Elon Musk has claimed that Twitter had “a lot of people doing things that didn’t seem to have much value”. This partly explains the social media giant’s execution of mass layoffs.
“I think that this phenomenon has occurred in most companies in Silicon Valleymaybe not to the degree that it has been on Twitter,” Musk said during his virtual speech at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit in London this Tuesday.
“Twitter was in a situation where, in a meeting of 10 people, one was on the accelerator and 9 on the brakes, so you didn’t get very far,” he explained. The CEO of Tesla – and until recently of Twitter – has also assured that other large technology companies can still cut more jobs without affecting productivity.
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The mass layoffs have led to reflection on the apparent “make you work” trend, where executives and investors have admitted that tech companies overhired and gave people unnecessary jobs as a “vanity metric.” Proponents of this theory have argued that this is why the tech giants have cut so many jobs.
Musk assured conference attendees that Twitter now had 1,500 employees and that for him it was “a reasonable number”. However, 2 people familiar with the company told Business Insider that the number of full-time employees was closer to 1,000.
Twitter had more than 7,500 employees at the end of 2021. The billionaire bought the company for 41,000 million euros at the end of October 2022 and has reduced its workforce to a minimum, in what he assured were necessary measures to cut expenses and save the company. He fired about half of his workers just a week after taking control of Twitter.
Thousands more have been fired, laid off or resigned in the months since. The firings included some top executives and workers who criticized his leadership of the company.
The remaining workers were asked to commit to Musk’s vision for “Twitter 2.0”. The CEO reported that staff would have to work “long hours at high intensity” and be incredibly committed to the company to avoid being fired.
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Musk also declared in December to the program All In Podcast which decided which workers should stay based on whether they were “exceptional” at what they did, performed critical roles, or “put the company’s interests before their own.”
Now it seems that Twitter plans to increase its workforce again while it gets its accounts back on track and has green numbers again. “If we are lucky, we may have liquidity next month, but it remains to be seen”Musk said at the conference on Tuesday.
“We are going to start adding people to the company”, he continued, noting that some hiring had already begun. The owner of Twitter already assured in the CNBC that he would try to rehire some of the employees he fired early in his tenure.
