Elon Musk revealed that Twitter now has 2300 active and working employees. The disclosure follows a persisting era of layoffs and terminations overseen by Musk to reduce company costs.
Quick Facts
- Elon Musk announced on Saturday that Twitter is operating with 2,300 employees and dismissed a report that suggested the workforce had fewer members
- He divulged that only 10 people from his remaining companies were still working at Twitter against a report that revealed 130 external workers were involved in the platform’s daily affairs
- The outlet making the claim assured that the figures are based on internal records
Elon Musk made headlines on Saturday when he replied to a tweet made by the Twitter account @unusual_whales. It referred to a CNBC report that stated how Twitter’s full-time workforce has 1,300 people remaining.
“There are ~2300 active, working employees at Twitter,” he wrote. “There are still hundreds of employees working on trust & safety, along with several thousand contractors,” said Musk.
CNBC also reported that the headcount has fewer than 550 full-time engineers by title which is a striking contrast to the 7,000 before Musk’s arrival. CNBC also reported that more than 130 people from Musk’s other businesses worked at Twitter.
Musk quickly refuted the claim tweeting that “less than 10 people from my other companies are working at Twitter.” Backed up by an internal document, the report states that 75 of Twitter’s 1,300 employees are presently on leave, including 40 engineers.
The Twitter CEO affirmed that the company’s trust and safety team – the brains behind the ideation of policy, design, and product changes, is supported by of full-time staff.
According to Musk, “There are still hundreds of employees working on trust and safety… Less than 10 people from my other companies are working at Twitter.” His words deny the report that revealed that there are only 20 full-time employees on the trust and safety team.
In addition, Musk has not been transparent about non-working employees still on Twitter’s payroll. The internal document further shared that the company has around 1,400 non-working employees who “still get paid but are no longer expected to fulfill their former responsibilities.”
Elon Musk wants to “fix” Twitter
The cataclysmic events after Musk’s Twitter acquisition in late October 2022 unfolded unceremoniously. The social media giant fired 50 percent of the workforce of 7,500, and some workers even voluntarily departed as a result of Musk’s hardcore administrative abilities.
Another report recently implied that the layoffs will resume shortly. Twitter could in the future reduce the offloading of staff from the product division. However, some other departments could be affected by the move.
Big companies including Twitter have been observed to have laid off a barrage of employees in the last three months as a part of their extreme cost-cutting regime. Amazon offloaded approximately 18,000 workers, and Microsoft fired 10,000 staff members.
Meta, formerly named Facebook, permanently relieved 11,000 workers from their duties in November 2022, which accommodated around 13 percent of its workforce. Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that he let go of 12,000 workers because the company overhired during the rough two-year phase brought along by the Covid-19 pandemic.
After Musk’s entry as the CEO of Twitter, many workers from Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company swarmed into the company to recover its losses. Engineers from Tesla walked into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters to engage with Twitter engineers.
They held active discussions about work and some technical undertakings of the platform, as reported by Insider. The tech mogul revealed that he was on a progressive pathway to “fix” Twitter. His hyper-fixation on the company has reportedly outraged Tesla shareholders, and one of them even suggested looking for another CEO to take over the EV giant.
Last month Musk hinted at the possibility of him stepping down as Twitter CEO. He polled users asking them if they prefer his departure from the disastrous CEO-ship. Interestingly, more than 57% of users voted in favor of his departure. So he is on the lookout for a new CEO at the moment.
On the other hand, Musk attended a civil trial in San Francisco about his tweets in August 2018. He had claimed he was intending to make his care company private with “funding secured.”
He argued that his share in the private rocket company SpaceX backed up his statement at that time.
