At which point you’re taking on a huge risk for less savings, savings that’ll shrink over time and introduce new challenges: after-all, doubling the remaining employee’s salaries gives those employees all the power when it comes to negotiating — suddenly, each and every one knows just how valuable and important they are… and the company has much less room to negotiate to retain them.

And that assumes they can even cut the right 75%: what if the measure they use to determine the “valuable” employees turns out to be wrong? How do you even begin to undo / address that when everyone is being paid 2x?