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And the staff it had were entrenched within a culture of censorship and narrative control. The better move would have been to fire most of them except the most essential while building a new Twitter HQ somewhere in rural Texas or something, and then move the whole HQ out of the compromised bay area. I bet that would be a lot cheaper of a building to run than the current one as well. Then you could also make sure the (hopefully minimal) moderation team was staffed by normal people as well, instead of the types that tend to gravitate to SF.
Even better move would be do it all before you acquire Twitter, to have ready new management and new staff from day one.
Instead, it looks that Elon learned from Bush's success in Iraq.
1/Take over
2/Fire all management and personnel
3/???
4/Profit!
Elon's actions will lead directly to profits in a way that is easy to understand.
Twitter was bleeding money, losing $1.1 billion in 2020 alone.
They had a $13M meals program that was feeding less than 10% of the staff because no one showed up to HQ. It was costing hundreds of dollars per meal, with more people preparing food than eating it. It's laughably stupid.
My sense is Twitter was hyper-bloated, with ~10x more employees than they needed, so 90% layoffs seem about right. It's a microblogging website that grew to have a bunch of completely superfluous positions with people who literally contributed nothing.
Right-sizing the staff, cutting needless expenses, adding a revenue stream with a re-imagined Twitter Blue, reducing trolls/bots—these are all common sense. The advertisers will come back, as the only metric that matters is user engagement, and it's at an all time high & will continue to grow through 2024 with what will be the most "entertaining" election in U.S. history.
Elon will turn Twitter into the profitable Center of the Internet, and a certain tribe will be pretending the sky is falling the whole time.
#RIPTwitter & #Twitterisdown was trending during the highest engagement period in Twitter's existence. It's the fakest news that's ever been.
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