100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands | Hacker News Reader

100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

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125 pointsmfiguiere119 comments

Kylie Robison (Tech reporter for @FortuneMagazine): What I’m hearing from Twitter employees; It looks like roughly 75% of the remaining 3,700ish Twitter employees have not opted to stay after the “hardcore” email.

https://twitter.com/kyliebytes/status/1593391167718113280

That brings it down to under 1000 employees

So Elon paid $44B for a company now with 900-odd employees. For a 10-year ROI, that's $4.4B per year profit, or $440 million/per employee

For contrast, Netflix has the highest revenue per employee at $2.63 million/person, and Apple is second at $2.38 million, and Alphabet & Meta next at $1.64, and eBay at $0.9 million per employee.

So, he'll need to get 200x the profitability per employee, just to get a total profit equal to his investment in 10 years.

To get a company valuation back to his purchase price, at a 20X multiple, he needs to make those employees as profitable per employee as Apple. In a business that has never been consistently profitable, has not much of a moat, and in which he'd panicked almost all of his advertisers, the primary customers.

Good luck with that

The ones who stay are going to work nights and weekends, though.

It seems like ad spending is only going to get more difficult since there are way more options, spending is down in general, and Twitter is not video centric. That being said if you think those things are true then the absolute right move is to scale back operations and stop trying to be a growth innovator - and instead just be a really great forum. Reddit has 700 employees. Twitter can probably survive with 1000. It probably wont work out but maybe if revenue grows 10% per year and they can get paid features up to 1 or 2B per year it works out.

Yup, and to do that, he'll have to go right back to the mainstream moderation he loathes, as advertisers won't pay for even uncertainty (nevermind a hellscape), and the right-wing market won't pay and already has several sunken or underwater competitors.

I can't find an exact breakdown, but the sources I can find say that ads are still a majority of Reddit's revenue.

Reddit also has some structural advantages. Building around communities allows Reddit to ban advertiser unfriendly communities, and to threaten to ban others to force them to toe the line. It also gives them rough controls over what other users see (e.g. hiding NSFW content, quarantining subreddits so they don't show up on the not-logged-in front page).

They've also managed to convince their users to moderate each other for free, which gives them a really lean head count.

I think Twitter would need to substantially redefine their product to compete in that arena.

Reddit also only made ~$350M in revenue last year. I don't think competing with Reddit is likely to justify the purchase price of Twitter over the timespan either is likely to survive.

There's a reason he tried to get out of this deal. He's going to lose billions of dollars on this, the only question at this point is how many billions.

This is an under-explored part of how we got here. Elon did not want to buy Twitter. He bought it only because he thought he could flip it and lose less than what settling would cost (plus what damage depositions would do).

Right up to a few days before the deal closed, Elon was hoping he would not have to actually run Twitter. And that's the second part that is under-explored: Elon could not find a CEO. And he never will until he admits all of his and the coinvestors' equity stakes are now worth zero, and he takes a down round that reshapes the cap table and enables a sane incentive package for a CEO.

Neither wanting to flip it nor not wanting to run it explain what he has done once he actually owned though, more the opposite in fact. You don't prepare a company for flipping it by whatever this mess is, nor does it make being its CEO a more attractive job, nor did he have to run in as directly as he does. (Well, unless you don't care about the flipping price. Verizon managed to sell Tumblr after all ;))

Perhaps he thought it'd be easier than it really is after SpaceX's wild success in reusing orbital rocket boosters.

> So Elon paid $44B for a company now with 900-odd employees. For a 10-year ROI, that's $4.4B per year profit, or $440 million/per employee.

Your math is off. $4.4B per year profit / 1000 employees = $4.4M per year profit per employee.

So still higher than some of the highest benchmarks. 2x instead of 20x. Still tough.

Yeah, still tough. More like 5X - 10X. Definitely not the 200X disparity claimed by parent though.

Apple had $1M profit per employee in 2021.

What’s an achievable PPE for a business like New Twitter? If you say $500K, and if you subscribe to The Headcount Method of Valuation, that implies Musk will need to 10X headcount from this low point to break even in 10 years.

(I question the premise though — I don’t think the plan is “extract $44B in cash by 2032.”)

Worse than that; the Netflix figure is for _revenue_, not profit.

Don't forget the $1.3 Billion in interest payments from the loans they took on. ($13 Billion in debt signed on the deal, assuming 10% rate of CCC bonds from April 2022).

