• Twitter had a "lot of people doing things that didn't seem to have a lot of value," Elon Musk said.

• Some investors said tech companies overhired and gave people unnecessary jobs as a "vanity metric."

• Musk said that Twitter was starting to hire again after reducing its headcount to around 1,500.

Elon Musk said Twitter had "a lot of people doing things that didn't seem to have a lot of value" before he executed mass layoffs at the social-media giant.

"I think that's true probably at most Silicon Valley companies, maybe not to the degree to which it was at Twitter," Musk said while speaking virtually at the Wall Street Journal's CEO Council Summit in London on Tuesday.

"Twitter was in a situation where you'd have a meeting of 10 people and one person with an accelerator and nine with a set of brakes, so you didn't go very far," he said. Other Big Tech companies could make further job cuts without impacting productivity, Musk added.

Discourse has recently raged over the apparent "fake work" trend, with some executives and investors saying that tech companies overhired and gave people unnecessary jobs as a "vanity metric." Proponents of the theory said this was why tech giants were slashing so many jobs.

Musk told conference attendees that Twitter now had 1,500 employees, which he said was "probably a reasonable number." However, two people familiar with the company previously told Insider that the number of full-time staff was closer to 1,000.

Twitter had more than 7,500 employees at the end of 2021. Musk bought the company for $44 billion in late October 2022 and has largely depleted its workforce in what he said were necessary measures to cut costs and save the company. Musk laid off around half of its workers just a week after taking control of Twitter.

Thousands more have been fired, been laid off, or quit in the months since. The firings included some top executives and workers who criticized his leadership of the company.