Twitter CEO Elon Musk revealed on Tuesday that his team has managed to significantly increase efficiency at the social media company since he purchased the firm six months ago.
Musk, who also serves as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, said he acquired Twitter at the end of last year in order to reserve a corner of the public square for open dialogue. He commented in a virtual interview with the Wall Street Journal CEO Council that the process of purchasing Twitter felt like he was “teleported into a plane that’s plunging to the ground with its engines on fire.”
“We had to do some pretty heavy-handed cost cutting,” he remarked. “If we get lucky, we might be cash flow positive next month, but it remains to be seen.”
Musk dismissed all but 1,500 of the 8,000 employees who worked at Twitter when he acquired the firm. He revealed that the company would once again “start adding people” as they keep overall headcount near the current threshold of 1,500 employees, noting that the firm initially had only “one person with an accelerator” for every “nine with a set of brakes.”
“At any given company, there are people who help move things forward and people who sort of try to slam the brakes,” he continued. “We introduced more functionality in the last six months than Twitter has in the last six years.”
The billionaire entrepreneur also introduced a revenue structure based on subscriptions rather than advertisements after he noted that a number of companies have ended their relationships with the platform at the behest of leftist organizations, dealing a significant blow to the business.
Other prominent technology firms have likewise introduced mass layoffs at the behest of investors frustrated with lackluster profitability: Microsoft, Google, and Amazon previously revealed moves to decrease payrolls by a combined more than 40,000 workers earlier this year, while fellow social media company Meta dismissed another 10,000 employees and ceased efforts to fill 5,000 available positions after reducing payrolls by more than 11,000 workers.
Musk concurred that other firms would likely see increased operational efficiency despite the layoffs. “There were a lot of people doing things that didn’t seem to have a lot of value,” he noted with respect to Twitter. “I think that’s true probably at most Silicon Valley companies, maybe not to the degree to which it was at Twitter, but there’s a potential for significant cuts at other companies without affecting their productivity, and in fact increasing productivity.”
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More than 144,000 workers have been dismissed from technology firms in the first months of 2023, according to a report from Crunchbase, even after companies in the sector dismissed some 93,000 positions in the entirety of last year.
Twitter has meanwhile implemented efforts to host podcasts and other original content. All of the top-ranked shows from The Daily Wire will start to stream on the platform next week, while conservative commentator Tucker Carlson will launch a show on the platform as well after his unexpected ouster from Fox News. Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis will announce his bid for the presidency on Wednesday in a conversation with Musk likewise hosted on Twitter.