In a rare interview with the BBC late on Tuesday, Elon Musk said that since taking over Twitter, the firm had let go of more than 6,000 employees.
The social networking site now only has 1,500 employees, down from under 8,000 at the time of his acquisition, according to Musk, who was quoted in the interview.
The layoffs represent over 80% of the company’s workforce.
At Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, the billionaire CEO told the British broadcaster that it’s “not fun at all” and occasionally “painful.”
When he joined the company, the second-richest man in the world claimed that “drastic action” was required since there was “a $3 billion negative cash flow situation.” This gave Twitter (TWTR) only “four months to live,” according to him.
“This is not a caring [or] uncaring situation. It’s like, if the whole ship sinks, then nobody’s got a job,” Musk said.
Last October, Musk paid $44 billion to acquire Twitter.
He made the initial bid to purchase the business in April 2022, but then tried to back out due to reservations about the number of bot accounts it had.
Since then, he has completely redesigned Twitter, removing key executives, cutting positions, and implementing new rules for how user accounts are tagged or verified.
He told the BBC that since then, Twitter is “roughly” breaking even and that advertisers are returning to the service.
“We are funded by the British public through the licence fee,” it said at the time.
Musk added his two cents to the US investigation into TikTok, noting that he wasn’t a user of the Chinese-owned app but that he was typically “against banning things.”
“I mean, it would help Twitter, I suppose, if TikTok was banned, because then people would spend more time on Twitter and less on TikTok,” he mused.
“But even though that would help Twitter, I would be generally against banning of things.”
