If he gets himself under control and stops it from downward spiraling (including losing much of their existing advertiser revenue!) then he’s making some progress.
But right now, he seems to be throwing gasoline on it.
So it will coast for a while before the wheels come off. Maybe performance will degrade, maybe media stops loading or your timeline won't refresh. Maybe none of that happens and a critical system deep down fails and it just stops. But Musk has all but ensured that Twitter in its current form cannot continue to function.
But then again, it's Elon, so who knows.
Cut it before understanding what it does, I don't think anything good is going to come from this.
Remember, cutting off the MFA microservice ?
I strongly suspect that was a case of switching off something that few people realized was required by for MFA service to operate. That speaks to poor comms, poor docs, and poor understanding of the systems (by the people who were still around.) "Chesterton's Fence" says you shouldn't be turning off stuff you don't understand, but if it looked OK to turn it off, but it wasn't, then that's actually an indictment of the poor engineering practises that Elon claims are rampant around Twitter. Rather than showing Elon to be an idiot it might prove his point.
But we're not in Twitter, so we can't know. What I would say is that if everything was well signposted that the service was critical then I doubt Elon would have recklessly ordered it should be turned off regardless. He's not that bad. It smells of bad documentation to me.
But hey, maybe that's why I'm just an engineer without any interest of making the switch to the "leadership" ladder, and not a CEO.
But did he have to be so cruel? Post this picture https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592618665933156352 while 5k people lost their jobs? And all the other stuff... I mean... it's one thing to "tell it like it is", which is a trait a lot of people admire. But he's just doing a bunch of stuff that deep down only abominable human beings would think and let alone act on it.
There's an increasingly blunt divide these days between people who think cruelty is a good signal because it's in some way "realistic", and people who think avoidable suffering is bad and should be avoided. This is almost exactly the "woke"/"antiwoke" split.
This might map with the idea how the military first needs to break a person to rebuild them in something that's capable of doing what society has taught us to never do (namely, kill others), and more strongly to what I've been increasingly hearing lately in the business world which is "antifragility".
In no way I am equating killing with building resilient systems, but I can see a thread connecting them when someone thinks that cruelty can produce better and improved new behaviors or systems.
50% layoffs gets them back to their 2018 headcount.
As far as I can remember, Twitter was functioning fine in 2018 as well. And it certainly didn't grow enough or add enough features to warrant 50% headcount increase in two pandemic years.
Remember that some people willingly put themselves through extremely situations - obsctacle races, bootcamps, etc. 80hrs/week doesn't bother them. Work-life balance isn't something they care about. The David Goggins types.
Elon has built his career seeking out such people. Couple all of this "hardcore" talk with some elaborate BS about "Twitter's mission" (and he IS an excellent hype man) and I can totally see certain type of engineers jumping through hoops just to get in.
https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-...
Word on the street is full teams (including most of infra) have clicked "no". He may be in a state where the site can't even stay up as he coasts on employee fumes.
Why do you consider that "unfortunate"?
So he's doing exactly as we all should expect, he's literally said it. I used to delete last Now I delete first.