Zuckerberg Expresses His Admiration For Musk’s Strategy To Make Twitter ‘A Lot Leaner’

Speaking in a podcast airing on Thursday 8th June, Mark Zuckerberg praised Elon Musk for making Twitter “a lot leaner” in a way that has kickstarted a trend in the industry which has been generally beneficial for companies.

Mark Zuckerberg was a guest speaker in an episode of “The Lex Fridman Podcast” where he was asked about the former Twitter CEO Elon Musk in a nearly three-hour conversation.

Lex Fridman, the host of the podcast which is a “safe space for the anti-woke tech elite”, asked Zuckerberg to provide a list of some things which he thought Musk was doing well as well as where the Tesla CEO could improve.

After pausing to consider the question, the Meta CEO finally gave a response. “Elon led a push early on to make Twitter a lot leaner. I think that those were generally good changes.” Zuckerberg said.

The “changes” that Zuckerberg is referencing as having made Musk’s company “leaner” are similar to those Zuckerberg has recently implemented at Meta. That is stripping down the organization through layoffs.

Musk reduced the entire number of employees at Twitter from about 7,800 to its current employment of about 1,000 since buying the platform in October 2022. That is a reduction of the workforce by just over 80%.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Elon Musk said that the layoffs were necessary since Twitter had “a lot of people doing things that didn’t seem to have a lot of value.”

In December 2022, Musk in another podcast was questioned on the criteria he used to decide who had value and who didn’t at the company. He said that employees have to be “exceptional” at what they do, play key roles, and “put the company’s interests before their own.”

In the podcast, Zuckerberg continued, “I also think that it was probably good for the industry that he made those changes because my sense is that there were a lot of other people who thought that those were good changes but who may have been a little shy about doing them.”

Similar to Musk, Zuckerberg has also carried out multiple rounds of layoffs for Meta in 2023, the year he has dubbed Meta’s “year of efficiency.” In about 8 months, Meta has laid off over 21,000 employees.

“As part of the Year of Efficiency, we’re focusing on returning to a more optimal ratio of engineers to other roles. It’s important for all groups to get leaner and more efficient to enable our technology groups to get as lean and efficient as possible,” he recently said.

Zuckerberg’s sentments toward Musk and his clear apprecaton for his efforts in streamling Twitter operatipns were predicted by The Verge in November 2022 after Musk’s takeover of the platform.

This was in their article titled, ‘Why some tech CEOs are rooting for Elon Musk,’ by Casey Newton and Zoe Schiffer.

A section of the article read, “Musk represents a good, old way of doing business: ignoring everything but his principles, his product roadmap, and his path to profitability.” The article posited that Musk’s decisions at the helm of Twitter might prove influential for some of his fellow CEOs.

“The ramifications of his leadership could resonate across the tech industry for some time to come,” the article read.

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