Imagine what the company would be "worth" if it did everything it does but with only three and a half employees. Company culture is a cost center.

Imagine what it would be worth if it did everything it does but with just Musk employed

yeah but he wouldn't be able to fire himself

Australia newspapers are reporting [1] that local staff have been locked out of their accounts.

They were responsible for local marketing and news curation.

[1] https://www.theage.com.au/business/companies/musk-starts-mas...

Doesn't seem like a big add

For comparison, SpaceX runs an entire private space program on ~12,000 employees. Near-weekly launches. Rocket development+production. Building+deploying Starlink.

(Although that's just a number from a quick googling. Maybe they outsource a lot of manufacturing etc?)

NASA has 18k permanent employees which I thought was surprisingly low. https://www.nasa.gov/about/index.html

Government typically has a whole ton of contractors, sometimes twice the number of FTEs, but a cursory Google indicates NASA has only about 1000 contractors. Interesting, but the contract money probably goes to acquisition and commercial partnerships (https://www.osbp.nasa.gov/docs/top20_2020_contractors-TAGGED...).

That said, their FY22 budget is “only” $30B, which is less than Elon just paid for all of Twitter. This number usually surprises people but a lot of other space-related work is within the USAF and NRO budgets.

About a decade ago I was working on websites for NASA and just the contractor I worked for had over a thousand contractors. They were far from the largest, too.

That’s because recent focus on the space program is nonexistent. It’s been getting on life support since the moon walk.

That comparison is however completely irrelevant to Twitter.

It may seem to ignorant people that a space program is more advanced than "just a website" but actually running these kind of websites is extremely complex. Especially when you're needing to compete with Facebook and Google at serving ads in a relevant and effective way.

It is really interesting reading through their infrastructure challenges alone:

https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...

> at serving ads in a relevant and effective way.

Anyone ever seen a relevant Twitter ad?

Just seems very dumb location based placement. Nowhere near the level of IG.

> Nowhere near the level of IG

Facebook and Google are in a completely different league which is why for most brands ~95% of online ad spend is spent there.

Twitter has been slowly getting better until now when Musk's attitude has frightened the brands off i.e. GM, L'Oreal, Pfizer etc.

It's crazy the number of people on HN somehow claiming that Twitter is this well run and well functioning tech company now that bad rocket man took the reigns and decided to lay off everyone... Isn't it a consensus among tech people that Twitter is the absolute worst tech company?

Twitter was a bit shit. But its up and running more or less in real time for millions of users. Thats pretty impressive. Its business is shit, yes.

Musk looks like hes done the classic: "the office is clean why do I need cleaners" dance. I am surprised he can fire that many people that quickly and still expect momentum.

It doesn't help that he appears to be shitting out product ideas that he's just "dreamt" up. Rather than talking to people to see why twitter didn't do it in the first place. He clearly has a low opinion of the entire company.

There's a ton of websites that are up and running for millions of users. That should be table stakes for running an online service.

> Isn't it a consensus among tech people that Twitter is the absolute worst tech company?

I don't think so. I see far more hate towards Meta and Amazon.

I think a lot of people viewed Twitter as poorly-monetized and -managed as product and business, but generally competitive as a technical organization.

Not really. It's been known for a while that the tech side of Twitter is incredibly low-performing.

Over the years in various hiring threads it's been common to describe Twitter as the giant tech comapny you go to when you can't get hired anywhere else. Twitter has definitely had a reputation for a long time for being bloated and filled with less-than-competent employees. It's only earlier this year that I've seen the discussion shift towards this idea of Twitter being a competent group.

Whew - even with your empty caveat against saying what I’m about to say:

Designing reusable rockets and launching hundreds of them into space for profit, is more complicated and requires a different caliber of frankly higher IQ worker, than building and maintaining the existing Twitter.

Not that there aren’t some smart web people, obviously.

Well up till now, Twitter paid better and was considered a near FAANG caliber gig.

Tesla is known for fucked up WLB and low compensation compared to FAANG.

