Elon Musk refutes report that Twitter run by a fifth of employees than pre-takeover
Twitter Inc has about 2,300 active employees, Elon Musk said in a Tweet on Saturday after a report on Friday claimed, citing internal records, that the microblogging company is now functioning on a skeleton crew of less than 1,300 active employees – less than a fifth of the number of staff prior to the billionaire’s takeover.
Less than 550 full-time engineers by title are managing the operations, CNBC reported. Before Musk’s takeover, 7,500 employees were said to be handling operations.
“The note is incorrect. There are about 2300 active, working employees at Twitter,” billionaire Musk tweeted in a response to a tweet quoting CNBC.
“There are still hundreds of employees working on trust & safety, along with several thousand contractors,” Musk added.
The CNBC report said that the employees who remain are reportedly being joined by 130 people from Musk’s alternate ventures including SpaceX, The Boring Company and Tesla.
At least 1,400 employees who no longer serve a role in the organization continue to be paid, the report claimed, adding that many of them quit when Musk sent out a pledge asking them to commit to intensive work at the restructured company.
Meanwhile, the company’s safety enforcement team, which “makes policy recommendations, design and product changes with the aim of keeping all of Twitter’s users safe,” CNBC reported, is down to under 20 full-time employees.
Since Musk took over a leadership role at Twitter in October last year, he has gutted the staff and alienated users and advertisers.
Twitter faces multiple suits over unpaid bills, including for private chartered plane flights, software services and rent at one of its San Francisco offices, while Musk is on trial over a 2018 tweet that he had funding to take his electric carmaker private.
Shareholders alleged that Musk lied when he sent the tweet, costing investors millions. The prospect of a $72 billion buyout fueled a rally in the company’s stock price that abruptly ended a week later after it became apparent that he did not have the funding to pull off the deal after all.
Tesla shareholders then sued him, saying that Tesla shares would not have swung so widely in value if he had not dangled the idea of buying the company for $420 per share.
On the personal finance front, Musk has officially broken the world record for the largest loss of personal fortune in history, according to a report from the Guinness World Records.
He lost approximately $182 billion since November 2021, the report said quoting Forbes magazine. According to Forbes, Musk’s net worth dropped from a peak of $320 billion in 2021 to $138 billion as of January 2023, largely due to the poor performance of Tesla’s stock.
