I’ve heard this claim many times and is not backed by any more evidence than “it works on my machine”.
If the company really did continue to operate in the same manner, it wouldn’t have been worth 80% less in 2024 (https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-...), nor would it need to be rolled up and financially engineered into being part of an AI company that then gets rolled into a rocket company.
It has been losing users, safety standards have dropped and overall the platform is worse off than before. There’s a reason why no other company has done something similar with their employee counts.
Also, it is now full of bots and grifters, plus Musk’s own promoted tweets with whatever political thing he’s obsessed with at the moment showing up in everyone’s timelines.
The matter of the fact is that most governments and newspapers publish on twitter (now X) still. It also serves the purpose of amplifying Musk to a large audience.
If you wanted to transform a public forum into a right -wing echo chamber, then the transformation is a massive success and the platform continues to achieve all relevant objectives.
While you’re right in that the platform has its uses, other companies cannot do the same. Which is why it’s important to talk about objective success metrics. Sure if you want to fire 80% staff at Microsoft and have a transformation where they only cater to half the user base then they can do it. But they will also not be taking in the same profits as before.
I don't think it's right, but I can see how a billionaire just completely overrides the company mission and business model after they buy enough shares or something.
Maybe there are other non-obvious use-cases for other companies, where you're effectively buying the user base to then pull the rug.
A lot of the original customers will just accept such a change. See Twitter or GitHub.
Musk paid an absurd premium for the company. Far more than it was worth. It was intended to force the board to sell. So an 80% estimated drop (it’s private so it’s a very rough estimate and I won’t go into the various reasons you should not accept it at face value), sounds scary but it’s by design.
Twitter as a company was doing quite poorly leading up to the acquisition. It lost more than $1.3B in the two preceding years. A big downgrade from its previous $1B+ annual reported profits.
As for the 81% headcount reduction, Musk confirmed that, but if you think he’s lying about that for some reason, CNBC investigated it. Journalists examined internal Twitter records and reported approximately 1,300 actively working employees, with another 1,400 still receiving pay but no longer working. CNBC also interviewed two recent employees who corroborated the scale of the reductions. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-tha...
Prior to acquisition, Twitter's SEC filings confirmed more than 7,500 full-time employees.
I don’t see why this claim is so unbelievable. Twitter was famous for its army of social media staff whose entire day comprised two meeting between matcha tea and meditation. https://youtube.com/watch?v=buF4hB5_rFs
Musk just fired everyone who wasn’t an engineer and it turns out the engineers keep the lights on.
As for this:
> Twitter as a company was doing quite poorly leading up to the acquisition
This is objectively false. 2020 revenue for Twitter was $3.71B while 2021 came in at $5.07B. The company was on a growth trajectory and path to profitability.
In fact, after the acquisition, the ad revenue dropped by a lot. https://www.businessinsider.com/x-revenues-plunged-months-af...
All of this is public information.
That’s because I didn’t make any claims about X’s financial performance. I was explaining to you why you were wrong on some important facts.
> This is objectively false. 2020 revenue for Twitter was $3.71B while 2021 came in at $5.07B.
First, you’re conflating revenue and profit, which is kind of unforgivable in this context. Second, I explained that in those years they made large profits. In my comment. Which you clearly didn’t read.
If this is just where you like to emotionally vent may I instead recommend Reddit? I like the interesting discussions here.
The valuation crashing back to reality after going private, and therefore being measured by its intrinsic worth rather than whatever the latest trader paid for a share of it, was an inevitable but meaningless consequence.
Twitter has become text book bad purchase, bad management, and worst "rebranding" in history.
It was meaningless to Musk for all of about a week, when he came off his ketamine binge and realized what a stupid offer he’d made. But it was a done deal by that point.
According to Reddit[0], it might not have been meaningless to employees with unvested RSUs. They lacked an acceleration clause, so instead of immediately becoming 100% vested at $54.20, the schedule remained intact with a cash payout instead of stock. If the cash payout was relative to current company value, then it was a massive hit.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/comments/yykn1e/if_you_work...
I'm talking about the investors and banks that ponied up over half the purchase funds, and the employees that didn't have life changing payouts who were laid off.
