PayPal to cut 7 percent of workforce, about 2,000 employees

Financial technology company PayPal announced on Tuesday that they are to cut about 2,000 employees, or 7 percent of their workforce, as the payment processing service faces what they call a "challenging macroeconomic environment."

"Today, I'm writing to share the difficult news that we will be reducing our global workforce by approximately 2,000 full time employees, which is about 7 percent of our total workforce," PayPal president and CEO Dan Schulman wrote in a statement. "These reductions will occur over the coming weeks, with some organizations impacted more than others."  



Though the company announced sweeping layoffs in the next weeks, Schulman did not specify as to what areas of the finance conglomerate may be facing the biggest cut backs. PayPal, which was ranked at 143 on the 2022 Fortune 500 list of the largest American corporations by revenue, also owns payment processors Venmo, Xoom, ecommerce coupon tool Honey, among other brands.

However, shares of PayPal have dropped about 53 percent in just the last year, reported the Daily Mail.

Schulman added in his statement that lots of work has been done, and still needs to be done, in order for the company to recover. 

"Over the past year, we made significant progress in strengthening and reshaping our company to address the challenging macroeconomic environment while continuing to invest to meet our customers' needs," he said Tuesday.

"While we have made substantial progress in right-sizing our cost structure, and focused our resources on our core strategic priorities, we have more work to do,"  he added.

The news of the layoffs has come along with speculations that Elon Musk, the co-founder of money processor X.com, which later became PayPal, is planning to add payment processing to Twitter, which he acquired in October. 

As the Financial Times reported on Monday, Musk has previously expressed his interest in the social media platform offering services such as peer-to-peer transactions, savings accounts, and debit cards, as part of his vision for an "everything app."

According to the publication, Twitter "registered with the US Treasury as a payments processor" in November, and has also now begun to apply for some of the necessary state licenses.

"The day Twitter can process payments is the day I ditch PayPal forever," commentator Collin Rugg wrote. 

The announcement of layoffs also comes as the company still faces backlash for an updated terms of service policy that showed they wanted to fine users $2500 for spreading "misinformation," directly taken from their bank accounts.

They later apologized, saying the "language was never intended to be inserted in our policy."

The San Jose, California-based company joins Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce as other tech companies who announced large workforce cuts in the month of January alone.