Twitter’s headcount is now down to about 1,000 full-time employees.
The revised figure is down roughly 90% since Elon Musk took over the company and implemented widespread layoffs in an effort to return to profitability. The company had roughly 8,000 employees when Musk acquired it.
During Twitter’s 9-year run as a public company, the social media site posted just two profitable years— 2018 and 2019.
Last month, Musk appeared in an interview with the BBC and said that Twitter is operating at break-even and could return to profitability in a few months.
The company last reported a profit in 2019, when it reported $1.4 billion in net income.
Of its full-time employees, around half are engineers.
The remaining employees undergo constant performance reviews, and firings come with little explanation.
In his BBC interview, Musk said the move to cut staff dramatically was to avoid imminent bankruptcy.
“The issue is like the company’s going to go bankrupt if we don’t cut costs immediately,” he told the BBC. “This is not a caring, uncaring situation. It’s like if the whole ship sinks, then nobody’s got a job.”
Following the interview, New York Times tech journalist Kate Conger tweeted that Musk cut parental leave at Twitter from 20 weeks to two weeks after reviewing internal documents.
Last year, Musk set a goal to get Twitter to a billion monthly active users by 2024.
In 2022, Twitter grew its daily active users by 16.6% to 238 million users.
When asked if Musk was the best possible pick to lead Twitter, Jack Dorsey, cofounder and former CEO of Twitter, gave his opinion on Musk’s performance as the new head of Twitter.
“No … it all went south. … But it happened, and all we can do now is build something to avoid that ever happening again,” Dorsey said, according to The New York Times. Dorsey is busy building Twitter alternative Bluesky.