I suppose he has the money to pay back the investors and banks now though. Not sure what kinda return they were expecting vs what they got.
The Financial Times report is behind a paywall so I'm not sure how that evaluation was reached. Also there are a bunch of bizarre financial shenanigans Musk has freely pulled with zero scrutiny. Hard to gauge the full impact of the layoffs when the person at the helm is profoundly amoral and has no scruples about lying.
and `X’s revenues have dropped since Musk’s takeover, but it posted about $1.2bn in adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation in 2024, according to two people familiar with the matter — roughly flat with the period before Musk’s takeover.`
Musk, in traditional private equity ways, killed anything that wasnt immediately making money. Then he made it pay to play and monetized the hell out of it. All of that BEFORE he opened the far-right floodgates.
Now its a shell of its former self and coasting on the momentum it once enjoyed.
The Twitter exodus does relate to this, kind of; it's an example of the "fall back on existing revenue streams" strategy (you could call it a private equity playbook, but it's more universal than that) exaggerated by the guy acquiring it not needing more revenue and clobbering the revenue part too.
Twitter pre-Musk had an _enormous_ amount of experiments going on. They were building streaming services, clones of every social network you can think of (Spaces etc.), an entire sports brand around MLB, and so on and so on.
They also had an army of sales people who sold ads and an army of engineers building and optimizing an ad platform, which is (or was?) their actual business.
The "platform going down" narrative from both sides was 100% irrelevant to what was actually going on. "We laid off PMs, salespeople, and engineers and the system didn't crash" is a complete non-sequitor that should be obvious to anyone who's involved in software engineering or maintenance. If anything, I'd expect laying off most of any company to make it much more stable; when you don't change things you introduce fewer bugs.
If you aren't growing and building, then obviously you don't need the same amount of people only to maintain what you have. It doesn't take that many people to fix bugs, renew SSL certificates and plug security holes.
Game studios knew this since forever. Once you finish building, if you aren't building something new, then you're laying off. It's not a new thing Twitter/Musk has just discovered. Odd that whenever this is discussed, it's framed as if Twitter-then is the same thing as Twitter-now, minus most of its employees and doing just fine.
Laying off all those people didn't tank the site, it tanked the business!
50% of the output is produced by the square root of the team size.
In bloated organizations, there is a lot of fat to cut.
The problem is that the bigger and more bloated a company is, the harder it becomes to tell what is fat and what isn’t.
In fact, this condition might be the cleanest definition of "bloat".
A tautology, and therefore devoid of information.
If you had claimed "In very large organizations...", you might have been saying something.
Also look at their recent account merging efforts and all the problems people have encountered and posted about on the platform itself.
I suspect this is what got Meta and other companies at least considering whether they would benefit from doing this at a much smaller scale, because there were some mass firings the next year at other companies, but this could have just been in the pipes anyway due to overhiring before.
After the acquisition, advertising revenue dramatically dropped (to a low of about 1/3 in 2025 though it has apparently recovered up to only down about 50%!), because all of those functions were gutted. This is why Twitter tried to switch to "buying a blue-check" and other premium features (e.g. access to Grok), because they had fired all of the people necessary to run a real advertising business and they needed revenue.
And I know that you don't need that many employees to support Twitter's customer facing business because Bluesky does basically the same thing (message storage/search backend+web app+two mobile apps) and they worked for over a year on just 20 million in total raises (and no advertising or any other revenue)- they did a Series B in 2025 that raised over 100 million, but they were operational for over a year on just 20 million in raise. So yeah, it doesn't take that many people to just present the messages of users to other users, but what Twitter did was to cut back on what they did for their customers and accept the big drop in revenue that came with it, and that's not really proof of anything.
User numbers are down 20% since the acquisition, ad revenue is halved and the value of the company has collapsed. Where is the politics? The only political thing was the acquisition itself. It ceased to function as a growth and market based company and effectively became a propaganda outlet, EM is highly relevant in that this was the actual point.
As a product the entire platform has stagnated, which is what you'd expect if you let most people go and just use it as an arm for election influence.
I guess this is why we can't have nice things.
Edit: Enron Musk apologists will always crack me up.