I believe that Twitter is 2 top-down edicts away from drastically improving their efficiency with fewer employees.<p>1) Dramatically reducing the size and scope of the speech rules they implement to something akin to "If the speech is legal in a country, then it's legal on Twitter" would reduce technical and operating complexity. Between developing the technical infrastructure to automate restrictions and bans, to having staff trying to judge all sorts of petty bickering between groups trying to take advantage of the rules to report and ban their rivals, I feel like Twitter is wasting a large amount of resources on stuff that they shouldn't even be trying to do. A smaller team could focus on the essentials: removing illegal content and responding quickly to actual issues of safety (stuff like death threats that might pose an imminent harm). Hell, I feel like Twitter is so involved in trying to get involved in Internet drama and disputes that they currently do a mediocre job on actually dealing with genuine safety issues.<p>2) I realize that the infrastructure to run a site as large as Twitter isn't trivial to maintain, but for a site that has so few real user-facing features, it's kind of surprising that their technical team is so large. If somebody just laser-focused them on a clearly defined set of important features and policies for the business to execute on, it seems like Twitter should be able to move much faster on the handful of things that are core to their business.
Just for actual reference, here's how expenses broke down for '22 Q2 [1]:<p><pre><code> Three Months Ended June 30, 2022 - In thousands
-----------------------------------------------
Cost of revenue - $540.676
Research and development - $454,859
Sales and marketing - $308,301
General and administrative - $216,586
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Total costs and expenses - $1,520,422
</code></pre>
So just running Twitter is 35%, R&D is another 30%, sales/marketing is 20%, while general/administrative is 14%.<p>If running Twitter includes a lot of server/infrastructure costs on top of headcount, and general/administrative includes a lot of rent and overhead, then <i>maybe</i> by totally cutting R&D and sales and marketing you could cut 75% of employees but Twitter would still run?<p>[1] <a href="https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2022/q2/Final_Q2'22_Earnings_Release.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2022/q2...</a>
Even if you assume that somehow 50%ish of employees do literally nothing at Twitter, the people that remain will still have much more work shoveled on their plate for the same pay. Actions like these are a great way to completely kill a company because no one wants to jump to a ship that's currently on fire.
In the chat logs of the recent lawsuit it seems he explains the reasons why. Compared to other social media companies Twitter gets in less income per employee. The idea is to make the ratio similar to other companies then make it public again.<p>So firing people and increasing income is the aim. I doubt 75% is accurate however and I think that Twitter blue is a bad idea for income.<p>The logs suggest video, music etc giving most revenue cut of any platform.
What I see here (especially with the recent Tesla worth 4 trillion statement) is boldfaced Elon going “not for my money.” He’s literally trying to coerce every cow in his gravitational neighborhood to pay for this too keep himself out of pocket. He doesn’t want it. It’s so fucking ridiculous.
Is there any objective way to define and measure productivity at companies like Twitter and estimate how few people they could get away with? The story implies they have 4/3×5600 employees which I could easily be convinced is a lot to do what they do. Likewise with Google and Facebook (who both give the impression of doing way more research and product development so you'd expect more people) - it's certainly plausible that the my could run their core business with way fewer people. Obviously the status quo will push against any changes, it would be interesting to see some information on what a reasonable size is
This is how I read it:<p>Elon Musk (is yet again) seeking new ways to withdraw from the deal, this time by convincing share holders/employees that he might wreck even more havoc if the deal goes through.