Since Tesla founder Elon Musk took over Twitter late last year, the social media giant has become the center of controversy from free speech debates to censorship revelations. Shortly after taking the reigns at Twitter, Musk decided to let go of several top employees as well as weed out the social media company's staff.
Despite facing harsh criticism for the move, Musk defended his actions to cut back the "absurdly overstaffed" Twitter Monday on "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
"We just had a situation at Twitter where it was absurdly overstaffed," Musk said. "Turns out you don't need all that many people to run Twitter."
Last week, Musk revealed that more than 6,000 people have lost their jobs at Twitter since he took over the company last October.
ELON MUSK SITS DOWN WITH TUCKER CARLSON FOR AN EXCLUSIVE TWO-PART INTERVIEW EVENT
In a rare media interview with the BBC, the billionaire said Twitter has about 1,500 people on staff, down from 8,000 when he bought the social media platform in a $44 billion deal. The job cuts were painful but necessary, Musk said.
Musk elaborated further on the numbers mentioned to BBC while speaking with Carlson, Monday, noting the company has seen success despite cutting back on the number of employees.
"It's clearly working," Musk told Carlson. "In fact, I think it's working better than ever. We've increased the responsiveness of the system by, in some cases, over 80%."
"If you're not trying to run some sort of glorified activist organization and you don't care that much about censorship, then you can really let go of a lot of people, turns out," he added.
ELON MUSK SAYS TWITTER HAS SHED MORE THAN 6,000 EMPLOYEES
Twitter's communications department was one victim of Musk's drastic cost-cutting. The company now responds to inquiries from journalists with a poop emoji. Others were Twitter's former executive leadership, including those involved in censoring conservatives.
"There's a comedy situation here," Musk said. "You're not making cars; it was very difficult to make cars or get rockets to orbit. So, you know, the real question is like, how did it get so absurdly overstaffed? This is insane."
While Musk has cited the overstaffing issue at Twitter as being a reason behind his move to purchase it, a perhaps greater factor that served as a major stimulus in his decision to buy the tech giant is the "desperate" media saturating the internet with half-truths and incomplete narratives.
"Major shrinking pie, obviously, for most of the traditional media companies and made them more desperate to get clicks, to get attention. When they were there in sort of a desperate state, they will then tend to really push headlines that get the most clicks, whether those headlines are accurate or not."
Musk told Carlson that the media has "increased the negativity of the news" through social media platforms like Twitter.
"Historically, the negative stuff would have been quite proximate, like it would have been near. It represented a real danger to you as a person if you heard negative news. Because historically, like a few hundred years ago, we're not hearing about what negative things are happening on the other side of the world or… outside the country. We're only we're hearing about negative things in our village, things that could actually have a bad effect on you. Whereas now... the news very often seems to attempt to answer the question, ‘what is the worst thing that happened on Earth today?’"
"And you wonder why you're sad after reading that," Musk jested.
"It's resulted, that in my view, I think most people would agree, a less truthful, less accurate news because they're just going to get a rise out of people."
Musk added that, in spite of the criticism he has received, the goal of his actions and his takeover at large is to make Twitter the "least untrustworthy" place on the internet.
"We're trying to make Twitter the most trusted place on the Internet, the least untrustworthy place on the Internet. I don't think anyone should trust the Internet, but maybe we can make Twitter the least untrustworthy. Like I said, try to get the truth to the people as best we can."
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FOX Business' Chris Pandolfo contributed to this report.
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