Mark Zuckerberg on Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter Elon Musk famously reduced head count by 80% after acquiring Twitter. It was controversial at the time, but Mark is asked what he thinks Elon did well during it. Mark responds: “You can agree or disagree with the exact tactics and how he did that. Every leader has their own style… But a lot of the specific principles that he pushed on: making the organization more technical, decreasing distance between engineers at the company and him, fewer layers of management. I think that those were generally good changes.” Mark also believes this was good for the technology industry as a whole: “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. Just in my conversations with other founders and how people have reacted to the things we’ve done… When people see what Elon is doing, I think 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.” He continues: “So I think that was one thing where he was quite ahead of a bunch of the other companies on… And 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… But certainly his actions led me and, I think, a lot of other folks in the industry to think about, ‘Hey, are we doing this as much as we should? Could we make our companies better by pushing on some of these same principles?’” Video source: @lexfridman (2023)