Mark Zuckerberg praised Elon Musk's push 'to make Twitter a lot leaner'

• On a recent episode of "The Lex Fridman Podcast," Mark Zuckerberg was asked about Elon Musk.
• Zuckerberg praised some of Musk's changes to Twitter, calling them "probably good for the industry."

Mark Zuckerberg has some good things to say about the way Elon Musk has been running Twitter.

On an episode of "The Lex Fridman Podcast" that dropped Thursday and featured a nearly three-hour long conversation with Zuckerberg, Fridman asked the Meta CEO about Elon Musk.

The host — a scientist whose podcast is a "safe space for the anti-woke tech elite" — asked Zuckerberg to name some things he thought Musk was doing well and what the Tesla CEO can improve upon.

"Elon led a push early on to make Twitter a lot leaner," Zuckerberg said, after pausing to consider the question. "I think that those were generally good changes."

The selective praise highlighted changes to Twitter that are similar to those Zuckerberg has made at Meta — namely stripping down the organization through layoffs.

Zuckerberg referenced Musk's attempts to make the platform more technical and remove layers of management, leaving less distance between engineers at the company and Musk, himself.

Since purchasing the platform in October 2022, Musk slashed the total number of employees at Twitter from around 7,800 to its current workforce of around 1,000.

Prior to the layoffs, Twitter had "a lot of people doing things that didn't seem to have a lot of value," Musk said during The Wall Street Journal's CEO Council Summit last month.

"I also think that it was probably good for the industry that he made those changes because my sense is that there were a lot of other people who thought that those were good changes but who may have been a little shy about doing them," Zuckerberg said.

Like Musk, Zuckerberg has conducted multiple rounds of layoffs over the past eight months. He's dubbed 2023 Meta's "year of efficiency."

When asked about these layoffs on Fridman's podcast, Zuckerberg pointed to Meta's renewed focus on higher-quality technical projects, citing a desire to "empower engineers" and ensure that there aren't "eight degrees of management" between the teams building Meta's products and the top of the organization.

In a comment to Insider, a company spokesperson pointed to Zuckerberg's company-wide memo from March.

"As part of the Year of Efficiency, we're focusing on returning to a more optimal ratio of engineers to other roles," Zuckerberg wrote. "It's important for all groups to get leaner and more efficient to enable our technology groups to get as lean and efficient as possible."

Zuckerberg criticisms of Musk on Fridman's podcast were as measured as his praise. He said that it was difficult to "offer specific critiques from the outside."

Musk, on the other hand, has been willing to give his unfiltered opinions on Zuckerberg's company. Last month, he tweeted that WhatsApp "cannot be trusted" and that Zuckerberg seemed "extremely partisan." The digs were among many that Musk has taken at Zuckerberg in recent years.