More than 3,000 Twitter employees laid off within one week of Musk's acquisition

Following his recent acquisition of Twitter, Inc., Penn graduate Elon Musk laid off roughly half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees last Friday.

The sudden layoffs come after Musk — who graduated from the College and Wharton in 1997 — acquired Twitter on Oct. 28 for $44 billion. The terminations spanned multiple departments from engineering and machine learning to content management and advertising, according to the New York Times. Days after the mass layoffs, however, the company has reportedly asked employees who had been laid off to return.

The only warning from the company was an email Thursday night notifying employees that layoffs were set to begin Friday.

“In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday,” an email obtained by The Washington Post wrote. "We recognize that this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions to Twitter, but this action is unfortunately necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward."

The email was also the Musk team’s first official communication with Twitter staff since the acquisition.

Many employees reported losing access to company systems late Thursday night. In one case, an employee was cut off from Twitter’s internal system in the middle of a work meeting about Twitter Blue, the social media company’s premium subscription service, according to the Times.

Multiple teams were cut entirely in the layoff process, just a week into Musk's tenure. According to TechCrunch, teams such as human rights, accessibility, artificial intelligence ethics, and curation were eliminated entirely.

Bloomberg reported on Sunday that dozens of employees who were initially fired were later asked to return to their roles. The company claimed that they were laid off by mistake or management realized after the fact their roles were necessary to fulfill the new company vision.

Musk announced that he became Twitter’s largest shareholder in early April and formally offered to buy the company later that month. However, a back-and-forth process ensued in the coming months, and Musk even tried to back out of the purchase in July.

However, after Twitter’s board of directors filed a lawsuit against him to complete the purchase by force, the parties reached an agreement to complete the purchase on Musk’s original terms. Upon Musk’s acquisition of the company, he dismissed Twitter’s board and appointed himself the sole director.