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?’”

Full video: Lex Fridman “Mark Zuckerberg: Future of AI at Meta, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp | Lex Fridman Podcast #383“ (Jun 2023)

More popular advice from Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg on the importance of engineers if you’re building a technology company “I define our strategy as: If we can learn faster than every other company, we’re going to win. We’re going to build a better product than everyone else because we’re going to get it out first, we’re going to have a good feedback loop, and we’re going to learn what people like better than other people.” (full article).

21 year old Mark Zuckerberg explains why he isn’t worried about competition from Google “The most important thing is to have smart people. As technology becomes more generic and less expensive, the leverage point becomes the people.” (full article).

Mark Zuckerberg: "You can’t 80/20 everything" “In the projects you work on, you will have a lot of similar questions. There’s the famous 80/20 rule where you get 80% of the benefit by doing 20% of the work, but you can’t just 80/20 everything. There have to be certain things that you are just the best at and that you go way further than anyone else on to establish this quality bar and have your product be the best thing that’s out there.” (full article).