Elon Musk fired 80% of Twitter’s staff after his Twitter takeover, asked employees to justify roles: Report

Elon Musk

After previous failed attempts, the popular billionaire and investor, Elon Musk finally bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, which he later renamed to X. However, in an interesting development, a new report by The Telegraph suggests that Musk had sent in loyalists, including ex-boring company exec Steve Davis and cousin James Musk, to “examine whether existing employees were value for money.”

Later, he fired more than 6000 employees from Twitter’s staff, which accounted for more than 80% of the total workforce, shocking the whole social media industry. The report adds that the existing staff was forced to justify their roles and even judge whether their own colleagues should be retained.

Another source told The Telegraph, “It was clearly pretty bloated. You had to right-size the organisation. However, Musk went further than anyone predicted. When he cuts a team, he cuts the whole team, and that creates significant chaos."

Further, the source added, “Musk had been hoping to rebuild the business with a challenger mindset and a clean slate. But lopping off whole divisions without a clear strategy left too many gaps to plug, and talent had plenty of opportunities at fast-growing start-ups like OpenAI rather than struggling Twitter.”

David Freidberg, a technology investor, said Elon Musk’s layoffs pattern was just the tip of the iceberg situation in Silicon Valley, and the problem needs further inspection.Other top-tier companies like Meta, Amazon, and Google also laid off 165,269 staff in 2022, 263,180 in 2023, and 96,551 until now in 2024, according to layoffs.fyi.