However, not many companies can survive with a permanent code-freeze, which is why companies don't just fire the "excess" folk who take PTO between December 25 and January 1, even though "things were fine" in that timeframe
Many of them probably could be fired without much repercussions on company, the problem really is that there is no way in hell to judge that quickly and immediately start firing.
It's the load balancing, the advertising, the billing system, the >200 legal jurisdiction's worth of regulation [0], lobbying both for and against various regulations, auditing everything for legal disputes, the dynamic battle with scammers and spammers who want to figure out and get around the spam filters, and the security updates (some of which they need to write themselves and not just install on all their machines).
Probably some other stuff as well, but this is already like a Monty Python sketch.
[0] not just each nation, but e.g. all the different US states
They might be able to sell it to someone for a fraction of the price they have paid for it but every day that he stays in charge the less they will be able to sell it for.
Trust me, I want Twitter to suffer the worst death of all. It's just not likely that Elon Musk will be the reason why the site falls, at least not from a technical standpoint.
It’s already over… I don’t know how long the death rattle is going to last but it’s past the point of no return in any meaningful sense.
None of those things are going to have any impact on the eventual outcome here.
I was pretty clear about the very specific problems they are facing and how any one of them individually is potentially fatal for them. Without solutions to those problems the end result is going to be the same it’s just the timeline that’s in question.
But for a one-time charge for a lawsuit settlement, it was profitable just before Musk took over, it was not operating above its means (it almost certainly is now, despite the cuts, because of the loss of advertising revenue on top of the enormous debt service costs Musk loaded it up with to finance the acquisition.)
> The actual employees seem to be doing a fine job at reduced-capacity though
Keeping the lights on in the core app? Maybe (subjectively, I’m seeing more problems with app behavior, and seeing more reports of them, but that could, at least in part, be more attention being on it.) With the kind of safety that is of concern to moderators, no, despite Musk’s claims of reduced hate speech and other objectionable content by Twitter’s count, outside analysis has that skyrocketing.
Basic business functions? Well, missing payroll in a couple of EU jurisdictions is kind of a big deal.
So, no, I would say the existing crew isn’t doing a great job of keeping Twitter running, though the most clear problems aren’t in app function, but other business-critical functions. But, it wasn’t just engineers that were cut, and keeping the lights on, without innovation, is probably the easiest function to maintain with deep cuts, since software doesn’t actually rot.