I think more than "dead weight", Musk was trying to get rid of what he deemed a culture problem. Using the dead weight as an excuse he did multiple rounds of purges, with "useful" (productive+culture matching) engineers also getting purged in the process as an acceptible loss, only perhaps seeing that as a bit too far later on (recall there were engineers being asked to come back on an individual basis). The purging wasn't a surprise from my perspective of , in the past, seeing CEOs agressively weed out employees who only slightly disagree with them, let alone the "actively plotting"(?) Twitter employees who, you may recall, Musk was pouring over internal conversation logs to find, it seems.

And to expound on the main topic, I think what we're seeing is a confluence of the above: using downturn, etc. as an excuse to shed perhaps individuals or groups that are in opposition to the culture the board thinks is useful, drowned out by a total also comprised of some amount of acceptible loss in employees the company wouldn't mind keeping.

Watch as some individuals from all of the above are individually asked to rejoin with a pay bump.

My two cents.

Are you an engineer? How often have you worked on something that would be noticeable immediately if you left?

I’ve never in my career worked for an extended period on something that was just maintenance. Software systems are extremely stable so long as no one is adding features or increasing usage. I have made (as part of a very small engineering team) a company close to a billion dollar profit on one project, but in the whole 5 years we built that thing, no one in the world would have noticed if we got fired. Because it was R&D.

Engineers are R&D investments. If you decide “no more R&D”, then that’s fine, that’s a strategic business decision. But it doesn’t mean the people previously doing R&D were doing nothing.

Where do people get these ideas?

Twitter is better than ever? From what I've heard they've driven away a huge chunk of their advertisers and users, and stopped paying rent

I definitely agree on big tech company bloat, but do not agree with those percentages (or at least on average).

I also don't think he properly sorted engineers between slackers and non-slackers due to reasons like the speed at which cutting occurred and the rehiring into firing to fix whatever random issues.

Industry wide layoffs are a nice cover to cut inefficient workers, although I don't know how well they can be sussed out in large companies. My own company with only a few hundred employees cut some people and I can say that, of the ones I was familiar with, they were mostly slackers or low performers.

Twitter isn't running well now, though. It's extremely error prone, recently protected tweets were showing on other folks timelines, the service was down in Australia for an extended period of time recently, auth services busted, APIs for third parties failed (and subsequently messaged to be no longer supported, unclear if this is because they can no longer maintain it or an actual decision was made to stop). One of Elon's largest proponents, popular twitter user catturd, is complaining incessantly about how the algorithm for feeds is worse now than ever before.

It's been a failure.