Elon Musk is hiring staff for ‘X’ after two years of layoffs

According to X’s official job listings, Elon Musk’s social media company is currently looking to hire new staff to help moderate content and secure its platform, nearly two years after layoffs across X’s trust, safety, and security teams.

X has advertised twenty job vacancies in the past month, equally divided between its cybersecurity and safety departments.

The positions held by members of X’s safety team range from government affairs managers to director of strategic response.

X is adding a threat intelligence specialist and multiple security engineers to its cybersecurity teams.

The number of employees that Musk fired after purchasing the business, formerly known as Twitter, for $44 billion in late 2022 is far higher than these modest figures.

According to Musk’s April 2023 interview with the BBC, Twitter, as it was then called, cut 6,000 jobs in just six months, leaving about 1,500 people working for the company after layoffs were completed.

The company’s trust and safety team had suffered severe cuts as a result of those cuts.

After Australia’s online safety commissioner inquired in January of this year, X revealed that it had let go of 80% of its trust and safety employees since Musk took over.

Prior to Musk’s acquisition, the company had 279 engineers worldwide on its trust and safety teams; by the end of May 2023, that number would have dropped to 55, according to X’s responses.

According to X’s report to the Australian eSafety Commissioner at the time, the company cut its 4,062-person trust and safety team by nearly a third to 2,849 workers, its full-time content moderation team from 107 to 51 workers, and its contracted moderators from 2,613 to 2,305 workers.