A previously overlooked conversation featuring Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg from a three-year-old podcast episode has now gone viral. The clip has been taken from a 2023 episode of Lex Fridman’s podcast and has now been widely shared on X.
Musk had cut more than 6,000 employees after he bought Twitter in 2022, reducing the company’s workforce from 8,000 to just 1,500. According to the clip, Zuckerberg had a positive assessment of the move.
Zuckerberg mentioned that Musk was trying to make Twitter (now X) leaner. “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 of the company and him, fewer layers of management, I think those were generally good changes,” he said.
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Zuckerberg added that he believed the changes were good for the industry because it was others who were likely to have wanted to make the same changes, but they may have been a “little shy about doing them.”
“Just in my conversations with other founders and how people have reacted to the things that we’ve done, what I’ve heard from a lot of folks is when someone like you, when I wrote the letter outlining the organizational changes I wanted to make back in March and when people see what Elon is doing, that gives people the ability to think through how to shape their organizations in a way that can be good for the industry and make all these companies more productive over time,” Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg noted that he thinks that Musk was “ahead of a bunch of other companies” on this issue. He further added, “Certainly 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? Could we make our companies better by pushing on some of these same principles?”
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He also made it clear that he was not claiming every decision made at Twitter was correct. “From the outside, it’s 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.
These comments may provide insights into Zuckerberg’s own approach to layoffs. 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. This strategy continued as Meta cut expenses in some areas while increasing investments in artificial intelligence.
Meanwhile, a group of 26 Meta employees has sued the company, claiming it used artificial intelligence systems to select people for layoffs, disproportionately targeting those on medical, parental or family leave. They are among the 8,000 employees, or about 10% of its workforce, Meta said it would lay off in May.