Mark Zuckerberg is giving credit where credit is due. The Meta CEO believes that Elon Musk, by firing hordes of middle managers at Twitter after his $44 billion takeover last October, kicked off a trend that’s been “good for the industry.”
After assuming control, Musk laid off thousands of employees, reducing headcount from about 7,500 to less than 2,000 by February of this year, according to TechCrunch.
Zuckerberg delivered the comments on the Lex Fridman Podcast on Thursday. The way he sees it—and laid-off Twitter employees would surely beg to differ—Musk was right in trying to make the company “more technical” and decrease the distance between engineers and himself, with “fewer layers of management.”
“His actions led me and I think a lot of other folks in the industry to think about, ‘Hey, are we kind of doing this as much as we should?’” he said. “Could we make our companies better by pushing on some of the same principles?…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.”
It was something Musk “was quite ahead of a bunch of the other companies on,” he added.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, announced in March that it would lay off 10,000 employees—adding to the 11,000 job cuts it started last November—and would also freeze hiring on 5,000 more positions. In a blog post, Zuckerberg said he would “make our organization flatter by removing multiple layers of management,” part of a “year of efficiency.”
While Meta employees have described “shattered” morale, Wall Street has responded positively, with Meta shares up about 112% year to date.
