> Those people would be happier in a job where they can make a difference, and society would be better off too

Serious question: how many jobs can really make a difference? How well do they pay and with what risk factors? Compare that to a steady paycheck where your way of making a difference it to try to make political and other internet discourse slightly nicer or at least less troll friendly.

How do you identify the right 50% in the short time Musk had?

He basically has to rely and trust people inside Twitter to make those decisions for him (can he, though?) or he has to fire people in an arbitrary way.

I don’t really understand how you can make that call unless you believe people are pretty much interchangeable and their emotions play no role.

It just seems inconceivable to me how you can meaningfully decide who to fire.

It‘s not as though this was an acquisition and suddenly the sales department is redundant and you can fire them all.

I would assume that you would need at least a couple months time to get to know the company and understand what and who might be redundant. I don’t think that question is easy to answer at all.

The answer is it's not really possible to do a much better job. With unlimited time the result would not be that much more fair or effective. Firing the bottom 50% is impossible even with unlimited time to think about it. Employee performance evaluation isn't very effective, and Musk has no reason to trust Twitter's previous performance evaluations, and forcing people to work 6 months under a new performance evaluation process with the threat of a 50% layoff over their heads is not compassionate either, nor would it have a much better result at the end anyway. There is no silver bullet. Better to rip off the band-aid in one go.

You might say that a perception of fairness is important so that employees trust leadership. Well, what's likely to happen is the fired people will think it's unfair, and the people chosen to remain will think "well, at least the right choice was made in my case". Of course, the opinion of the remaining people is what matters to the company going forward.

Generally agree with the perception part, except that if the employee sees their better performing team members get fired and the worst ones stay, they might be almost as unhappy as if they were fired themselves.