The Size of Tech Companies' Workforce

According to information obtained by the Washington Post, Elon Musk has presented plans to cut nearly 75 percent of Twitters workforce to investors. The Tesla and Space X CEO had agreed to buy the social network for $44 billion after acquiring a nine-percent stake in the company in April. More recently, Twitter and Musk have gone back and forth about the deal and even met in front of a judge. A final decision by Musk to buy for the agreed price or go ahead with a court case is expected by October 28.

A look at the size of different tech companies' staff shows the comparably small size of Twitter. The most recent data from Companies Market Cap lists 7,500 Twitter employees - fewer than Spotify's 9,000 and about as many as Snap. If the company was cut down to the proposed size of 2,000, it would have fewer staff than Groupon, the largely disgraced 2010s coupon juggernaut.

Even if Musk would abandon the sale, Twitter's staff numbers would likely still fall. The company has its own plans of a major cull that would cut around a quarter of jobs, according to Washington Post sources. The size of Twitter's own layoff plan shows the financial problems the company could be dealing with.

Tech companies with employees in the tens of thousands include Pay Pal, Uber, Baidu, Salesforce and Trip.com and also Meta, the biggest social network by staff size at more than 83,000 employees. The biggest tech company staff listed by Companies Market Cap is Amazon at around 1.5 million employees, followed by Apple contractor Foxconn (826,600). In the top five are also Chinese e-commerce giants JD (390,000 employees) and Alibaba (245,700 employees) as well as IBM (282,100 employees). All of these companies employ staff to manufacture or move physical goods, however, something that doesn't apply to online services like social networking, financials, media or ride exchanges, making their staffs smaller by default.