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I’m wondering what the heck 7500 people at Twitter actually do. Ok so a few hundred for engineering and DevOps. Their financial performance has been relatively poor prior to the Elon takeover saga. They don’t make their own hardware like Google and FB do. They don’t make consumer HW. They run a giant message queue with some ads. 7,500 people is way too many.

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Probably global brand management, language adaptation, marketing etc.

If you assume it's a global product, almost everything geometrically multiplies.

After that you need your managers, hr, etc

Those are really good points. So let’s make a country team: brand, localization/UX, marketing & sales, talent/HR, a few managers - say 50 staff. Twitter careers list some 23 counties (28 cities). Let’s round up to 50 so that’s 50 locations * 50 staff = 2500. (No way it’s this richly staffed in each city).

Plus the 500 for engineering, DevOps, security and another 1000 for managers, PMs and all the other supporting/corporate roles. Grand total: 4500.

Current staffing of ~7500 still seems partly unexplainable to me, for what the product is.

4500 + 50 location * 60 local moderators = 7500

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