The Musk effect

SOCIAL media giant, Twitter has seen sweeping changes since the arrival of new CEO and billionaire, Elon Musk, including thousands of lay-offs. And it appears that Musk’s radical vision for the transformation of the company has reached Spain.

The company’s headquarters in Spain had reported redundancies of more than 80 per cent of its workforce by Thursday, January 26, after lay-offs were made two days earlier. The social media platform had a small team in Spain of just 29, 24 of which have now been sacked.

The workers are set to leave the company’s Madrid headquarters from Wednesday, February 8 after coming to an agreement with bosses over redundancy. Spanish employment regulations mean that the employees will also receive a redundancy pay packet covering 33 days, instead of 20 as initially offered by the company.

The motion was originally announced by the UGT trade union in November, who said negotiations were set to open over the proposed laying-off of 26 of Twitter’s staff in Spain.

The changes are taking place as Musk seeks to change the way Twitter works.

These arrests took place in November 2022 in several Spanish provinces - Badajoz, Cadiz, Ciudad Real, Cordoba, Tenerife and in the Autonomous City of Ceutaand follow the arrest of 21 other members of the same criminal organisation in 2021.

Known as Operation Conifera, this investigation into match-fixing was carried out by the Spanish National Police in a joint operation with Europol and Interpol. A total of 30 football matches are currently being investigated in this case. The profits generated are estimated at over half a million euros.

Europol’s support was central in the development of the Spanish investigation. Europol’s European Financial and Economic Crime Centre has been providing continuous intelligence development and analysis to map out the different targets and their criminal activity.