Australia Twitter lead Neil Varcoe on ‘gardening leave’ after Elon Musk axes his entire team

TV star Edwina Bartholomew’s husband is on ‘garden leave’ after Elon Musk fired his Twitter team.

Twitter Australia editor in chief Neil Varcoe, 40, revealed he was on ‘garden leave’ on Monday – he shared a photo of the Bunnings warehouse factory on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

The term is used to describe the suspension from work by a full-paid employee for the duration of a notice period – generally for top executives.

Varcoe told friends on Facebook he could not comment on the details of his departure from the company, but said the media covered it “pretty well.”

Musk — who took out more than $30 billion in loans to buy the social media giant — fired half of the company’s 7,500 global employees over the weekend.

On Friday, Mr Varcoe revealed that he had been banned from the company’s internal instant messaging accounts in a tweet that has since been deleted.

“I just logged out of Slack,” he wrote, next to a salute emoji in an apparent farewell to the company.

Obviously, of Australia’s 40-strong workforce, only a ‘skeleton staff’ of mostly those working in advertising survived the cull.

Twitter closed off access to its offices around the world and locked staff out of company accounts on Friday, advising them to stay home and await news of their fate amid a massive corporate restructuring.

Employees were told they would either receive an email on their work account saying their job was safe, or an email on their personal account, meaning they were now unemployed.

Employees at the Twitter office in Sydney received an email around 1am on Saturday informing them whether they were still employed.

Local Twitter employees shared their “heartache” on LinkedIn after receiving news that they were part of the global layoffs.

“My entire team has been fired from Twitter,” wrote Katherine Gallo, former deputy head of world news in Sydney.

“I’m devastated because when I gave up my previous job at SBS, I thought I wouldn’t be able to find another place I loved so much. But I did. It’s the people who made Twitter so special. What’s next for me? I’m not sure.’

But in an unexpected twist, Twitter has reportedly contacted dozens of employees who were laid off in the global layoff and asked them to return.

Some staff members who were asked to return had been accidentally fired, according to two people familiar with the moves as reported by Bloomberg.

Daily Mail Australia has reached out to Twitter Australia and Mr Varcoe for comment.

Others, more disturbingly, were “released before management realized their work and experience may be needed to build the new features Musk envisioned,” the report said.

The email cull of nearly 3,700 employees was a move by Musk to cut costs on the social media platform.

“As for the diminution of Twitter’s power, unfortunately there is no choice when the company loses more than $4 million a day,” Musk tweeted Friday.

The internal email sent to employees said the cuts to Twitter’s global workforce would put the company on a “healthy path.”

“In an effort to put Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday,” the internal email read.

“We recognize that this will affect a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions to Twitter, but unfortunately this action is necessary to ensure the company’s future success.”

The e-mail then stated: ‘everyone will receive an individual e-mail with the subject line: Your role at Twitter’.

Employees who kept their position received an email to their Twitter address, and dismissed employees received the follow-up steps about their dismissal via their personal email address.

Musk last month acquired Twitter for $44 billion ($70 billion), took on billions of dollars in debt and sold $15.5 billion worth of stock in Tesla – his electric car company.

He had already cleared the company’s senior ranks, fired its chief executive and top finance and legal executives, along with those sitting on top of the company’s advertising, marketing and human resources divisions.

Before buying the platform, Musk tweeted that the company under his ownership will be “super focused on hardcore software engineering, design, infosec and server hardware.”

Musk asked users on Nov. 2 whether advertisers should support free speech or “political correctness” — more than two million users voted in the poll and nearly 80 percent answered “free speech.”

Advertisers expressed concern that the platform would be inundated with the voices of bigots and conspiracy theorists after Musk announced a process to reinstate banned accounts.

The billionaire promised advertisers that Twitter would not turn into a “free-for-all hellscape.”