The fact that Twitter had to ask some of the people it laid off to come back shortly after having fired them says it all about how incompetent and self-defeating those layoffs were.
Would you think the whole ordeal was done better if they just refused to admit that any of the firings were in error? Nobody makes no mistakes when firing. There are many issues with the Twitter firings, but asking some of them to come back isn't a negative sign at all.
I'm perplexed by the mental gymnastics you had to resort to to try to deflect any responsibility from Musk, let alone the despair to omit any reference to the extremely poor judgement and outright incompetence it takes to pull this sort of stunt, and instead fabricate this theory where this impulsive shot in the foot was actually a brilliant plan to thwart entrenched interests.
Occam's razor and Musk's track record reject this hypothesis. Musk f-ed up, just like he keeps on f-ing up, like the recent shit fest of Musk posting a stream of brain dead and profoundly I'll advised tweets trying to publicly smear a employee with disabilities.
That we know of (meaning they posted publicly about it). The real number could be way higher.
> but asking some of them to come back isn't a negative sign at all.
It's a very negative sign, especially at the scale it happened (as I said, we know about the cases where the person accepted to go back or publicly stated they were offered to come back).
Mistakes certainly can happen, but they're much more likely to happy when things are done chaotically without proper planning.
Twitter is now just nice yacht for a billionaire. The acquisition was no different than Ron Watkins buying 8chan.
Of course, that's a pre-Elon analysis. Elon's loans alone add 1 bil/year in interest costs, and reports say there's been a large drop in revenue since his purchase.
"He owns twitter, of course he knows what he's doing!"
"He owns a Lambo, of course he knows what he's doing!"
But it was profitable at certain times. Despite all the reported "bloat". Ironically now, it has little hopes of being profitable thanks to advertisers pulling out due to lax moderation (some of the automated stuff no longer working because the maintainers are gone!). So even if they managed to run the site with a skeleton crew, assuming they keep breaking non-essential features, it's unclear they could ever become profitable again.
There seems to be this echo chamber around the Twitter acquisition that thinks most software companies are bloated and that software engineers basically do nothing. They seem to believe Twitter will make that demonstration. It's particularly pervasive in semi or non-technical circles. I guess it's the same crowd that bought into no-code and low-code tools to "get rid of expensive developers" for the last decade.
While Twitter hasn't suffered any complete outage as of yet, several products and features seem to be broken, as well as a good chunk of their API (I don't buy the claim it's intentional because the latencies and error rates have been jumping up). To be completely honest, this level of service degradation would have killed more serious products. It's fine for Twitter because there's no SLA, no enterprise customers and no critical infra running on it.
But now with Twitter reportedly losing 40% of its advertisers and taking on $1 billion of annual debt servicing costs, it seems unlikely they'll be able to get back to profitable if things keep going this way.