Twitter is more productive after job cuts, says Elon Musk

Twitter and Tesla owner Elon Musk suggests that big tech companies should cut jobs to increase the value of work and productivity. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Musk addressed the situation on Twitter before his inauguration. He points out that in most companies, there are workers "helping move things forward" and employees "trying to slam [productivity] on the brakes," adding that nine out of 10 people on Twitter lowered productivity. After his inauguration in October last year, Musk cut half of Twitter's workforce from 7,500 to about 3,500. More workers were laid off in the months that followed, while some left due to the "hardcore" work culture. from Musk. Twitter currently employs 1,500 workers worldwide.

During the interview, Musk also called out Silicon Valley companies for not adding value to his work. He said: "A lot of people are doing things that do not have a lot of value, and that's probably true for most Silicon Valley companies. Maybe not to the degree to which it was at Twitter, but it's still. There's significant potential for cuts without affecting their productivity. In fact, increasing their productivity."

When asked if job cuts caused massive Twitter outages, Musk replied that site failures happen. And he adds: "Outages are not unusual, Instagram recently had an outage, for example." Musk also joked that users took to Twitter to report the Instagram outage.

Musk has repeatedly spoken about the situation at Twitter in terms of productivity. He had accused previous management of running Twitter as a non-profit organization. During the layoff, Musk also fired senior management, including then-CEO Parag Agrawal. Recently, he said that working from home is morally wrong.

During the latest interview, the Tesla owner also touched on artificial intelligence, which has become the talk of the town following the public launch of ChatGPT. Musk has repeatedly warned about the dangers of AI, including the risks associated with generative AI like ChatGPT. He has previously suggested that AI can become sentient beings and take over humans.

However, changes are inevitable, and Musk also agrees that big changes are coming soon. He states: "In a 20-30 year time frame, I think things will be transformed beyond belief. You probably won't recognise society in 30 years. You asked me about generative artificial intelligence. I think we're perhaps only three years, maybe six years away from it. So the impact, arguably, we are on the Event Horizon of the black hole, that is social super intelligence."