Elon Musk said in a post on Twitter on Saturday that Twitter, Inc. has about 2,300 active employees.
About 75 of the company’s 1,300 employees are on leave, including about 40 engineers, CNBC said, citing internal records.
“There are still hundreds of employees working on trust & safety, along with several thousand contractors,” he added.
CNBC also reported that more than 130 people from Musk’s other businesses worked at Twitter.
The billionaire responded in a post that “less than 10 people from my other companies are working at Twitter.”
Cutting Costs
During a Twitter Spaces conversation in December 2022, Musk said that the company was headed for a “negative cash flow situation of $3 billion a year” when he took over. “That is why I spent the last five weeks cutting costs like crazy,” he explained.“This company is like, basically, you are in a plane that is headed toward the ground at high speed with the engines on fire and the controls don’t work,” he said.
The tech mogul began slashing about half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees a week after taking control of the company as he scrambled to cut costs. Many companies have halted advertising on Twitter because of concerns over the platform’s new content-moderation policies.
Twitter earns nearly 90 percent of its revenue from selling digital ads and Musk recently attributed a “massive drop in revenue” to rights organizations that have pressured brands to pause their Twitter ads.
However, Musk expects Twitter to be back on track financially in 2023.
“With the changes we are making here on massively reducing the burn rate, and building subscriber revenue, I now think that Twitter will, in fact, be okay next year,” Musk said during the Twitter Space discussion.
Musk said on Dec. 20, 2022, that he would resign as CEO of Twitter as soon as he finds someone “foolish enough to take the job,” after Twitter users voted in a poll for him to step down.
Musk also indicated that he would continue to run the company’s “software and server teams” after stepping down.