I can't wait to see the GDPR lawsuits from the EU.

If he needs more than 900 employees, he can just hire more. He is not fixed at "900 employees", so the premise of this argument is invalid.

What I've wondered through all this is whether he intends to bring in different contractors than than were there before to replace everyone he is firing or causing to quit. Contractors are more disposable and often cheaper.

To be honest, I wonder if they could band together and challenge this in court. While companies get tons of leeway, you might be surprised that there's sometimes protection.

Even if legal, what Musk is doing is incredibly sleazy. The employees agreed to work on certain terms. Then he demands they agree to different terms. Seems sketchy, but I think I know what they'd argue.

It's just a really creepy thing. I don't think I've really seen or heard of it elsewhere. You work for me, so sign here for different terms, or you lose your job.

I do know that it's probably legal in most jurisdictions for CEOs to just dictate new work conditions, after hiring (though it shouldn't). However, it doesn't normally come in the form of a button you must push to agree with him, "or else". Usually you have a meeting where you explain the plans moving forward... it seems companies that are scared of being sued do this.

I can't imagine this is a legally prudent move. We should enact laws that specifically target CEOs that act like cartoon characters. Of course, that would just let them be more secretive or quiet.

It's the USA why wouldn't he be able to just fire people? He gives them 3 month should be plenty enough

I think contracts aren't enforceable unless both sides get something.

3 months pay sounds like something.

You might be surprised. It's really complicated. Based on my experience with companies such as twitter, they are so finicky about not doing stuff like this.

It's not just altruism or for employee moral. It's clear some of the companies are simply deciding to not rock the boat by firing people. This can be more legally complicated than it seems.

Anyway, I'm not really saying one way or another, but it seems to follow that if others are taking measures, there might be good reasons for them. I would be surprised if the Elon / twitter don't get sued by this; multiple times.

The main issue to me is that according to what I've read, employees were not given severance agreements nor employment contracts to review before making their decision to stay or go. It's unreasonable to force someone to make an important decision like this without even knowing what they are agreeing to.

I think there are going to be two levels of shock:

1) Never give people an ultimatum. It basically never works in your favor. That was such a dumb thing by Elon and his team. I don't think Elon expected the numbers to be so high.

2) Workers often overestimate their own worth within a company or how easily they can be replaced. It's likely that all the people leaving saying Twitter is going to majorly break soon won't be correct, as I doubt the core engineers are the ones posting Emojis in the Slack channels.

https://mobile.twitter.com/nitashatiku/status/15933997046366...

!!! “I know of six critical systems (like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical) which no longer have any engineers," "There is no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system. It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop.”

Could be fake, but assuming true, can Elon take it back? Is a webform like legally binding for severance? Elon did say he could run it with 150 engineers do even if 90% are gone, that leaves 700 thereabouts.

I think right now emotions are flying high, so people are going to make grand statements (and of course the press, which now hates Musk, is very gung-ho to publish anything.) I'm sure some systems will fail, but as to if the general public will really notice much of it, I have doubts. I could be wrong, but I've seen employees make similar claims after being fired or leaving and generally most everything working out. Interviewing or getting information from people fired up after an event like that are generally not reliable, in my experience.

You’re absolutely right for any small group of people, but if 88 percent of employees are gone(and you’re right that’s a big if right now) I don’t think there’s a precedent for this?

IMO, it really depends what teams they are from. If you lost 88% of your engineers then that would be a big problem, I just don't think that will be correct. I'm sure for people that were deemed indispensable at the moment were offered more money to stay on. That is something I've seen elsewhere during massive reorgs. I could be wrong; I can't speak for Elon. He seems like a loose cannon at times, but I don't think he's making all the decisions alone.

I saw an article backtracking on some things reported, with Twitter being a lot more flexible with people deemed "essential," which lends itself to my general view.

its fine

10% of Twitter’s engineers is much closer to 150 than 700. The majority of twitters employees were not engineers.

I was assuming the 90% laid off a disproportionate number of non engineers and only engineers were left but your version is much spicier :-)

This could be meaningless hyperbole without detail. What are those systems, why are they critical, how many staff did they have and how many staff do they have now and what type of staff are they?

