Elon Musk tells the BBC that he has cut around 80% of staff since taking over Twitter
Hong Kong (CNN) Elon Musk has fired more than 6,000 people at Twitter since he took over the company, he told the BBC in a rare interview late Tuesday.
Musk was quoted as saying in the interview that the social media platform now has just 1,500 employees, down from under 8,000 employed at the time of the acquisition. The reduction corresponds to approximately 80% of the company’s employees.
It’s “not fun at all” and can sometimes be “painful,”[ads1]; the billionaire CEO told the British broadcaster at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco.
The world’s second-richest man said “drastic action” was necessary when he came on board because the company was facing “a $3 billion negative cash flow situation.” That again Twitter (TWTR) with only “four months to go,” he estimated.
“This is not a care [or] inappropriate situation. It’s like the whole ship is sinking, then nobody has a job,” Musk said.
Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion last October.
After initially offering to take over the company in April 2022, he tried to back out of the deal, citing concerns over how many bot accounts it had. He has since radically overhauled Twitter: firing top executives, cutting jobs and adopting new guidelines for how user accounts are verified or flagged.
Since then, Twitter is now “roughly” in balance and advertisers are returning to the platform, he told the BBC.
Musk also promised to revise the label used on the British broadcaster from “government funded” to “publicly funded” after the BBC objected.
The designation was added over the weekend. The BBC had objected to the move, saying it “is, and always has been, independent”.
“We are funded by the British public through the license fee,” it said at the time.
Musk also weighed in on the US scrutiny of TikTok, saying that while he was not a user of the Chinese-owned app, he was generally “against banning things.”
“I mean, it would help Twitter, I guess, if TikTok was banned, because then people would spend more time on Twitter and less on TikTok,” he mused.
“But even if it would help Twitter, I would generally be against banning things.”
Musk also cracked jokes during the interview, saying he was “no longer the CEO of Twitter” and had been replaced by his pet dog, a Shiba Inu named Floki.
