Technology: Now, Musk ‘prompts’ other big-tech firms to sack more staff!
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Elon Musk, who sacked over three-fourths of employees after buying Twitter in October 2022, has now ‘prompted’ big technology firms to do likewise to boost their productivity.
He said Twitter, the microblogging platform he bought for USD 44 billion last year, was in a situation where almost 90 percent of employees were unproductive.
“You’d have a meeting of 10 people–one person with an accelerator and nine with a set of brakes,” he was quoted as saying in media reports on Saturday.
The outgoing Twitter CEO said the big-tech Silicon Valley companies can also afford to cut more workforce without affecting productivity.
In October and November 2022, Musk slashed over 80 percent of the Twitter staff worldwide after he took over the company.
Speaking virtually at The Wall Street Journal’s summit in London, Musk said there were a lot of people at Twitter that didn’t seem to have a lot of value.
“I think that’s true at many Silicon Valley companies. I think there is the possibility for significant cuts at other companies without affecting their productivity, in fact, increasing their productivity,” he said.
Musk said Twitter now has around 1,500 employees, which is “probably a reasonable number.”
Even after a massive round of job cuts last year, he sacked more in the following months, despite promising not to fire them. That left only about 1,500 employees out of the total 7,500 he found when he took it over.
Twitter also shut down two of its three India offices and directed its employees to work from home. In November 2022, Musk fired 90 percent of his staff in India, numbering nearly 200.
“We will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade,” Musk had said.
