Boulder Twitter operation loses 38 by resignation

BOULDER — Laid-off Twitter Inc. employees in Boulder will now be joined by an additional 38 workers — mostly engineers and designers — who have resigned.

They join the 87 employees who were laid off Nov. 4 in an action that the company’s new owner, Elon Musk, said was necessary to make the social-media company financially successful.

Notice of the 38 resignations was filed today with the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, although Twitter’s letter to the agency said it didn’t consider itself legally obligated to provide the notice.

While exact numbers of employees remaining is not known, it is estimated that the company now employs well under 100 in the Boulder market; it once had 300 in the community, although some worked remotely.

The company moved or was moving everyone into a 65,000 square-foot facility at 3401 Bluff St.

Twitter first came to Boulder in 2014 with its acquisition of the social media application programming interface company Gnip Inc. It expanded its presence in 2016 by leasing 30,000 square feet in the Wencel Building in downtown Boulder, doubling its employee count in the city to about 200.

Then in 2020, it leased 65,000 square feet in the S’Park office park in northeast Boulder, bringing its headcount to around 300. This year, Twitter vacated its Wencel Building offices. 

John Tayer, president and CEO of the Boulder Chamber, said he had no new information since the layoff notice was filed Nov. 4. “We can’t know now how they’ll deal with that space,” Tayer said Monday.

He said previously that the laid-off workforce would likely find new homes at tech companies in Boulder, given the community’s low unemployment rate and the high demand for skilled workers.

Twitter was founded in 2006 and at one time had 100 million users. In April this year, Musk began negotiations to buy the company, which he accomplished Oct. 27 for $44 billion. He named himself as CEO.

Within a week, he laid off half of the worldwide company’s 7,500 workers and shortly thereafter ordered all the remaining employees to return to the office after a COVID-related work-from-home strategy. He said he would personally need to approve any exceptions to the order.

He told staff in early November, according to a San Francisco Chronicle report, that the company was losing $4 million a day.  Media Matters for America reported that half of Twitter’s top 100 advertisers, accounting for $750 million in revenue this year alone, have left the platform since the change of ownership. The platform’s ability to moderate its content and the restoration of accounts for controversial persons such as former president Donald Trump were among the reasons given.

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