Twitter has 2,300 active workers and several thousand contractors: Elon Musk

After acquiring Twitter in October 2022, Elon Musk denied affirmations that it has only 1,300 active employees. Instead, he tweeted that his company has approximately 2,300 active employees and "several thousand contractors." This denies a recent report from CNBC, which claims that Twitter has only 1,300 active employees, including "fewer than 550 full-time engineers by title." Citing an internal document, the report says that 75 of Twitter's 1,300 employees are presently on leave, including 40 engineers.

In the tweet, Musk also clarified that Twitter's trust and safety team, which makes recommendations for policy, design, and product changes, has hundreds of full-time staff. He said: "There are still hundreds of employees working on trust and safety... Less than 10 people from my other companies are working at Twitter." On the other hand, the report claims that there are only 20 full-time employees on the trust and safety team.

Musk offered no clarity on non-working employees still on Twitter's payroll. However, the internal document indicates that Twitter has approximately 1,400 non-working employees who "still get paid but are no longer expected to fulfill their former responsibilities."

Following his inauguration in late October 2022, Twitter laid off 50 per cent of the workforce of 7,500, with some even voluntarily resigning to reject Musk's "hardcore" work style. A separate report recently indicated that Twitter might lay off more employees soon. The social media platform may reduce the layoff of staff from the product division. However, some other departments could also be affected.

Twitter and other big tech companies have laid off thousands of employees in the last three months to cut costs. Amazon has laid off approximately 18,000 workers, and Microsoft has laid off 10,000 employees. In addition, meta, formerly Facebook, laid off about 11,000 workers in November 2022, representing about 13 per cent of its workforce. Last week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai also announced that he laid off around 12,000 because the company overhired during the two-year peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.