During an interview that aired on Monday’s broadcast of FNC’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Elon Musk discussed the staffing situation he inherited after his acquisition of Twitter.
Musk deemed it “absurdly overstaffed” at the time.
According to Musk, 80% of the initial staff at Twitter had either departed or been terminated.
“What percentage of your staff did you fire at Twitter?” Carlson asked. “One of the great business stories of the year?”
“I think we’re about 20% of the original size,” Musk replied,
“So 80% left?” Carlson said.
“Yes — a lot of people voluntarily left,” Musk said.
“Sure, 80% are going from the daily total,” Carlson said. “So, how do you run the company with only 20% of the staff?”
“It turns out you don’t need all that many people to run Twitter,” Musk replied.
Carlson responded, “But 80%? That’s a lot.”
“Yes, I mean, if you’re not trying to run some sort of glorified activist organization and you don’t care that much about censorship, then you can really let go of a lot of people, it turns out,” Musk said.
“I had dinner with somebody who runs a big company recently,” Carlson explained. “He said, ‘I’m really inspired by Elon.’ And I said, ‘The free speech stuff?’ He goes, ‘No, the firing the staff stuff.’ How many other CEOs have come to talk to you about this?”
“I spend a lot of time at work, so it’s not like I’m meeting with lots of people,” Musk said. “But I think we just had a situation at Twitter where it was absurdly overstaffed, you know? What does it really take to operate Twitter? You know, most of what we’re talking about here is a group text service at scale. Like, how many people are really needed for that, you know? If you at what has been the product development over time? You list product improvements, and it is a pretty flat line. So what are they doing, you know? It took a year to add an edit button that doesn’t work most of the time. I mean, I feel like it was a comedy situation here.”
“You’re not making cars,” he added. “It’s very difficult to make cars. The question is, how did it get so absurdly overstaffed?”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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