Zuckerberg credits Musk with kicking off tech trend of firing middle managers | Fortune

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Abstraction: Zuckerberg credits Musk's Twitter layoffs for inspiring Meta's flattening

Key points:

Zuckerberg told Lex Fridman that Musk's post-acquisition Twitter layoffs — reducing headcount from ~7,500 to under 2,000 — inspired Meta and other companies to reduce management layers
Meta announced 10,000 layoffs in March 2023 (after 11,000 in November 2022) as part of a "year of efficiency" aimed at empowering engineers over management hierarchies
Meta stock rose ~112% year-to-date despite — or because of — the cuts; internal morale described as "shattered"
Stewart Butterfield (former Slack CEO) attributed over-hiring to a prestige dynamic: more direct reports = more power, so every manager pushes to hire
Tech layoffs in 2023 were the highest since the dot-com bust 22 years prior, per Challenger, Gray & Christmas
Musk later admitted some fired Twitter employees "probably shouldn't have been let go"

Connections: Mark Zuckerberg · Elon Musk · Meta · Twitter · Organizational Management