CEO Saves His Failing Company By Firing Entire HR Department
When Elon Musk purchased Twitter and took the company over in 2022, he proceeded to fire approximately 80% of the social media company's bloated 7500 person workforce. This included almost all HR related employees. The company roster was pared down to a lean 1500 people. Everyone in the establishment media claimed that Twitter (now called "X") was going to collapse.
The political left and their corporate allies did everything in their power to make this happen, including advertising cancellations and even government intervention, but they failed. X's monthly active user (MAU) count has grown over the past 5 years - rising from roughly 360 million in 2021 to over 550 million by early 2026. Part of the reason for this success despite the constant attacks was Musk's removal of internal saboteurs.
The majority of corporations today have inflated their teams with people who do not add value - Rather, they create problems from thin air and drag the company down. The primary vehicle that facilitates this sabotage is the Human Resources department.
HR departments were originally created as a means of monitoring compliance with state and federal laws to avoid liability. In many cases this revolved around "sexual harassment" or "discrimination" in the workplace, but it ended up becoming a progressive crusade to make women, LGBT and minority groups a protected class of workers that are difficult to fire because HR is more concerned with lawsuits.
This lack of accountability based on gender and minority privilege reached its peak during the height of the woke era and DEI. Companies were rife with useless employees who did little work while raking in six-figure salaries.
Today, the situation is changing rapidly. A wave of layoffs has hit the white collar sector since 2025. The end of DEI is leading to mass cuts which are largely affecting women, with minority women making up the bulk of the job losses.
One company CEO, Ryan Breslow of Bolt, saved his company from implosion by a simple change which allowed him to more easily make a number of other changes: He fired his entire HR department.
Breslow, who stepped down as CEO in 2022 but returned in 2025, cut 30% of the workforce in April and replaced HR with a smaller “people operations” team focused on training. “They were creating problems that didn’t exist,” Breslow, 31, said at Fortune’s Workforce Innovation Summit. “Those problems disappeared when I let them go.”
Bolt was founded in 2014 and makes checkout payments technology. The company saw a whopping valuation collapse from $11 billion in 2022 to $300 million in 2025.
But HR wasn’t the only group to lose their jobs. Breslow said employees had grown complacent during the boom years. He gave workers 60 days to adapt to a leaner culture but said 99% couldn’t make the shift. “There’s a sense of entitlement that had festered across the company,” he said.
He fired nearly the entire leadership team and eliminated four-day workweeks and unlimited PTO. Bolt now operates with about 100 employees, down from thousands. “We have a team a quarter of the size, who are much more junior, who work a lot harder, who have better energy,” Breslow says.
The CEO's observations echo across the corporate world in the US and in Europe, and it's the reason why many DEI related jobs are disappearing and why so many college graduates with psychology and communications related degrees can't get hired to save their lives.
It makes sense; Human Resource employees are 75% to 80% women and 18% LGBT, far above the averages in most white collar fields. These demographics commonly lead to a grievance-based work environment and an entitlement culture. These are the groups who often create problems from thin air as a means to manipulate the policy courses of companies and they are difficult to eject because of liability fears.
Placing them in a position of power with the ability to drum up internal conflicts is a detrimental mistake.
Time, however, is healing. The era of easy salaries for low value employees is quickly coming to an end. Numerous tech companies and venture capital companies that expanded during the last decade are cutting the dead weight. The viral TikToks of women spending most of their workday in corporate cafeterias and yoga rooms are disappearing. The free ride is over, and soon there may not be any HR department's left to protect the barnacles from being scraped off the ship.