They have great reason to be hyperbolic - they've just basically been fired, Elon is accusing Twitter of being an inefficient, lazy, engineering organisation. He has insulted them, they will insult him back and want him to fail.

I don't think anything like this has ever happened before to a system with this scale, so who can say? But just as an engineer at another company that probably has a vaguely similar architecture it's certainly in a place of extreme risk. It just depends on if they can get people in place to hold together the critical services. Also things are much more likely to break it they start trying to change things, it will take longer for a problem to happen if there is little new feature work.

I have a hunch that over Thanksgiving the increased traffic will break something, and there will be nobody around to fix it, so more stuff will break. I have a hunch that most of SRE people that would normally be watching the metrics ready to jump on anything starting to look dicey are gone.

Not just thanksgiving, by the world cup is starting next week as well and that usually drives a lot of traffic

And World Cup traffic will be bursty. Big game, big event in game. Could really peak message volume and this is even geographically distributed.

So fun times for those left there to fight the fires.

During the 2010 World Cup, Twitter crashed every time a goal was scored. It was a major motivation for the rearchitecture that changed it from a monorail to services. The rock-solid stability during the 2014 World Cup vindicated that effort.

With that context, the performance during this World Cup will be especially meaningful.

The "once they start trying to change things" aspect is where I'm most keen to watch.

Surely we have all been involved with large-to-small systems where we were curious how well/long they would stand up on their own without intervention. It's kind of fascinating to watch a real-world example, even though we likely won't get a lot of detail. But still, :popcorn_emoji:.

But what's getting somewhat-ignored in this discourse is they aren't changing anything. All deploys are frozen. And the new CEO has made a ton of promises about new features and policies. Eventually they need to roll those out, and once they do, damn... Even if they have strong automated tests, those generally only tell you that new code is functionally ok. Anything that crosses interfaces, deals with end-to-end integration, or adds new tables/dbs/jobs/etc that would eventually hit their scaling solutions - all could have catastrophic effects.

(And that ignores the consent decree stuff on changes too.)

I find the colloquial use of "Elon" to be pretty lame, like when people call Mark Zuckerberg "Mark" only. News sources don't do that, it's usually only losers who either want to imply familiarity or refer to him in a vaguely disrespectful way. There are lots of instances where people would be getting upset over way less - here I just think it makes one look like a loser (not singling out the parent, there are lots of these), unless one is really in Musk's circle of friends and talking about him to other friends.

He has a unique first name and likes to interact with regular people online. Internet people have used Elon for a long time even when they liked him. It happens to a lot of famous people with rare first names (e.g. Lebron Kobe Shaq)

His last name is unique as well, and would generally by how e.g a news org would refer to him. I still get the sense there is a certain type of post that uses the first name exclusively, either (maybe less now) a tech-bro-type implying familiarity, or now an outraged tech-adjacent type wanting to mildly show their superiority. Ymmv, it's just the impression I get, especially if you look at the content of posts that refer to him this way

I've seen people routinely feign outrage over people not addressed as "Dr" (which as someone with a PhD I think is ridiculous) - even though it's clearly a minor thing, I think people seem fine trying to subtly disrespect Musk through how he's addressed

What an incredibly cringe comment. Names are used to reference a person, Elon as a name makes it painstakingly obvious who is being talked about. Mark pointedly does not.

To call someone a loser and dribble about this asinine analysis of familiarity. It is infuriating to read. How I wish you had been born in the middle ages with Lord's and Lady's, you would be happier and so would I for never having to know of your existence.

Thanks for taking the time to reply

The Musk simps are getting more deranged by the hour.

What is the proper term of address for Saint Car?

>as I doubt the core engineers are the ones posting Emojis in the Slack channels.

Why would someone who is capable of being a core engineer at Twitter agree to be overworked after Musk destroys the majority of the company. The most talented people will leave the dumpster fire.

The remaining folks are probably going to be the people with the least confidence that they can get a new job in three months

I empathize with those remaining with a H1B, they would be worried sick. They would have less choices and would otherwise have less of 60 days to find a new job or to leave the country.

Wrt 2: "I am going to miss this place. We built something special here, and I do not expect to see its like ever again. I have worked here at Twitter for over 11 years. Back in July, I was the 27th most tenured employee at the company. Now I'm the 15th. I am not going to click "yes""

https://mobile.twitter.com/THISWILLWORK/status/1593376111563...

