Twitter is a glorified message board. You don't need more than 50 engineers to oversee that. Wasn't instagram and whatsapp overseeing >250m DAU with around that many engineers before their acquisitions?
Twitter-as-140-characters-shouted-into-the-ether can be 'built in a weekend'. Twitter-as-a-business-that-makes-money is an entirely different machine.
As Elon Musk Cuts Costs at Twitter, Some Bills Are Going Unpaid - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/technology/elon-musk-twit...
> ...
> Mr. Musk also issued an order to slow or in some cases halt transfers of funds to Twitter’s vendors and contract services, the people said. Any expenditures for services need to be approved by Mr. Birchall, three people said. Mr. Musk has since declined to pay for the travel services incurred by the former Twitter executives, the people said.
> ...
> Mr. Davis, the president of the Boring Company, has also directed Twitter employees to renegotiate the deals that the company has with firms such as Amazon and Oracle, which provide computing and tech services, the people said. The employees were told to suggest to those companies that Mr. Musk’s firms would not work with them in the future if they refused to renegotiate, the people said.
> After Twitter’s contract with one software vendor expired under Mr. Musk’s ownership, that company voided a discount it had given to Twitter, one engineering manager said.
The hard part is monetizing.
What was the revenue Instagram and Whatsapp were collecting at the time of their acquisition? Likely 0.
The moment you start collecting money, signing contracts, besides the non engineering work like legal and finance, not to mention sales, you will need to do a lot of tracking whether you delivered what you claimed you sold.
Didnt Facebook get in trouble for exaggerating ad metrics?
And that's on top of all sorts regional compliance requirements over GDPR, cookies, which require both engineers building stuff as specified by legal, which wasnt required before because if you have no revenue, you dont really need to worry about getting sued or banned in the region.