Tucker Carlson laughs at people being laid off in Elon Musk interview

Pair also discussed abortion and alien life

Fox News host Tucker Carlson cracked a smile as he listened to Elon Musk describe slashing 80 per cent of Twitter’s employees after taking over.

“Turns out you don’t need all that many people to run Twitter,” Mr Musk said in an interview with the Fox News host. “If you’re not trying to run some kind of glorified activist organisation, and you’re not caring that much about censorship, you can really let go of a lot of people it turns out.”

Carlson, in an interview that aired this week on the network, called the layoffs “one of the great business stories of the year,” and recounted a story of having dinner with an executive who praised Mr Musk for “firing the staff stuff.”

During the conversation, Mr Musk referred to the thousands of employees who were fired or quit as part of a Twitter organisation that was “absurdly over-staffed,” and said running the company was as simple as a glorified “group text.”

As The Independent reports, many Twitter employees were let go with little warning, leaving some of the company’s workers on employment visas in limbo.

"It was like this tidal wave coming across the United States, advancing towards you, and you had no idea if you were going to be drowned or if you were standing on high enough ground to escape this," 48-year-old data scientist Melissa Ingle told The Independent in December.

Mr Musk’s conversation with Fox News featured a number of other eye-catching moments.

In one section, the Twitter owner claimed abortion and birth control were bringing about the “collapse” of civilisation because of their purported impacts on population rates.

(Despite the mass production of oral contraceptives and hormonal birth control methods, the human population has actually more than doubled in the last 50 years from 2.5 billion to 8 billion, according to the United Nations.)

In another aside, Mr Musk said he was one of the people most likely to find evidence of alien life, but hadn’t seen any so far.

“I would immediately tweet it out,” he said. “That would probably be the top tweet of all time, found one guys.”

The high-profile interview with the tech mogul came as Fox News was in the spotlight for other reasons, principally its $787m settlement of a defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems for its inaccurate 2020 election reporting.