Twitter has lost nearly 80% of its employees under Elon Musk

January 24, 2023: Twitter’s full-time headcount has reduced to nearly 1,300 active working workers, which include less than 550 full-time engineers by title. Around 75 of the corporation’s 1,300 employees, including about 40 engineers, are on leave.

The firm’s trust and security team, making policy recommendations, design and product changes to keep all of Twitter’s users safe, is down to less than 20 full-time employees.

Internal records indicate that about 1,400 non-working employees of Twitter are still being paid but are no longer expected to fulfil their old responsibilities at the social media company. Many resigned when CEO Elon Musk sent out a “promise” which asked to commit to “hardcore” work at Twitter 2.0, including extended hours.

Musk has contradicted the internal records in a series of tweets and claimed that Twitter has about 2,300 full-time employees and many other contractors.

Under Musk’s management, Twitter slashed headcount through mass layoffs, different terminations and changes that compelled many to resign, which included the end of a forever policy of working from home that had been put in place under ex-CEO Jack Dorsey.

Before Musk provided a $44 billion leveraged buyout of Twitter the previous year, Twitter’s headcount stood at nearly 7,500 employees. Layoffs were whispered internally and expected to occur whether Musk’s takeover went through or not. However, according to internal records and the two employees, Musk has cut Twitter personnel far over many expected or by about 80%.

According to an engineer resigning from the company, the loss of employees and reduced headcount made it harder to think about the service reliably while building new features.

This person, questioning to remain unnamed while discussing a prior employer, explained that the firm’s code base is massive and requires knowledge of different platforms and programming languages to maintain other parts of Twitter advertising services versus the core timeline, for instance. Engineers’ skill sets, they said, are only sometimes transferrable across all of these. And it will be challenging to train engineers who lose so much institutional knowledge, this person added.

In addition to nearly 1,300 full-time working employees, Musk has authorized almost 130 people from his different businesses, which include Tesla, SpaceX and The Boring Company, and talent from venture funds and other firms, to work at Twitter.