Billionaire Elon Musk, who took over Twitter following a legal battle in October last year, said the social media giant is "working better than ever", despite the spree of layoffs after the company was acquired by him.
Twitter lost nearly 80 percent of its workforce in the months following Musk's takeover. While nearly half of the microblogging platform's 7,500 employees were let go after the acquisition came into effect, others chose to leave in January-February as the company gave an ultimatum to work with "extreme hardcore" goals.
While speaking to Fox News on April 18, Musk said the company was "absurdly overstaffed" before he took charge, and was working akin to a "glorified activist organisation".
"If you're not trying to run some sort of glorified activist organisation ... then you can really let go of a lot of people, it turns out," Musk told the news channel.
The billionaire went on to claim that Twitter does not require a large workforce to perform efficiently. The company is "working better than ever", he said, adding that, "it turns out you don't need all that many people to run Twitter."
Twitter, however, have suffered from an increased number of outages since the reduction of its workforce. The platform, which was earlier known for its rare disruption in services, is beginning to lose count of the number of outages, an employee had told Platformer on the condition of anonymity. "I think we're all numb to it," the employee was quoted as saying.
Musk had, earlier, while speaking to BBC, said the slashing of workforce was a "painful" decision but "necessary" to prevent the company from turning bankrupt.
Musk, who also owns electric vehicle major Tesla and spacecraft company SpaceX, had begun buying Twitter shares in January last year. He inked a surprise deal for the acquisition of Twitter in April, for $44 billion, but kept delaying it as he alleged that around 20 percent of the platform's users were spam or bots. The deal was concluded by him six months later, after briefly suspending it and moving the courts in a bid to seek its termination.
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