From 7,500 employees to just 1,300: The Elon Musk ‘effect’ at Twitter – Times of India

Twitter 2.0: Drastic reduction in headcount

The report says that before Musk bought Twitter, the total headcount was 7,500. Twitter now has less than 550 engineers working for it. Twitter’s trust and safety team — responsible for keeping users ‘safe’ — now has less than 20 full-time employees working.
Interestingly, the report mentions that internal records suggest that Twitter still has 1,400 ‘non-working’ employees. These are employees who continue to be paid by Twitter but don’t execute their responsibilities. The report suggests many of these non-working employees are those who resigned when Musk asked them to sign a pledge, which involved “extreme hardcore” work and long working hours at the company.
Musk also got almost 130 employees from Tesla and SpaceX — his other two companies — to work at Twitter.

Twitter’s revenue troubles

According to a report by The Information, Twitter’s daily revenue on January 17 was 40% lower than the same day a year ago. It was also reported that more than 500 of Twitter’s top advertisers have put a halt on spending on Twitter since Musk’s takeover.
However, as per Musk, it’s not all doom and gloom. A report by Axios revealed that Twitter has secured content sponsorship deals with more than three dozen news outlets, media companies and sports leagues in the first half of this year.
Still, the reduction in the headcount is likely to have an impact on the social media platform, according to an engineer who recently left the company. The CNBC report mentions that the engineer said “the company’s code base is massive, and it requires knowledge of different platforms and programming languages to maintain different parts of Twitter.” With fewer employees, it may be an uphill battle to maintain Twitter reliably, said the former engineer.