I found it odd that both the New York Times and The Washington Post had top stories about how terrible things were at Twitter now that Musk took over. A few days is hardly enough time to decide that a new leader has destroyed a company.
I mean, a month ago Musk wasn't even go to buy Twitter. You'd think we'd want to wait at least a few weeks (if not much longer) before deciding that what Musk is attempting to do during the first few days is definitely going to be the way Twitter will be handled going forward.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20221104220914/https://www.washi...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/20/musk-tw...
Twitter as a public company was a money pit. Now is Elon's money pit.
Musk's purchase, as you may know, increased Twitter's interest burden, so now Twitter is losing $4mil/day.
In the absence of Musk holding the company hostage from April to November, yes, of course Twitter would have to make some cuts like so many others who've had a drop in revenue.
But there's no reason to believe they would have cut the estimated 50-55% that Elon has.
edit: And now there's impact of this decision: of those who didn't get cut, how many will decide this isn't a healthy environment to work in?
More fundamentally, there's something deeply misguided about anyone complaining about layoffs at any corporation which haemorrhages money the way Twitter has for many years. Quite simply, unless Twitter has a path towards financial viability, there would be no point in it having any employees at all.
Wow, that's not my experience of reading the tech media.
Twitter gets disproportionate attention because of the relationship you mentioned, but also because what's happening to it is pretty unprecedented. It stands to reason that it'll be the main topic in tech journalism for the next few weeks, particularly as Musk continues his attention seeking behavior (and journalists continue to feed on it).
What level of error would be sufficient to warrant the haphazard descriptor? Two percent? One percent?
A company like Twitter is complex, and it's very likely that some number of people are important in a way which cannot be seen from a top-down view. Hence error correction. It's a good thing. I see it as a healthy sign that Twitter management are identifying and rectifying their mistakes so quickly.