Twitter employees expect layoffs as Elon Musk preps 'aggressive' cuts

Happy Halloween, readers. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed after a week away, I'm your host, Jordan Parker Erb. Thank you to Avery Hartmans for taking over while I was gone!

In keeping with today's holiday, we're talking about something spooky: what's going on inside Twitter. For starters, questions are swirling over who's leading the company as CEO — apparently even Elon Musk isn't sure — and why people are being asked to print out code.

And that's not to mention that employees are preparing for layoffs after Twitter leaders and VPs made lists of who to keep.

Let's get started.

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1. Twitter employees expect layoffs to begin very soon. Late Friday, Twitter team leaders and VPs began stack ranking employees. By Saturday afternoon, they handed Elon Musk lists of employees "to keep," two people said.

• The process began on Musk's first official day as Twitter's owner, a day that left employees confused and unsure of their fate. Plus, there was confusion over who's actually running the company: Despite listing himself as CEO on internal company profiles, Musk said he has "no idea who the CEO is."
• Meanwhile, several Twitter engineering teams met with Tesla engineers in meetings aimed at identifying "top" performers and "who to cut, who to keep and what orgs are bad," one person said.
• There is no exact percentage of employees to be cut, this person added, but layoffs are expected to be "aggressive" — and workers expect them to begin soon. That's why many engineers and vice presidents worked through the weekend to try and keep their jobs, in an atmosphere likened to the "Hunger Games."

As Musk prepares "aggressive" cuts, who will be spared?

In other news:

2. Tech companies like Amazon and Meta are in for a tough few months. After tech stocks were slammed amid dismal earnings reports, analysts are saying there are choppy waters ahead — and only some firms are prepared.

3. Amazon slashed another division in an attempt to cut costs. On Friday, the company fired half of its Amp live radio division, notifying roughly 150 people they would need to take severance or find new jobs internally. What we know about the cuts.

4. Elon Musk fired Twitter execs "for cause" in a bid to avoid paying out tens of millions in severance. According to The Information, Musk dismissed the executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, to try to avoid payouts and unvested stock awards, suggesting he had justification for their termination. A look at what that means.

5. VCs are looking for alternatives to traditional social networks. For the first time in years, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are "weak" — and investors told Insider they're eager to back the next big platform and take on existing giants. Here's what VCs are looking for.

6. Mark Zuckerberg wants to do what Google did with Android — but he learned all the wrong lessons. Similar to Google, Zuckerberg's Meta is trying to wrangle control away from Apple, but experts say the project seems to miss one key ingredient that made Android a success: consumer demand. Why analysts are skeptical Meta can pull it off.

7. Meet a woman who quit her full-time tech job to become a creator and voice actor. After four years of working for Instagram's marketing team, Joy Ofodu left to pursue voice acting and content creation. She explains how she grew her following, and what she's learned.

8. These billionaires have seen their net worths drop the most this year. Among this year's biggest losers are those who've invested heavily in the metaverse (Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg) and crypto (Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao). Here's who else has had their net worth battered this year.

Odds and ends:

9. Airbnb awarded 100 recipients $100,000 each to design out-of-this-world properties. The selected winners were given the funding to bring their ideas to life. From a ghost town gondola and acorn treehouse to a salt cave and Koi fish dome-house, check out 25 of the designs that won the coveted grant.

10. New titles are coming to Netflix. While some popular films are leaving the platform in November, new seasons of "Dead to Me" and "The Crown" will be added, as well as season five of "The Great British Baking Show: Holidays." See everything coming to — and leaving — Netflix in November.

What we're watching today:

• The Bipartisan Policy Center is hosting a discussion on mergers and acquisitions in the tech sector at 11 a.m. ET.
• NFT San Francisco concludes today.
• NXP Semiconductors and others are reporting earnings today. Keep up with earnings here.

Keep updated with the latest tech news throughout your day by checking out The Refresh from Insider, a dynamic audio news brief from the Insider newsroom. Listen here.

Curated by Jordan Parker Erb in New York. (Feedback or tips? Email jerb@insider.com or tweet @jordanparkererb.) Edited by Hallam Bullock (tweet @hallam_bullock) in London.