Twitter is full of employees with 5-10 years of experience sharing that they are leaving. There is no doubt many people with critical knowledge and skills that are not easily replaced are gone.

Extreme commitment makes sense if you believe in the mission. Such as saving the planet with EVs. Not sure what Twitter's altruistic mission is. Giving up family life to enable trolls may not seen like a good trade.

+1. Musk needs to offer a compelling vision for what this platform should be. As of now I primarily know Twitter as the home of cancel culture, whiny journalists, and idiotic flame wars. That's not something I would devote 80+ hours a week of my life to, not by a long shot.

I think he has a serious gap in his understanding of the company culture. He has basically just assumed that many of the employees work there for the same reasons employees work at Tesla, SpaceX, etc.

Or he just only wants to work with ones who do!

_This_ is the real existential threat to Twitter. From the outside, before Musk bought it Twitter already looked like a stagnant company making short-term decisions to boost kpi's without a real mission.

I'm just not sure Elon is the man to fix a business that isn't really going anywhere. It was pedestrian, maybe it was hard to see a vision in that space, and the company culture became one of "maintain".

Even if he sells a vision of the "Everything App" like WeChat, is he going to find enough people at Twitter and enough new recruits to buy into that? Wouldn't you rather go put man on Mars or fight climate change?

If he _does_ manage to turn Twitter into the Western WeChat, it will be one of the most remarkable events in tech history. That said, I'm not even sure we want him working on a social network rather than loftier goals, so perhaps it would be better for humanity if he fails fast here.

So far it seems like Elon wants to turn Twitter into a less horrible version of 8chan, but the lessons in real-world moderation will come fast and hard. I wager it's going to get nastier before it gets any better.

I do know that many on HN are critical of twitter, but since the start of the war with Ukraine, twitter was an essential way to get fresh news/analysis of the situation. Therefore it's a pity that twitter is going down. And I do think it is happening.

That's my regret as well — there was clearly a very popular niche for breaking news and self-organization, although with some very challenging problems around authenticity which are hard to reconcile with such deep cuts.

Is losing information on the war really a bad thing?

I mean of course it is for people living in Ukraine who need updated information to survive. (But I would also hope they have govt sponsored alternatives)

But I actually thought it was deeply disturbing how many ppl in unrelated places, like California, would wake up and look forward to getting a fresh voyeur look on the suffering of others. Ppl were spectating and commenting like it was the latest season of game of thrones. Most likely ppl did some unintentional desensitization to themselves unknowingly.

Imo, not having such information is a net positive for society. Yes we should study war to not repeat historical mistakes. That’s completely different that what I saw a lot of Twitter coverage was tho

That "fresh voyeur look on the suffering of others" (odd framing) is why there is widespread, bipartisan political support for supporting Ukraine with munitions and money. People wouldn't make that choice if they did not know what is going on.

I don’t think that’s true at all? Support was setup and had been streaming into to Ukraine for a long time before any confirmation of a war, much less images. I remember when trump was president and there was the dispute where he was holding back the regular defense aid that the US sends to Ukraine. The point being that hundreds of millions were approved and sent with 0 tweets about the war (literally didn’t happen yet)

The United States is perhaps Ukraine's biggest supporter for strategic reasons, but it's also critical that Europe supports Ukraine and their support has been a lot more uncertain and reliant on democratic pressure.

Even the USA's support will wane if the economic costs create democratic pressure against Ukrainian support. One half of US Congress has just come under control by the GOP, a major political party that has a prominent isolationist faction who have been pretty open that they don't see the point in opposing Putin and would rather focus on domestic concerns. This isolationist pressure is well contained in the US thus far because Americans are swimming in sympathetic media coverage of Ukraine.

Perhaps you’re unaware that the level of funding, the level of awareness of what’s happening in Ukraine, the situation itself in Ukraine, have all changed since, you know, the invasion began.

> Is losing information on the war really a bad thing?

From the other day: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/11/1063162/twitters...

But then we get to other issues such as 'Lost memories': War crimes evidence threatened by AI moderation - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-socialmedia-rights...

And further back: Youtube and Facebook are Removing Evidence of Atrocities, Jeopardizing Cases Against War Criminals https://theintercept.com/2017/11/02/war-crimes-youtube-faceb...

Recently: Are tech companies removing evidence of war crimes? https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60911099

Or from the EFF - Amidst Invasion of Ukraine, Platforms Continue to Erase Critical War Crimes Documentation - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/amidst-invasion-ukrain...

