Twitter canceled its Chirp developer conference set for next month as new owner Elon Musk prepares to enact changes to the social media platform.
The company’s decision to cancel the conference comes amid speculation of cutbacks to Twitter’s workforce and expectations of new product offerings in the near term.
“We’ve decided to cancel the #Chirp developer conference while we build some things that we’re excited to share with you soon,” the company announced via its @TwitterDev account.
The company announced the cancelation late Wednesday and said it would refund people who registered to attend the gathering in San Francisco in November.
The scrapping of the conference has added fuel to speculation that Twitter employees could soon be on the chopping block as Mr. Musk looks to expand revenue. He has plans to kill about 3,700 jobs at Twitter and inform staffers as soon as Friday, according to Bloomberg.
Since Mr. Musk took the company private, he has fired the company’s board of directors and made himself the board’s sole member. He also axed then-CEO Parag Agrawal and other executives last week.
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Reports of wider-spread layoffs have proved false. Two men pretending to be laid-off Twitter employees captured media attention last week, leading to news outlets publishing erroneous reports about the men carrying boxes of their belongings away from the company’s offices. The men were pranksters.
A downsizing of Twitter’s workforce would resemble changes underway at other tech firms looking to be competitive. For example, ride-sharing company Lyft plans to cut 700 employees, and payment platform Stripe is scrapping more than 1,000 jobs, according to reports published Thursday.
Mr. Musk is experimenting with new video-focused features and has floated resurrecting the short-form video-based app Vine that Twitter previously shuttered. The SpaceX and Tesla CEO has also proffered different ideas about monetizing content on his platform, including offering people the ability to post longer videos in return for a monthly fee that also gives a user a blue badge of verification on the platform.
• This article was based in part on wire service reports.
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.
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