I was curious about the numbers that other tech companies may employ as a comparison... from some cursory googling:

* Meta: 71,970 [2021]

* Apple: 164,000 [2022]

* Amazon: 1,298,000 [2020]

* Netflix: 11,300 [2021]

* Alphabet: 156,500 [2021]

* Microsoft: 221,000 [2021]

* The New York Times: 5000 [2021]

* Fox Corporation: 9000 [2020]

* Reddit: 700 [2021]

(Anyone else I should add?)

I can't really find any trends. I think Reddit is an outlier, and my impression is having only 3750 employees would probably put Twitter on the smaller end of the scale too.

Reddit planned to double to 1400 in 2021 alone [1], it wouldn't surprise me if they were at 1500-2000 by now.

1. https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/9/22274077/reddit-funding-ro...

We'd need to also see the money (income/revenue/profit) of these companies, and then see the ratio of employees to money. Musk saw that list and noticed that Twitter had the lowest ratio.

To get the ratio metric up, they have to increase income or reduce employees.

This rationale, given by Musk (and I imagine VC friends) is all outlined in the discovery documents of the twitter vs musk legal case.

edits, i dug it out and made it a top level comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33467305

Also product market type. Building pure software and ads is different than building consumable hardware, data centers, etc

I think Reddit is an outlier because they offload a lot of their moderation to volunteers.

These numbers are misleading as many of these companies have an army of contractors that are not included in the official headcount numbers.

Google, for example, has more contractors than full-time employees, bringing the total employee count up to over 300,000

Reddit can barely stay up and constantly has weird bugs so they likely need more!

I've been using Reddit daily for a couple of years and have never seen downtime or any weird bugs. I use the mobile app, not sure if that's what you were referring to.

Craigslist: 50

I wonder does this number include moderators or are they contractors who are not included in the headcount. I could see half that number being made of moderators if so.

Out of curiosity what do you think is a reasonable number?

Too many variables changing at once to do proper attribution

I have no doubt Elon expects to hire a bunch of people to replace those hire laid off.... but I suspect he wants different people.