy. On Sunday morning, he tweeted a link to an internet post speculatively calling into question what happened in the violent Friday morning attack on the husband of House Speaker

Nancy Pelosi.

“There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” Mr. Musk tweeted. He later deleted the tweet.

—Sarah E. Needleman contributed to this article.

Write to Alexa Corse at alexa.corse@wsj.com and Salvador Rodriguez at salvador.rodriguez@wsj.com