Elon Musk said that he has “too much work on his plate.” The Tesla chief executive and the social media platform’s new owner told the B20 business leaders’ conference in Bali that “my workload has recently increased quite a lot,” in an apparent reference to his $44 billion (£37 billion) acquisition of the social media platform on October 27. “I mean, oh, man. “I have too much work on my plate, that is for sure,” he added, speaking via video link.
Musk’s comments on Monday followed a report at the weekend that a new jobs cull at Twitter had affected 4,400 of the company’s 5,500 contract employees, according to Casey Newton, the author of the tech industry newsletter Platformer.
The Twitter Functions affected include content moderation, marketing, and “core infrastructure services that keep the site up and running.” The move follows the firing of more than 3,700 full-time Twitter employees at the beginning of the month, days after the social media platform was bought by Musk. One contractor affected by the cuts, the data scientist Melissa Ingle, said she learned of her fate on Saturday evening when her access to Twitter’s systems was suddenly cut off.
An overloaded work week is nothing new to Musk. Along with being the CEO of Twitter, the father of 10 is also the co-founder and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and the co-founder of The Boring Company. In 2018, he seemed to reference Arianna Huffington’s request for him to pull back on his workload, tweeting, “You think this is an option.” It is not. Even at that time, Musk told The New York Times he was overwhelmed and working up to 120 hours a week, which could equate to 17-hour days, seven days a week.
That same year, he told CBS Mornings’ Gayle King that he had been sleeping on a Tesla factory floor as the company struggled to meet its production goals. “I don’t have time to go home and shower,” he told King. “I don’t believe people should be experiencing hardship while the CEO is off on vacation.”