So yes, losing information on the war is a bad thing.

Seems like these companies should be charged with aiding and abetting those war criminals, since they are actively destroying evidence of their crimes.

Who’s gonna say yes to “extreme hardcore” without “significant pay raise”?

The momentarily desperate and the nihilistic.

I imagine a proportion will say “sure” and do absolutely nothing until they finally get fired. While another group will say yes up to the very minute they find another job.

> Who’s gonna say yes to “extreme hardcore” without “significant pay raise”?

I can see one group of people: those who genuinely care about Twitter and have felt frustrated under previous management. But you have to wonder why they didn't already leave.

If you are somewhat important at Twitter (part of keeping the lights on, not new features) you would do well to take the severance and look else where. If Elon comes knocking get a huge upfront non-refundable signing bonus and dictate 'softcore' terms for re-employment. Better if you can find out who else is being called back and then you can all sort of work together to get better terms (create a very high floor).

I suspect this works at Tesla and SpaceX because working on rockets and EVs is intrinsically cool and motivating for nerds, in contrast to whatever kind of company Twitter is.

But I don’t understand why everyone is so dour. Either Musk figured out how to fix Twitter, or we no longer have to deal with Twitter. Win win.

There's always option three: Musk keeps it working, but worse than it was three weeks ago.

> or we no longer have to deal with Twitter

If it goes bankrupt it goes to the creditors and won't disappear.

Makes sense. I'm not sure there's a job I wouldn't leave for 3 months free money. Especially if I was confident of my talent and abilities as an ex-Twitter engineer.

Elon should follow Verizon's lead and sell Twitter to Automattic for $1M.

Put Tumblr in charge of it. Quarantines Tumblr's existing culture.

Is it my imagination or is it actually breaking down right now? I'm not seeing any new tweets!

edit: no, still going, but maybe the notifications are slow. As an SRE, I somehow feel obliged to watch it break.

It's your imagination.

They're stuck.

https://twitter.com/anothercohen/status/1593404311832338442

https://twitter.com/TweetOfSteiner/status/159340755912531148...

The first tweet you linked to is a parody account

Pretty sure those are satire posts

What I noticed is that after opening a thread the parent tweet is unavailable. It shows up once I go back. I'd attribute it to some kind of cache issue.

I understand being tough but why cause the needless turmoil. There's a theory of management that advocates breaking it all down and then rebuilding it from the bottom but this is a very extreme application.

I truly hope all the top tier engineers who kept it going leave and it all goes bankrupt and Elon can have his tarnished brand lol. There are multiple other avenues on social media for the same functions as Twitter, maybe a little less conducive but they will do the job.

Yeah even at a company with as relatively stable a product as twitter, there are so many processes that go on internally that certainly need someone who knows how to operate them. Another commenter mentioned dead-man's switches, but you don't even need explicit switches, especially if an entire team leaves. There will be parts of twitters infra that no one even knows how to deploy, /even if/ it was fully automated. At this point I would be extremely surprised if the twitter infrastructure was anything other than a car with no brakes. It will be interesting to see what parts of it fail first.

Especially considering they use a lot of stuff no one else uses, like Pelikan. They already fired the main dev, who knows if there's an ops team left. How do you even hire for that? It's hard enough finding people who can run Kafka lol

people love repeated ultimatums and firings !!!!

someone on blind is saying there are fewer than 300 employees left

I doubt it come on. this is all fun but he can actually have reduced in force that much

The article states keeping employment was opt-in. As in, agree to working more than 9-5 and click the link below, if you do not, you are laid off.

I agree, he can. ;) I think he just got on 300 signees; that's the number. So an enormous number I imagine are calling his bluff, but intend to let the checks to keep cashing. I would almost 100% do that if it was me.

I guess I'd probably be gone by now.

why not?

Question: What does 7500 employees do at Twitter?

I cannot fathom what they do. Can someone help me with some general percent breakdown? How many are management, support, coders, testers, etc?

How many employees do you think Youtube has?

Mistake to make remaining employed optin with scary marketing copy above the button, instead of having the optin be for layoffs. Doesn't get UX, Musk.

We all know Twitter is really bad product we are using. The obvious problem is the twitter culture. It is extreme difficult to fix a company culture. I believe what Elon did is the fastest way to fix twitter broken culture. I believe 200 engineers can run twitter far more better than now.

