Pedestrians outside the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, October 6, 2022.
David Paul | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Twitter’s full-time staff count dropped to about 1,300 lively, working employees, including fewer than 550 full-time engineers by title, in accordance with internal records reviewed by CNBC. About 75 of the corporate’s 1,300 employees are on leave, including about 40 engineers.
The corporate’s trust and security team, which develops policy recommendations, design and product changes to maintain all Twitter users protected, has fewer than 20 full-time employees.
Internal records indicate that roughly 1,400 non-working Twitter employees are still paid, but are not any longer expected to meet their former duties on the social media company. A lot of them resigned when CEO Elon Musk sent out a “pledge” asking them to commit to Twitter 2.0’s “hard” work, including long hours.
Musk denied internal records obtained by CNBC in a series of tweetsand claimed that Twitter currently has about 2,300 full-time employees and hundreds of contractors. CNBC contacted Twitter for clarification and comments, but didn’t immediately receive a response.
Under Musk’s leadership, Twitter has reduced its workforce through mass layoffs, other layoffs, and changes which have forced many to resign, including the tip of the work-from-home ceaselessly policy that was introduced under former CEO Jack Dorsey.
Prior to Musk’s $44 billion leveraged buyout of Twitter last 12 months, Twitter had about 7,500 employees. Rumors of layoffs circulated internally and were expected to follow no matter whether Musk’s takeover went ahead or not. Nevertheless, Musk has reduced Twitter’s staff much more than many expected – or by around 80%, in accordance with internal records and two recent employees who spoke to CNBC.
In accordance with an engineer who resigned from the corporate, the lack of employees and reduced employment will make it difficult to keep up the service reliably while constructing latest functions.
This person, who asked to stay anonymous while discussing a previous employer, explained that the corporate’s code base is large and requires knowledge of varied platforms and programming languages to keep up various parts of Twitter – promoting services and a basic timeline, for instance. Engineer skill sets, they said, will not be necessarily transferable to all of them. And it’s going to be difficult to coach engineers after losing a lot institutional knowledge, the person added.
Along with about 1,300 full-time employees, Musk has also authorized about 130 people from other of his corporations, including TeslaSpaceX and The Boring Company, in addition to talent from enterprise capitalists and other corporations to work on Twitter.
Because the Twitter acquisition, Musk has faced shareholder backlash against Tesla for being a distraction, creating political controversy along with his Twitter strategy, and for selling billions of dollars value of Tesla stock to fund the Twitter acquisition.
Clarification: This story has been updated to notice that 1,300 persons are lively, working Twitter employees. One other 1,400 persons are unemployed but paid employees of Twitter.