During a virtual talk at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit in London last week, Twitter CEO Elon Musk said when he took over Twitter, the social media platform employed “a lot of people” who did things that “didn’t seem to have a lot of value,” Business Insider reported.
Musk added that this is probably the case at tech most companies in Silicon Valley, though, not to the same degree as Twitter.
He explained that at Twitter, there could be ten people in a meeting but only one has “an accelerator” while the other nine have a “set of brakes.” He added that tech companies could enact further job cuts without hurting productivity.
A recent column in Discourse highlighted the “fake work” trend among tech companies, with some executives and investors suggesting that big tech overhired giving people useless jobs as a “vanity metric.”
Musk told the CEO Council Summit that currently Twitter is operating with around 1,500 employees which he described as “a reasonable number.”
In a recent interview with CNBC’s David Faber, Musk blasted remote working calling the pandemic-inspired practice “bullsh*t” and “morally wrong,” and described Silicon Valley’s remote tech workers as the “laptop classes living in la-la-land.”
Musk said working at the office increases productivity and suggested that workers who refused to return to the office after the pandemic restriction ended should “get off their moral high horse” and go back to work since they expect “everyone else” to continue working away from home.
Musk suggested that remote working is a “let them eat cake” mentality, noting that workers who stay at home still expect the people who made their cars to continue working at the factory. He pointed out that the people at-home workers hire to make repairs at their houses can’t work from home, nor can the people who deliver their meals.
Musk asked Faber if that seemed “morally right,” adding, “That’s messed up.”