Was the button opt-in a legal workaround for something?

Twitter will fall down over Thanksgiving.

I guess its time for IsTwitterDownYet.com . Makes you wonder what its architectural weak points are.

The world cup should be a good stress test for Twitter's automated systems

Ooof. I don't follow football, but yes, World Cup and Thanksgiving the same week.

It's kind of that a billionaire can show up one day and ruin thousands of people's lives.

His money provided the opportunity, but his personality flaws / mental health disorders provided the means.

Bye, twitter.

_everyone_ should get away from that psychopath.

_everyone_ loved Elon when he stuck to EVs, spaceX, solar panels, and boring companies.

Yeah, that was when he was useful enough to outweigh his jackassery.

And hey, maybe if he kills twitter, he'll still be doing humanity a service.

people will just flee to other social media. Twitter dying changes nothing

N social networks with M/N people each are not remotely the same as a single network with M people.

The submarine/rescue situation should've clued many more people into his capricious, reckless nature, but yet many persisted.

This country has a serious problem with platforming and idolizing narcissists and non-violent psychopaths and it needs to stop. Sh*t-shows like this hopefully have a chance of showing everyone that these monsters don't deserve our adulation.

Boring Company and the absurd outcome of the Tesla tunnel in Las Vegas were other clear warning signs.

I'd rate orchestrating a coup in Bolivia and tweeting "We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it." an act of violence.

I hope that was _sarcasm_... This man is singlehandedly causing more polution, social unrest, and fraud than anyone I've seen in my lifetime. Each of his enterprises is bankrupt without government money and very creative accounting. His behavior is reprehensible and criminal. I can't believe he is not in prison.

The comment you're responding to is a prescription: what people ought to do.

Yours is a description: what people in fact do.

Yet, you phrased it in the same way, with the same emphasis. It might be a world view shifting shock to you. But I have always thought Elon was an asshole, from the very beginning of his self image marketing campaign.

And with any luck this charade will clue the previously clueless into this man's irrational, unstable nature, permanently removing the veneer of credibility and "coolness" that has been instrumental in his success thus far.

The legions of neckbeards who worship him as a real life Stark will follow him to their graves.

Please don't call names on HN and especially please don't do psychiatric name-calling.

You may not owe billionaire CEOs who you feel are psychopathic better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please look up the definition of psychopathy.

I can see that you are impressed by his wealth and title, but I owe this community a voice to balance yours.

Tossing pejoratives like 'psychopath' around in information-free ways is a marker of a bad HN comment, regardless of who it is you're putting down—although the celebrity aspect makes it worse because it adds sensationalism. If you've read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, it should be obvious that this isn't in the intended spirit of the site. In fact, if that isn't obvious of your comment, of which comment would it be obvious?

It's common for people to conclude that the mods secretly hold the opposing view to theirs*. I suppose the logic goes like this: (1) I can't possibly have broken the rules; (2) yet the moderator has scolded me; (3) why? there must be some other reason; (4) it must be that they disagree with me. The mistake is at step (1). The truth is, we don't care—we just want commenters to use the site as intended.

* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

What’s missing in almost all of the discussion is that billionaires rarely buy media companies to maximise their profits. It’s down to maximise their power.

As long as Twitter remains the social media portal for politicians, business leaders, media, journalists, and scientists, he controls the algorithm.

He also gets to advertise at will to the most powerful people on the planet.

His largest business risk is political. He needs the government support for spaceX and he might need them to mitigate Tesla class action liabilities.

For 1/10th the market cap of Tesla he owns the ‘Town square’.

Presumably he could pay off the debt if he wanted to, unless Tesla shares crater.

Now that he owns Twitter, his biggest risk is pushback from employees. He needs and rewards loyalty, and so forcing people to opt-out and pledge allegiance early is also critical.

The short, medium, or even long term economics of the Twitter business are not relevant and he’s using it as a smokescreen to hide the power play he’s making.

Like Trump, he understands power and doesn’t concern himself with truth.

Hundres as in with 2 whole zeros? out of almost 10k? WOW they gonna half hundreds less now!

"Twitter had roughly 2,900 remaining employees before the deadline Thursday,"

That's still a lot of employees... Hopefully for Musk, they kept the better ones.

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