this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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I think one of the things Musk has proven is that there was a fair amount of organizational dead weight in Twitter.
If he'd made some staffing cuts, paid less for ego offices, and done it all while shutting up and not being Apartheid Boy we'd be applauding his 4d chess.
This is what happens when an organization gets sufficiently large. And this is not necessarily a bad thing.
"Surplus" staff is very important when a new project comes and the organization needs to scale up. Instead of suddenly hiring a lot of people with no understanding of organization culture, the staff can be mobilized to work on new things without affecting existing project and structure.
There is a reason why governments around the world don't suddenly fire their staff when it is apparent a lot of them are not working at max capacity. Redundancy is a kind of safety.
How did he prove that? I don't know how to determine how much of Twitter's decline is due to Musk's public statements.
The advertiser exodus is 100% a result of his policy changes and public persona. That's just how it works, the advertisers don't care about anything but brand awareness.
He changed policy, they left because that policy could be damaging to their brands.
But one of his policies was gutting the workforce, and despite all the dire predictions the platform has somehow still not exploded. There's certainly a lot of reasons for that, and he's been publicly embarrassed more than a few times, but if he'd gone in with a scalpel instead of a hatchet and not scared away the money and the tech it's almost certain he could have made Twitter at least briefly profitable.
Twitter was losing money, but not by standards of potential and net valuation.
Put it like this.
In 2016, Twitter probably decided the US election. At the time, they had 3500 employees.
In 2021, they had 7500, and were losing less money.
Can you think of anything they did in that five year period that made you say, "Wow, that's a good feature," or "this community is amazing?"
Not really, right? It was the same Twitter, with double the workforce, doing not a whole lot with them.