Tech

Elon Musk's X is hiring again, CEO says. It had slashed more than half its workforce.

Linda Yaccarino, left, will take over from Elon Musk, right, as Twitter's new CEO.
X CEO Linda Yaccarino says the company is hiring again. Santiago Felipe/Getty Images, Gotham/FilmMagic
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X CEO Linda Yaccarino said the social media company is hiring again after gutting over half of its workforce after Elon Musk took over.

"I get to come in and shift from this cost discipline to growth and what does growth mean? Growth means hiring," Yaccarino said during an interview with CNBC on Thursday.

The company does not have any open positions listed on LinkedIn or its careers website.

The former ad boss at NBCUniversal, who joined X earlier this year, said the company's operational run rate is near breaking even. She added that the company's relationship with advertisers — which had reportedly slipped since Musk took over Twitter — was on the mend and that some of the advertisers that had left were already returning to the platform.

"We're a company that has gone from 8,000 people and has gone through a very necessary cost-discipline exercise to about 1,500 people so it makes sense that there wouldn't be some type of impact of presence with these people," Yaccarino said of the impact of the layoffs on the company's relationship with advertisers.

The CEO also commented on her working relationship with Musk and added that the X owner gives her "autonomy."

"Our roles are very clear," Yaccarino said, adding that Musk works on the technology and product side while she focuses on "everything else."

Before Yaccarino joined the company in June, Musk had done significant bloodletting at the company formerly known as Twitter and called for employees to commit to working "hardcore" or leave the company.

More recently, Musk appeared to backtrack a bit on his cost-cutting efforts. In May, Musk told CNBC's David Faber that some "babies got thrown out with the bathwater" during the layoffs.

"There's no question that some of the people who were let go probably shouldn't have been let go because we simply did not have the time to figure it out. We had to make widespread cuts to get the run rate under control," Musk said, adding that the company might eventually even try to rehire some of the people they had let go.

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Grace Kay
Grace Kay was a Correspondent on Business Insider’s enterprise desk, where she covered the inner workings of Tesla, Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, and the broader robotics and electric vehicle industries.Her stories have been cited by multiple publications, including Reuters, Bloomberg, and CNBC. Before joining Business Insider, she worked at Bloomberg and Forbes.Tesla: Inside 'Project Rodeo,' the Tesla effort pushing the limits of self-driving technologyInternal Tesla salary database shows Elon Musk's strategy: Lower salaries, bigger stock grantsTesla tells staff it plans to roll out its Robotaxi service in San Francisco this weekendTesla has been working on modified Model Ys for its Robotaxi programTesla prioritizes Musk's and other 'VIP' drivers' data to train self-driving softwareAshok Elluswamy is the most powerful Tesla executive you've never heard ofxAI:Internal documents reveal how Elon Musk's xAI trains Grok to be the anti-woke chatbotXAI's Macrohard project stalls as Tesla ramps up a similar AI agent effortElon Musk's xAI plans to supply computing power to coding startup CursorWar rooms, group chats, and video games: Inside Elon Musk's AI startupBehind Grok's 'sexy' settings, workers review explicit and disturbing contentElon Musk's xAI lays off hundreds of workers tasked with training GrokEVs and robots:Fisker employees are fixing some customers' cars with parts from the company's vehicle 'graveyard,' sources sayFisker Ocean reservation cancellations top 40,000 as the EV company tries to fight off bankruptcy, leaked data showsInside the downfall of Henrik Fisker's second automotive startup, which just filed for bankruptcyInside the glass-walled Tesla lab where workers train the Optimus robot to act like a humanInside OpenAI's renewed push into robotics