Elon Musk says there’s more room for layoffs at Big Tech companies.

• Elon Musk told the WSJ CEO Council that Big Tech could make more job cuts without affecting productivity.
• “There were a lot of people doing things that seemed worthless,” Musk said of Twitter.
• After acquiring Twitter for $44 billion, there have been widespread layoffs and cut benefits.

Elon Musk thinks Big Tech can afford to cut more workers without hurting productivity.

“I think there’s an opportunity for other companies to make significant cuts without affecting their productivity and increasing their productivity,” he said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council on Tuesday.

On Twitter, Mook, CEO and chief technology officer, commented on cost reductions at the platform and other Silicon Valley companies — many of which have already been hit with layoffs this year.

According to the tracker layoffs.fyi, tech companies will lay off 165,000 workers globally in 2022. By 2023, this number is projected to reach 200,000 tech workers.

Twitter is one of the big tech companies that has seen significant headcount cuts since Musk bought the company for $44 billion last year.

Insider Callie Hayes reported on May 2 that Twitter’s headcount has been cut by about 1,000 employees — about 90 percent of the 7,500 employees the social media company employed when Musk bought the company.

“There were a lot of people doing things that didn’t seem worth it,” Musk said on Twitter about the employees at the CEO Forum.

That’s probably true for most Silicon Valley companies, he said.

“Twitter was in a situation where you had a meeting of 10 people – one person was an accelerator and nine people were brakes, so you didn’t get very far,” he added.

Even with a small staff strength, Twitter has been “gungho” to release more functions and features on Twitter in the past six months than it has in the past six years, he added.

Twitter will add more employees — a “proportionate number” of 1,500, Mook said, without elaborating.

Musk told the BBC in April that Twitter is also “pretty fragmented.” In an interview Tuesday, Twitter said it could be cash flow positive in June “if we’re lucky” — a point it made in early March.

“I think we’re hoping for a comeback,” Musk added.

Twitter responded to Insider’s request for comment with an automated message that did not address the issue.