Google bloat gave us transformers. Apple bloat gave us a usable touchscreen only, pocket computer (famously an entire org within Apple had developed an iPod-based approach that was competing with what was released)

The leaps forward need bloat. A startup can execute on specific vector direction way better.

Now back to your point, what did X deliver with its lean ops? It seems that it needed 2 bailouts (one from xAI, and one from space X)

I disagree. It's not about the culling, it has never been, and actually, it makes things worse. You spend countless hours and tons of money recruiting talented people not to lay them off because you don't want a bureaucratic org.

If the issue is inefficiency, tons of meetings, too much team alignment etc, then that's the issue that you need to tackle, and these issues can already appear in a 50-100 employee company. Sure, that's an easy problem to solve with a smaller size but unless you hired people for no reason, these people have a very specific set of problems to tackle and are often, in these companies, the best in class to tackle them, culling half of the company isn't going to make things better.

(And X rehired part of the laid-off engineers)

Is that you Musk? Twitter lost half its revenue, more than 80% of its valuation.

"what Elon did with Twitter after taking over."

You mean fire the very smart people who designed the core systems AND insult them so that anyone with options would never want to work there?

Eh, what has X/Twitter delivered since the cull? It’s basically in maintenance mode. Which is fine if that’s what you want to do, but Google and Apple definitely don’t (and I’m glad for that)

> Google and Apple both need a culling similar to what Elon did with Twitter after taking over.

You could cut Google's size by 40% and they'd still have more corporate employees than Apple.

(Google has ~190k employees, Apple has ~160k but 50k of those are retail staff, so ~110k corporate)