Elon Musk, who has largely eliminated Twitter’s workforce since buying the company in late October, laughed when asked about the layoffs on a podcast. Elon Musk appeared on an episode of the “All-In Podcast” released on Saturday, where he talked about his “roller coaster” first two months on Twitter.
Venture capitalist and podcast cohost Chamath Palihapitiya asked Musk how he decided what “the skilled range of employees” should be to improve Twitter. Musk laughed before turning to David Sachs, who has served as an advisor and close confidante to the tech mogul since taking over at Twitter.
“I saw a part of it where you basically asked the question, ‘Who is important here and who is extraordinary here?'” Sachs said. Elon Musk explained his reasoning behind deciding who should stay at the company: “Somebody who is exceptional at what they do, where the role is important and they have a positive impact on others, and are trusted.” goes.” Which means he must put the interests of the company ahead of his own.”
He added that employees also needed to be “willing to work hard”, adding that this was not part of Twitter’s “former culture”. Following the completion of Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition deal on October 27, he cut nearly half of the company’s workforce. Musk fired some of the company’s top executives as well as employees who criticized his leadership.
The remaining employees were given an ultimatum, telling them to commit to Elon Musk’s vision for “Twitter 2.0”, which he said would “operate at a high intensity for a long time” or be shut down. . Meanwhile, other Twitter employees have decided to leave, saying Musk has changed the company’s culture and they are worried about the future of the site.
Elon Musk said on Saturday’s “All-In Podcast” that Twitter still has about 2,000 employees left, a sharp decline from more than 7,500 full-time employees at the end of 2021. Musk said Twitter also had about 5,000 contractors. , whom he said are responsible for “almost all” of the site’s trust and security functions.
Elon Musk spoke more generally about his time at the helm of Twitter, saying that it had its highs and lows to say the least, but that overall the site is headed in a good direction. Since acquiring the company, Musk has changed some of the site’s features, such as introducing tweet view counts and adding blue verification ticks to the list of benefits for Twitter Blue subscribers.
He has also reinstated some suspended accounts, such as former President Donald Trump’s account, and announced sweeping changes to Twitter’s content-moderation policies that have led some companies to stop running ads on the site. Twitter has been hit by several lawsuits from laid-off employees alleging wrongdoing. Elon Musk said earlier this month that he would step down as CEO of Twitter as soon as I find a fool who can take the job.
One of the first things I said after the acquisition closed was, ‘We’re going to make a lot of mistakes, but then we’ll try to recover from them quickly,’ and that’s what we’ve done and I think we will We’ve generally recovered from them pretty quickly,’ he said on the All-In podcast.
Elon Musk also defended his decision to temporarily suspend the accounts of several journalists. Musk has alleged that the journalists who were suspended were “doxing”, some of them reporting on Twitter’s suspension of @ElonJet, an account that was used publicly to track the whereabouts of his jet.
Elon Musk said, I think the suspension of journalists was not a mistake. For some reason a group of journalists thought they were better than everyone else on a regular basis and that they are not subject to suspension if they engage in doxing and break the rules in various ways, even though your average citizen is your average Be civil and I think it’s just messed up.