Mark Zuckerberg praises Elon Musk for sacking 6,000 Twitter employees, here is why

A three-year-old podcast clip of Mark Zuckerberg has gone viral, where the Meta CEO praised Elon Musk's controversial decision to cut around 80 per cent of Twitter's workforce. Zuckerberg said Musk's restructuring pushed the tech industry to rethink how companies operate and manage teams.Mark Zuckerberg praises Elon Musk for sacking 6,000 Twitter employees. (Image source: Lex Fridman podcast)Three years after Elon Musk slashed thousands of jobs at Twitter, a previously overlooked conversation featuring Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has resurfaced online, drawing attention to his surprisingly positive assessment of the move. The clip, taken from a 2023 episode of Lex Fridman's podcast and now widely shared on X, shows Zuckerberg arguing that Musk's aggressive restructuring did more than transform Twitter. In his view, it pushed technology companies across Silicon Valley to rethink how they build and manage large organisations.Musk cut more than 6,000 jobs after buying Twitter in 2022, reducing the company's workforce from around 8,000 employees to roughly 1,500 within months. The layoffs sparked widespread debate, with critics questioning whether the platform could function after such a dramatic reduction in staff.Zuckerberg says Musk made Twitter more technical by sacking thousands of employeesRather than focusing only on the scale of the layoffs, Zuckerberg pointed to the organisational changes behind Musk's approach. He said Musk's effort to reduce management layers and bring engineers closer to decision-making was something many companies could learn from. An old video of Mark Zuckerberg saying Musk did the right thing by sacking thousands of Twitter employees is going viral on X. "I do think that Elon led a push early on to make Twitter a lot leaner," Zuckerberg said during the podcast. "You can agree or disagree with exactly all the tactics... but a lot of the specific principles that he pushed on around basically trying to make the organization more technical, around decreasing the distance between engineers at the company and him, like fewer layers of management. I think that those were generally good changes." The Meta CEO said Musk's actions encouraged other founders to look more closely at their own organisations and question whether they had unnecessary layers of management."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," he added. Zuckerberg also made it clear that he was not claiming every decision made at Twitter was correct. He said people outside the company could not fully understand the challenges involved in running the platform or determine whether the cuts went too far."From the outside, very hard to know. Did he cut too much? Did he not cut enough? I don't think it's my place to opine on that," Zuckerberg said.A different tone from Meta's own layoffsThe comments have gained attention because Meta later went through its own major restructuring phase.When Zuckerberg announced Meta's first large-scale layoffs in late 2022, he admitted that the company had expanded too aggressively during the pandemic. The company cut 11,000 jobs initially, with the reductions later growing to more than 20,000 positions."I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that," Zuckerberg told employees at the time.In 2023, Zuckerberg described the company's restructuring as part of Meta's "year of efficiency", with the company focusing on reducing costs and simplifying operations. The strategy has continued as Meta cuts expenses in some areas while increasing investments in artificial intelligence.The renewed attention around Zuckerberg's comments highlights how Musk's controversial Twitter takeover became part of a larger conversation in the technology industry about efficiency, management structures and whether some of the world's biggest companies had become too complex. While Zuckerberg did not endorse every aspect of Musk's approach, he acknowledged that the move forced many technology leaders to rethink how they run their businesses.- EndsPublished By: Ankita GargPublished On: Jul 21, 2026 12:03 IST