Elon Musk's X Begins Rebuilding Safety Teams After Slashing Them by 80%

X’s Hiring U-Turn: New Safety Roles After Years of Deep Cuts

X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, is adding roughly two dozen roles across safety, security and content moderation, a sharp reversal from the deep layoffs that followed Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover in late 2022. The company cut its global workforce from about 7,500 to 1,500, with the trust and safety engineering team shrinking from 279 to just 55 people. Content moderators, both staff and contractors, were similarly gutted.

Newly posted listings include a director of strategic response, security engineers and threat intelligence analysts, roughly split between safety teams and cybersecurity. The jobs are spread across Austin, New York, Palo Alto and international offices in Manila and Delhi. This follows an announcement in January that X would open a Trust and Safety Center in Austin staffed by 100 full-time content moderators, the first dedicated facility of its kind since the Musk-era cuts.

The recruitment push marks the first significant net addition to the moderation headcount in nearly two years and comes after a series of high-profile departures from the leadership ranks. Former Chief Cybersecurity Officer Lea Kissner and Trust and Safety head Ella Irwin both left the company, leaving the units without veteran direction as criticism over platform safety mounted.

Why the Platform Is Quietly Rebuilding Its Moderation Muscles

A tacit admission that the cuts went too far

The simple act of posting job ads for two dozen safety and cybersecurity roles is in itself a statement. Musk had long argued that trust and safety teams were bloated and ideologically driven, but the subsequent hollowing out visibly degraded the platform’s ability to police hate speech, coordinated harassment and election interference. The new openings — which explicitly mention threat analysis, strategic response and engineering for trust tools — are precisely the capabilities that were dismantled. For a company that once claimed it could run with a fraction of the staff, this is a data point that the experimental minimalism didn’t hold.

Regulatory and advertiser pressure as likely triggers

Although X does not publicly cite a reason for the hiring shift, the timing aligns with mounting regulatory pressure, particularly from the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which requires very large online platforms to demonstrate robust content-moderation systems. A failure to meet those standards can carry fines of up to 6% of global annual turnover. Separately, advertisers that paused spending after the 2022 turmoil — including many major brands — have been waiting for verifiable safety improvements before returning. The 100-person Austin centre and the new engineering hires can be read as the company building exactly the kind of demonstrable infrastructure that regulators and cautious ad buyers demand.

The numbers show a rebuild, not a restoration

Even if every new role is filled, X will remain far below its pre-Musk moderation capacity. The trust and safety engineering team would rise from 55 to perhaps 80 if all two dozen new hires join that unit — still less than a third of its former size. The Austin centre’s 100 moderators replace only a fraction of the thousands of in-house and contract moderators who left. So while the direction of travel has changed, the absolute capability to handle the firehose of daily reports remains limited, especially for non-English languages and fast-moving global events.

Leadership vacuum adds execution risk

Both the chief cybersecurity officer and the trust and safety lead have departed without publicly named permanent successors. Filling individual contributor roles without stable executive oversight can lead to disjointed priorities and slow decision-making. The director of strategic response role is arguably the most important of the new lot, because it would set the tone for how X handles coordinated inauthentic campaigns and real-world harm. Until that person is in place and empowered, the hiring spree may generate more noise than tangible improvement.

What This Partial Rebuild Changes for Advertisers, Users, and X Itself

X’s partial rebuild changes the platform’s risk profile, but for now it remains a work in progress. Here’s what it means for the parties most affected:

• For advertisers: The 100-person Austin moderation centre and two dozen safety engineers represent the first concrete steps toward rebuilding the trust-and-safety infrastructure that brands demand. However, with trust and safety engineering headcount still at only around 55—potentially rising to 70–80—harmful content takedown times are unlikely to return to pre-2022 levels. Brands should request updated transparency metrics before renewing large campaigns.
• For users: The new cybersecurity and threat analyst roles signal a greater ability to disrupt coordinated attacks and harassment rings. But with the departure of the chief cybersecurity officer and trust-and-safety lead still unfilled, response to mass-reporting campaigns or emerging threats may remain slow and inconsistent. Users should not expect overnight change.
• For competitors: Rival platforms that have gained users during X’s turbulence—Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon—can point to X’s own admission that skeleton staffing failed as evidence that their own, heavier moderation investments are a competitive moat. They now have a tangible example to show sceptics.