Twitter Has About 2,300 ‘Active, Working Employees,’ Says Elon Musk

Twitter Has About 2,300 ‘Active, Working Employees,’ Says Elon Musk
SpaceX owner and Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks during a conversation with legendary game designer Todd Howard (not pictured) at the E3 gaming convention in Los Angeles, Calif., on June 13, 2019. (Mike Blake/Reuters)
1/23/2023
Updated:
1/23/2023

Elon Musk said in a post on Twitter on Saturday that Twitter, Inc. has about 2,300 active employees.

CNBC on Friday reported that Twitter’s full-time headcount has reduced to about 1,300 active, working employees, including fewer than 550 full-time engineers by title.

About 75 of the company’s 1,300 employees are on leave, including about 40 engineers, CNBC said, citing internal records.

“The note is incorrect. There are ~2300 active, working employees at Twitter,” Musk responded in a Twitter post that quoted CNBC.

“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.”

Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022 and rolled out a number of changes in the company and its policies. The company launched Twitter-verified blue checkmarks as a paid service.

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.

Reuters contributed to this report.