There no way in hell that this 80% of workforce was actual bloat.
But Twitter is not a software and servers company -- it's a media company. It has more in common with Hulu than Microsoft. The ability to post 240 chars of content is not a business. The users aren't the customers. As you say, the Twitter platform is not ground breaking tech -- that was never where the value was.
> Teams dedicated to curating content like twitter headlines and moderating content don't need to be there
This is where I think you and Elon are wrong. The "content" is the product and the advertisers are the customers. The assumption is that that these teams are not helping bring in advertisers but you and I don't know that. Elon didn't even care to find out because he fundamentally misunderstands the business he's in.
If your advertisers go away, then a whole lot of the iceberg of complexity underneath the bird app goes away.
https://polymarket.com/market/will-twitter-report-any-outage...
The people who stay will be those with the least options.
Musk has made employment at Twitter hugely risky, with no possibility of reward. Really boneheaded business, completely incompetent cutting off the workforce, honestly. Hard to imagine a worse way of pruning the workforce.
People keep repeating this trope as if Twitter is some paragon of technical excellence and innovation. It is no such thing. It is a popular website with a textbox for user input.
You don't need "talent", you simply need to people who get the job done.
And defenses like this go a looooong ways towards destructing the myth that Musk had technical acumen, because the only people defending him are those that can't do the work.
John Carmack, "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so."
And discounting the scale of Twitter is also quite cartoonish projection.
It says that 80% of the results come from 20% of the sources. That's not 8/10 people are doing nothing, but rather 8/10 people are doing things that only contribute to 20% of what makes Twitter Twitter.
On any given team of ten, it's likely that the entire team is in either the 80 or the 20 bucket, by virtue of what they're working on, not by virtue of how hard they're working or how talented they are.
> Derek de Solla Price, a British physicist, historian of science, and information scientist, discovered something about his peers in academia. He noticed that there were always a handful of people who dominated the publications within a subject. Price recognized a pattern which was later named after him.
> What is Price’s Law?
> 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work.
https://expressingthegeniuswithin.com/prices-law-and-how-it-...
And no, I don't gamble on events or crypto.
I firmly believe, lets say 80%, of Twitter is bloat. But sacking them like this wont prove anything due to practicalities. You just can't unwind a mess like Musk is doing. If some employees sole productive task in a week is to reset a server that still has to be done and it will take a lot of work to figure out which button to press when the site falls over.