With 7500 direct employees and ~6000 contractors that means with revenue of 5billion you are looking at $370,370 per employee. Considering that many of these will be low paid contractors for moderation and support roles and the platform cost of delivering the service beyond payroll costs was unlikely to be more than 10% of revenue that's pretty healthy. There's certainly room to optimise but it's not grossly over staffed by any means for the scale and complexity of the operation considering it is a global service with hundreds of jurisdictions and languages, millions of users and a wide array of advertising clients to support. The sales team alone to drive advertising revenue was likely 1000 of that headcount.
So because he didn't want to have the consent agreement but agreed to it because the SEC made a deal with him its not valid. That would mean that any plea agreement made with a defendant could be said to be not valid later by that defendant when they didn't abide by its terms as it was "made under duress". He is telling the judge that he didn't run his Tesla tweets past the board as the consent agreement said he had to. Confessing to breaking an agreement on the stand probably isn't the way to go.
