(DailyVantage.com) – Twitter CEO Elon Musk claimed the social network previously employed most of its staff to run a “glorified activist organization” and to censor users after being asked about layoffs during an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Upon being asked by Carlson how many Twitter employees had either left or been fired since Musk took over the company, Musk revealed that Twitter’s staff was now around 20 percent the size of what it used to be.
Musk told Carlson that it was possible to run Twitter at such a reduced capacity because the company was previously being run as a “glorified activist organization” and was “absurdly overstaffed.” Musk also implied that much of Twitter’s former staff were employed to censor users.
The billionaire went on to argue that those who were employed specifically to improve the technology of the platform also didn’t provide much value to the company as Twitter’s product improvement was stuck in a “flat line” for years.
“It took a year to add an edit button that doesn’t work most of the time,” Musk remarked, comparing Twitter’s previous management to a “comedy situation.”
He said that while it was difficult to make cars, or to send rockets to obit — in reference to two of his other companies: Tesla and SpaceX — Twitter ran on a basic premise and essentially served as a large-scale “group chat,” and so shouldn’t have required so many staff.
Musk concluded that despite the fact that Twitter was operating with 20 percent of the staff it used to, it was running better than ever and they had even managed to improve the platform’s responsiveness.
During the bombshell interview, Musk also told Carlson that US government agencies had access to most of the content at Twitter before he took over, including private direct messages between users. In addition, Musk warned about the dangerous potential of artificial intelligence and claimed it could end up destroying civilization if left unchecked.
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