Twitter Reportedly Employs 1,300 Full-Time Workers, Musk Says 2,300

Twitter reportedly employs just 1,300 full-time working employees, of whom fewer than 540 are full-time engineers, while the company’s trust and safety team has less than 20 full-time workers, according to internal records seen(Opens in a new window) by CNBC.

This staff count means Twitter has lost over 80% of the 7,500 total employees it had before Elon Musk bought the company at the end of October last year. Alongside mass layoffs, Twitter CEO Musk has closed down a huge data center, Twitter’s Seattle office, laid off janitorial and cleaning staff across company offices and terminated a work-from-home forever policy that had been rolled out under previous CEO and founder Jack Dorsey.

CNBC also reported that there are circa 1,400 non-working employees who are still on the company payroll, of whom many resigned from their positions when Musk sent out a pledge in November asking them to commit to “hardcore” work. 

The small staffing numbers were slapped down by Elon Musk who tweeted(Opens in a new window) there were roughly 2300 “active, working employees at Twitter” alongside “hundreds of employees working on trust & safety.”

Tweet(Opens in a new window)

He added that less than 10 people from his other companies had gone to work at Twitter, rebutting the same CNBC report that alleged 130 people from companies including Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company were working at Twitter. 

Earlier this week, Tweetbot and Twitterific shut down after Twitter updated its developer agreement(Opens in a new window) to officially ban third-party clients from using the company’s licensed materials to “create a substitute or similar service.”

The move came after days of silence from the company amid third-party clients breaking after Twitter restricted the use of its API.

There has been no direct word from the social media company as to why the decision was made but CEO Elon Musk has sought to third-party apps generally do not show ads and therefore any income Twitter earns from them is minimal.