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Comment by yongjik | Hacker News Reader

If a few days is enough time for a new leader to decide half of the workforce is redundant, then it's enough time for others to decide the leader is an idiot. You can't have it both ways.

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But it wasn't a few days. Musk and his team had half a year to analyse the existing company structure and made preparations. Furthermore, it has been admitted that Twitter had layoffs in the order of 25% already planned, but those were placed on hold during the transition period.

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.

Musk spent half the year trying to not purchase Twitter. Or is the thinking that he was simultaneously attempting to not own Twitter while devising the management strategy if he did?

Musk spent half the year trying to not purchase Twitter for 44 billion. What happened was that he (unluckily or foolishly, pick your poison) signed a watertight buy agreement just before the wider stock market experienced a crash. He did try to get out of the deal, but that's not the same as saying that owning Twitter is something he no longer wanted.

From an article published last month seems that with or without Elon a lot of people were still getting fired.

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.

Twitter's interest burden wasn't this ridiculous as a public company, and they make $1bil/quarter on average (well, they were before Musk ran away advertisers). When you say "money pit" I imagine investors dumping in cash to make up for low revenue, and this hasn't been the case for years.

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?

Disagreeing with someone's approach or saying you think it will have a terrible outcome is fine. What's weird is seeing major media publications looking at the first few days of a transition period and pronouncing that this is the way Twitter will now be. For instance, this is was the top Washington Post story a day ago[1]: "Advertisers fleeing, workers in fear: Welcome to Elon Musk’s Twitter" with the byline "The company was hailed for its welcoming and relaxed work environment. Elon Musk made that a relic of the past."

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...

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