Hung Lee: Elon Musk reduced Twitter's headcount down to 20%
Hung Lee · Polarizing Talent: Navigating 2023's Landscape · Jul 7, 2023 · at 33:14
Hung Lee discusses how Elon Musk handled return-to-office mandates and workforce reductions at Twitter.
0:00 / 0:12exact quote · 12.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Now what he managed to do was to obviously wipe out more than 70% of the company, I believe, Pre-Musk. Twitter was significantly bigger than it was now. They're down to 20%, I believe, in terms of headcount.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Hung Lee
Lee: Brutalizing a Business With Mandates Efficiently Forces Cultural Shifts
“However, It may be the way to cut the Gordian knot is to brutalize the business. I'm not suggesting this is the way forward, but it is clearly a method forward. And you do wonder how many leaders have been quietly inspired by this approach and may in fact be a…”
Remote-First Organizational Structures Inherently Favor Senior Individual Contributors
“If we are absolutely a remote first company, We are probably optimized as an employer for a senior individual contributor that has already achieved a certain degree of material comfort in order to provide for home or working has social security in the sense of…”
Lee: Remote-first companies hold a significant recruiting advantage over non-remote competitors
“We've got multiple data points to suggest that companies that are operating a remote first policy typically have a significant advantage against companies that do not.”
VMware Cut Time-to-Hire in Half by Switching to Remote Hiring
“VMware, for instance were, did a sort of before and after comparison in terms of their time to hire when it comes down to where they doing on-premise hiring pre pre the big over period, and then they switched to remote hiring and they reduced their time to hir…”
Lee: Early-career workers prefer in-office work to accelerate learning
“It was very clear that someone who was an early career person, they did not want remote. It wasn't, it was something that, you know, they thought about yes, no, they literally didn't want it. They wanted the office because they wanted the learning. They want t…”