Elon Musk Says Twitter Was Full of Workers Doing 'Fake Work' - and Thinks Most Silicon Valley Giants Are Too

In a recent virtual appearance at the Wall Street Journal‘s CEO Council Summit in London, Elon Musk defended the large-scale layoffs executed since his acquisition of Twitter and hinted at a potential hiring surge in the future. According to Musk Twitter and many other Silicon Valley companies are filled with people doing “fake work” measured by “vanity metrics.”

Business Insider reports that Tech tycoon Elon Musk recently made a virtual appearance at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit in London, where he defended the extensive layoffs that have been made since his acquisition of Twitter and hinted at a future hiring boom.

Elon Musk, who paid $44 billion for the social media behemoth Twitter in October 2022, said his drastic staff reductions were a response to inefficiencies at the company. “Twitter was in a situation where you’d have a meeting of ten people and one person with an accelerator and nine with a set of brakes, so you didn’t go very far,” he said.

Musk criticized the prevalence of “fake work” in Silicon Valley firms, alleging that Twitter and other tech giants had overhired to inflate “vanity metrics,” creating roles with questionable value. This overstaffing problem, he contended, was so severe that “most Silicon Valley companies, maybe not to the degree to which it was at Twitter,” could benefit from further job cuts.

Twitter had more than 7,500 employees when Musk assumed control of the company. He eventually reduced this number to around 1,500, which he thought was “probably a reasonable number” after a series of layoffs and terminations. According to some sources, The number of full-time employees may be closer to 1,000.

Under Musk’s direction, the remaining Twitter employees must follow the stringent requirements of the visionary billionaire. Accepting Musk’s vision of “Twitter 2.0” necessitates working “long hours at high intensity” and prioritizing the needs of the business over your own. Musk emphasized that in this leaner, more concentrated version of Twitter, employees must be “exceptional” at their jobs in order to keep them. Even with this dedication, more employees were laid off in February, including Musk loyalists.

Musk, however, predicts a reversal in the trend of layoffs as the dust settles on this time of significant change. He disclosed plans to increase Twitter’s headcount once more as the company gets closer to becoming cash-flow positive. “If we get lucky, we might be cash-flow positive next month, but it remains to be seen,” Musk remarked at Tuesday’s conference. Additionally, he mentioned that the business has already started hiring.

Musk previously said in an interview with CNBC that he might even think about rehiring some of the employees fired in the first few months of his time as CEO of Twitter.

As experienced Musk observers know, it is impossible to predict what his next move will be with Twitter, although future moves will very likely include the input of his handpicked woke CEO.