Mark Zuckerberg sobre os cortes de Musk: “Elon liderou desde cedo um esforço para deixar o Twitter muito mais enxuto”

Mark Zuckerberg does not often hand a rival credit, least of all Elon Musk. Yet the sharpest endorsement of Musk’s remaking of Twitter came from the one competitor with the most reason to call it reckless — and he called it the opposite. The verdict has resurfaced because Meta is now living inside the very logic Zuckerberg praised.

“I do think that Elon led a push early on to make Twitter a lot leaner.”

Zuckerberg offered that read on Lex Fridman’s podcast, crediting Musk for stripping out layers of management and shrinking headcount at the platform now called X. He went further, arguing the move was good for the whole industry, because plenty of executives had wanted to cut and lacked the nerve. Heard then, it was one billionaire tipping his hat to another’s ruthlessness.

Heard now, it sounds closer to a thesis he was about to test on himself. “Leaner” was never a neutral description; it was a permission slip. Musk had shown that a technology company could shed the overwhelming majority of its staff and still keep the lights on, and that proof gave cover to every peer who wanted the same license. Zuckerberg took it, and what he admired in Musk he industrialised at Meta.

The scale tells the arc. Meta cut more than 21,000 jobs across its 2023 “year of efficiency,” the campaign running in parallel with those very remarks. Twitter, for its part, fell from roughly 7,800 employees to about 1,000 after Musk’s $44 billion purchase. Leanness, dressed as discipline, became the sector’s default setting.

The reason the old clip stings is what leanness is being asked to justify now. Meta shed another 8,000 roles this year and moved some 7,000 workers into artificial-intelligence teams, wagering that a smaller, AI-accelerated company would outrun a larger one. Then, at a July staff meeting, Zuckerberg conceded that AI-agent progress “hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected,” and that the reorganisation had not been as clean as promised.

That gap — between the leanness sold as strategy and a payoff that has not arrived — is where the human cost stops being an abstraction. Twenty-six Meta employees are now suing, alleging the company used an algorithm to decide who to cut and that the math landed hardest on staff out on medical, parental or family leave. Meta says those decisions “were and are made by people, not AI.” Either way, the line Zuckerberg admired assumed the fat was obvious and the muscle would survive the knife.

Musk made “lean” a virtue; Zuckerberg made it a policy. What neither has yet shown is that a company cut this close still knows how to build — and in a year when the machine meant to replace the missing hands is running behind schedule, that has stopped being a rhetorical question.

Tags: Elon Musk, meta, Mark Zuckerberg, demissões na tecnologia, reestruturação por IA, twitter