Big tech firms can sack more employees to boost productivity: Musk

IANS

San Francisco, May 27

Outgoing Twitter CEO Elon Musk has said that Silicon Valley companies can afford to cut more workforce without affecting productivity.

Musk slashed over 80 per cent of the Twitter staff in October-November last year as he took over after acquiring the platform for $44 billion.

Speaking virtually at The Wall Street Journal's summit in London, Musk said there were a lot of people at Twitter that didn't seem to have a lot of value.

"I think that's true at many Silicon Valley companies. I think there is the possibility for significant cuts at other companies without affecting their productivity, in fact, increasing their productivity," he was quoted as saying in the report.

He said that Twitter was in a situation where you'd have a meeting of 10 people and "one person with an accelerator and nine with a set of brakes".

Musk told conference attendees that Twitter now has around 1,500 employees, saying it is "probably a reasonable number".

Musk continued to sack Twitter employees even after the massive round in October, despite promising not to fire more staff after his brutal layoff exercise in November that affected two-thirds of the micro-blogging platform's 7,500 employees.

Twitter also shut down two of its three India offices and directed its employees to work from home. In November, Musk fired more than 90 per cent of its staff in India, around 200-plus.

"We will need to be extremely hard core. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade," Musk had said.