- Under Elon Musk's ownership, Twitter recently laid off 3,700 people, roughly half its workforce.
- The New York Times reports Musk initially wanted layoffs before employees would receive scheduled bonuses but delayed them after finding out how expensive that would be.
- Musk then ordered a payroll audit, in which managers were asked to confirm employees were human, because he worried "ghost employees" would receive money, per NYT.
Elon Musk has long been wary of bots on Twitter. It turns out he's also suspicious that some of Twitter's employees, not just its users, aren't actual people.
Since Musk took charge at Twitter, the company has slashed 3,700 jobs, which is roughly half of its workforce. The New York Times reported Friday that, during the process, Musk wanted confirmation that Twitter employees were "real humans" and ordered a payroll audit to confirm that was the case before giving staff regularly scheduled bonuses.
On October 28, one day after his deal to buy Twitter was finalized, Musk met with HR executives and said he wanted to make job cuts immediately, the Times reported. Employees were due to get vested stock as a regularly scheduled retention bonus on November 1, and one team at Twitter built a model showing that laying people off before then could mean millions of dollars in legal fees and fines, three people told the Times.
When Musk learned how much pricier this course of action would be, he agreed to delay, four people told the Times.
Before paying the bonuses, however, Musk ordered a payroll audit to make sure Twitter's employees were "real humans," out of his concern that "ghost employees" still on the books would get some of the money, according to the Times.
Twitter's chief accounting officer, Robert Kaiden, who was chosen by Musk to carry out the audit, asked managers to confirm if they knew certain employees and verify that they were in fact human, the Times reported, citing three people and an internal document it reviewed.
Twitter ultimately announced its mass layoffs on November 4. Some staffers, however, started getting locked out of services like Slack and email the day before they were set to begin, multiple employees previously told Insider. After the cuts, some employees said they'd been called back after Musk's advisers realized they were "essential for Twitter's ecosystem to function."
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