‘A Stressful Situation’: Elon Musk Has Fired More Than 80% Of Twitter Staff

Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, has disclosed in a Tuesday interview with the BBC that the social media platform has dismissed more than 80% of its staff members. The world’s wealthiest person acquired Twitter in late 2020 with the aim of increasing free expression on the platform but started his tenure with layoffs for many of the remaining 8,000 employees. Musk confirmed that currently, only about 1,500 workers are still with the firm.

The layoffs were “not fun at all” and “painful” to introduce, Musk said, as he recognized the challenging situation of downsizing. He noted, “The company’s going to go bankrupt if we do not cut costs immediately. This hasn’t been some sort of party. It’s been really quite a stressful situation.”

Despite acknowledging the difficulty of the layoffs, Musk does not regret dismissing about 6,500 employees. He insists that the layoffs were necessary to reorient Twitter towards a greater focus on engineering rather than product management and other non-technical roles.

In the quest to put Twitter on a healthy path, the firm had to go through the challenging process of reducing its global workforce at the end of last year. One email from the company sent to all employees last year accepted that the move would impact several individuals’ valuable contributions to Twitter.

Other tech firms worldwide have started trimming down their headcount as elevated consumer demand started to slow, including companies that nixed about 93,000 positions last year. According to a report from Crunchbase, over 131,000 workers have been dismissed from tech firms so far this year.

Musk, who is also a famous critic of remote work arrangements and has discontinued the practice within the firms he leads, including Tesla and SpaceX, is facing backlash from advertisers who claim that Twitter’s new policies around free expression allow an increased amount of so-called hate speech.
During the interview with the BBC, Clayton confronted Musk over a supposed rise in hateful conduct on Twitter. Musk asked him to provide a single example of hate speech made despite his allegations that he has witnessed an increase in such posts.