Zuckerberg applauds Elon Musk for streamlining Twitter, calls it beneficial for industry

Musk's efforts to make the platform more technical by removing layers of management, leaving less distance between engineers at the company and himself was a good move.

New Delhi: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has praised Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk for making Twitter “a lot leaner” which has been “good for the industry” overall.

On the ‘The Lex Fridman Podcast’ show, Zuckerberg said that Musk “led a push early on to make Twitter a lot leaner”.

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“I think that those were generally good changes. 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,” Zuckerberg told the host.

According to Meta founder, Musk’s efforts to make the platform more technical by removing layers of management, leaving less distance between engineers at the company and himself was a good move.

After acquiring the platform for $44 billion, Musk brought down Twitter workforce to around 1,000 from nearly 7,800.

Like Musk, Zuckerberg has conducted multiple rounds of layoffs over the past eight months, laying off 21,000 employees in the course of a few months.

He has dubbed 2023 as Meta’s “year of efficiency”.

“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.

On the podcast, Zuckerberg also discussed his decision to remove thousands of employees.

“Layoffs are uniquely challenging and tough in that you have a lot of people leaving for reasons that are not connected to their own performance. Really, it is just a strategy decision and sometimes financially required, but not fully in our case,” he said.

Zuckerberg said that “I decided we needed to get to a point where we are a lot leaner.”