Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, now X, has been a struggle — and now it looks like the platform’s user growth has stalled.According to figures seen by the Financial Times, X said its number of global daily active users was 251 million in the second quarter of this year — just 1.6% above what it was a year ago. Before Musk acquired the social media platform for $44 billion in October 2022, Twitter had experienced double-digit year-over-year growth, including 33.8% growth in the second quarter of 2022.
Meanwhile, X said Tuesday the platform had around 570 million monthly active users during the second quarter — up 6% year-over-year.
Many users have left the platform over concerns about hate speech since Musk’s takeover. That combined with Musk’s fight with major advertisers, including Walmart and Disney, has sent the company’s value tumbling 71.5% since Musk’s takeover.
As of November 2023, X was worth $12.5 billion, according to a disclosure from Fidelity — which had worked with Musk on his purchase of the platform — obtained by Axios. Months earlier, a leaked memo valued X at $19 billion — or less than half of what he paid for it in 2022. Analysts have said X is falling behind its rivals, and daily active users on the platform were down 23% from October 2022 to March.
UiPath, a developer of automat
ion software, is cutting 10% of its workforce, or about 420 jobs, as part of a broader restructuring, the company said in filing with the SEC on Tuesday.
Most of the layoffs will be implemented by the end of the first quarter of fiscal 2026, the company said. That quarter ends next April.
UiPath shares dropped about 7% on Tuesday and have now lost more than half their value this year. The Nasdaq is up 23% over that stretch. UiPath has faced a dramatic slowing of revenue growth following its IPO in 2021, which was one of the largest U.S. software offerings on record.
When Etsy launched almost two decades ago, the site attracted artisans and craft makers, who finally had a place online where they could sell their niche products and reach a large audience. But in recent years, Etsy has found itself overrun with mass-produced, generic items from resellers who have learned how to game the website and crowd out handcrafted products.
Now Etsy CEO Josh Silverman wants the company, whose stated mission is to “keep commerce human,” to get back to its roots.
DoorDash said Tuesday that it’s stepping up efforts to identify dangerous delivery drivers and remove them from its platform after a flood of complaints from cities.
In a letter sent last month to DoorDash and other food delivery companies, Boston officials said they were seeing an increase in the unlawful and dangerous operation of motorcycles, mopeds and motorized scooters by delivery workers.
The city said riders were running red lights, traveling the wrong way on one-way streets, exceeding posted speed limits and driving on sidewalks.
San Francisco-based DoorDash said it has created a dedicated point of contact for the Boston Police Department to make it faster and easier to process requests for drivers’ records. The company said it would also consider removing drivers from the platform if police report they have broken traffic laws.
DoorDash said it was starting the effort in Boston but may expand it to other cities.
DoorDash said it’s also partnering with Boston and other cities to share guidance on vehicle registration requirements in multiple languages. It will also warn delivery workers about activities that break local laws, like driving on sidewalks.
“We will remind Dashers that failing to comply with local laws or our standards could lead to removal from our platform,” the company said.
Officials in Boston, New York and other cities have said that in many cases, drivers are using unregistered vehicles for deliveries. Some drivers may also share accounts, so a person with multiple traffic violations might be using a vehicle registered to someone else.
In New York, authorities have seized 13,000 scooters and mopeds so far this year that were unregistered or used to break traffic laws.
“They have terrorized many of our pedestrians, particularly our senior and older adults,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams said last month at an event where 200 motorized two-wheeled delivery vehicles were destroyed. “Riders who think the rules don’t apply to them, they’re going to see an aggressive enforcement policy that’s in place.”
In response, DoorDash said it will more frequently prompt drivers to submit a real-time selfie to prove their identity while they’re making deliveries. The selfie is then compared to previously submitted government identification.
DoorDash said it would remove drivers who fail to confirm their identities.
DoorDash wouldn’t say Tuesday how many drivers it typically removes from its platform each year for breaking traffic laws.
People make or break a company, something that’s easy to forget with all the hullaballoo over AI. Paycor, a human capital management platform, surveyed more than 7,000 American employees, half of whom worked in HR, over what makes companies and employees successful. Here are the key insights:
- Attracting and retaining talent is the biggest challenge: 71% of companies say finding quality employees is their biggest recruiting challenge. Meanwhile, 38% of employees who have been at a company for less than two years are more likely to search for a new job within the following year. Concerningly, half (46%) of HR professionals have been in their jobs for two years or less.
- Leader feedback is essential for high performance: employees in high-performing companies are 110% more likely to get productive feedback from managers and 397% more likely to say their leaders are engaged and inspirational. However, only 39% of remote workers say they get productive feedback from their managers, compared to 56% of hybrid employees and 50% of onsite employees. Meanwhile, hybrid and onsite workers say burnout is the number one reason managers are ineffective—but remote employees beg to differ. They say their managers don’t have enough HR support.
- Strong leaders drive strong financial performance: Also, 83% of companies with excellent financial performance in the last year agreed that their leaders were highly effective. By comparison, 85% of companies with poor economic performance said their leaders were ineffective.
“It could be that in high-performing companies, HR has figured out ways to give managers back time in their days to coach and develop [teams],” the report’s authors wrote.
As more women are remaining in the workforce well into their fifties, a cottage industry of startups has cropped up to help support them through the experience of menopause.
There are products that claim to address symptoms like hot flashes and hair loss, while others have the more ambitious goal of staving off menopause or mitigating its effect on fertility. Some companies are focused on providing medical care to those facing menopause, who they believe are underserved by traditional healthcare.
The proliferation of these companies has also raised awareness about how menopause can impact working individuals, in particular—and workers themselves have started asking for menopause-related benefits.
LACK OF BENEFITS
Even so, the majority of workplaces have been slow to embrace the issue: The latest edition of an annual survey by the menopause care startup Bonafide finds that most workers still lack any kind of accommodations as they approach (and experience) menopause. The survey polled over 2,000 perimenopausal and menopausal women, 76% of whom said their workplace has no accommodations for issues related to menopause.
But it’s clear that many would like to see that change: More than half of respondents said they wanted better workplace accommodations for menopause. According to the survey, women are seeing the effects of menopause on their careers, perhaps in part because of the stigma that persists when it comes to discussing the topic both in and out of the workplace.
WORKPLACE STIGMA
Almost half of the respondents said that menopause had impacted their performance at work—and that they felt menopausal women were perceived as “less productive or emotionally stable.” A significant number of respondents (42%) also felt like the symptoms of menopause had taken a toll on their ambition.
The survey also seems to indicate that younger women—those experiencing perimenopause and early symptoms of menopause—might face some of the greatest hurdles. Those under 50 were more likely to report feeling “hopeless” and inadequately prepared to deal with the onset of menopause. The impact on job performance was also 27% higher for women under 50.
With millennials now accounting for the majority of the workforce—and many workers clamoring for menopause-related benefits—employers are more likely to embrace workplace accommodations for menopause in the years to come.
