Twitter owner Elon Musk, after significantly reducing the company’s headcount following his acquisition of the micro-blogging website, said the company is planning to rehire some of them and admitted that the job cuts were too deep.
In the six months since Musk’s acquisition, Twitter’s headcount has dropped by 80%, from 7,800 to around 1,500, as part of measures to reduce costs and get the company into the black. The majority of the 6,300 former employees were laid off, but others either quit or were fired.
During an interview with CNBC’s David Faber following Tesla’s shareholder meeting, Musk admitted that the job cuts were too deep and not done in the correct manner. He asserted that the company shouldn’t have fired too many people.
The billionaire entrepreneur said that some of the employees should not have been laid off last year when he was reducing the workforce, adding that the layoffs were a desperate measure to save Twitter financially.
"Desperate times call for desperate measures... Unfortunately, if you do it fast, there are some babies who will be thrown out," Musk said.
Musk also spoke about Twitter’s new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, saying that "Linda will operate the company and I will build products."
According to Musk, Twitter is largely an advertising-dependent business, and Linda is great at that. "My skills and interests are in technology," he said. Yaccarino was the head of advertising sales for NBCUniversal.
She will take charge of business operations at Twitter, specifically ad sales. Musk will continue to serve in his roles as executive chair and Chief Technology Officer (CTO). He will be responsible for overseeing system operations, software, and product development.
