Toss away ethics and sure, it can reach the same nefarious levels of facebook. but as it stands, Twitter is a place of morals and that is their undoing. Twitter has barely if ever been profitable.

A place of morals! Well, lots of other people think Twitter is a place of immoral 1984-esque dystopianism that they want no part of. Those people have money too, and if Musk takes over and cleans house they might well turn up and start doing things that can be exploited for profit, like making interesting tweets about things.

Oh absolutely. Morals are mostly cultural. if we decided that it was moral to sacrifice humans, then it would be. What Musk plans and is doing however, is entirely unethical.

AHAHAHA good one! This is some hilarious post-irony.

It's also possible that Twitter could easily make money and the company is intentionally avoiding that, for tax purposes or whatever.

If you are holding yourself out as a growth company but also paying dividends, it creates a mixed message, because if you are growing shouldn't the money be better spent on growth than just giving it back to the shareholders?

Twitter is not a growth company by any metric: Users, revenue, or stock price. If they could easily generate lots of revenue right now with their current management, they absolutely would already be doing it.

If Twitter is losing $180 million per year, and they have 7500 employees, and each employee costs on average $100k [0] fully loaded ($750mm/yr), you could become profitable by reducing your payroll by 50% (laying off half their employees).

My guess is layoffs aren’t considered as an option since it would signal that they’re throwing in the towel and don’t believe in their own growth trajectory.

[0] Average salary here is a conservative guess

Yes, but typically when you're losing money like that you show user growth on the other side to justify it. Twitter doesn't have that.