I bet Twitter employees have higher average IQ. Especially compared to whoever at Tesla authorized removing radar and parking sensors.

I assume tesla could attract talent at those salaries due to the stock prospects. Wonder if that's the case nowadays.

  Especially compared to whoever at Tesla authorized removing radar and parking sensors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W1JBAfV4Io

Their crappy auto wipers and auto highbeams haven't dissuaded customers, so why not crappy parking sensors.

Just because it's easy for you, doesn't mean it's easy for everyone.

rocket science and software engineering are two skills that take years of experience to hone. they come with their own set of challenges.

i feel like this sentiment belongs alongside "isn't netflix just an ftp server and a media player?"

My guess is you have no idea what you are talking about.

About rockets? Or websites?

I’m writing from a faang office with a few decades of experience. I know some people in aerospace. They’re on average smarter than 4/5ths of my colleagues (who are also clever).

I’m much more junior, but to exchange anecdotes, I think it’s difficult to accurately say that people in FAANG are less, equal, or more intelligent than people in aerospace. To define intelligent, I will use the everyday definition that mixes speed of learning with the ability to solve hard problems (acknowledging that the academic definition of intelligence is different).

For one, I anecdotally know people in FAANG who were smart by effectively “studying for the test” by focusing more on leetcode than projects/intellectual exploration. In contrast, the people I know who went into aerospace tended to have a genuine interest in physics (and some with more interest in philosophy), and had more experience with projects (e.g. worked on an aerospace team in university), with many of them having little-to-know experience with software development.

Interestingly, the aerospace people I know anecdotally happened to be better at soft skills/networking for getting into companies, whereas the FAANG people focused on leetcode for admissions. After getting into a company, also from my anecdotal experience, more FAANG people focused on metrics/compensation, whereas more aerospace people tended to focus more on the mastery of the craft. I acknowledge that my anecdotes shouldn’t be generalized, but it aligns with the motivations of many people looking to get into each company (it seems more people go into FAANG for compensation/prestige, whereas more people go into aerospace for the passion).

So, I would say that people from both categories tended to be very smart at learning quickly and solving hard problems, though anecdotally, the aerospace people seemed to be generally more intellectually curious. Then again, perhaps the aerospace people were better at soft skills/presenting themselves so they appeared smarter, whereas the FAANG people didn’t focus on presenting themselves as intelligently. For limitations, note that the people I’m thinking of are at the junior level.

In any case, I don’t think one can conclusively say that people in FAANG have more/less/the same intelligence as people in aerospace companies, though maybe one can tentatively say that people who go into aerospace tend to be more curious and interested in mastery of one’s profession (versus material compensation).

Is any of that suppose to be convincing in any way? I also have been in faang and wouldn't use "I am or know people" argument, silly.

Is “I know; I am” not what knowledge and experience boils down to?

I've worked on a large scale website everyone knows. There are lots of interesting problems, and lots of super clever people who solve them in clever ways, but it's not literal rocket science.

i used to work on rockets and now i work in software, so i think i'm pretty qualified to say that you have no idea what you're talking about.

Really? You don’t think the aerospace folks were smarter?

How many employees would it take to just maintain the status quo? Code freeze, no more features and bug fixes. Just keep the lights on and keep selling ads.

Spacex also makes less revenue than Twitter with their higher headcount.

It’s privately held so we don’t actually know that. However, SpaceX was valued at around $120 billion in their last funding round.

SpaceX has many fewer customers and users though

But this is not a burger joint where you have to scale your number of employees as your number of customers increases.

Sure you do, just not linearly

To be fair software at space X is likely much less complex than Twitter’s stack.

For comparison, 400,000 people worked on the Apollo space program.

And Walmart has over 2M employees, and they're just running a retail store!

that's a labor intensive business

we'll find out soon if Twitter really need 7500 employees. (IMO, i just don't see how and why you needs that many people to run Twitter)

Out of curiosity what do you think is a reasonable number?

Too many variables changing at once to do proper attribution

I wonder does this number include moderators or are they contractors who are not included in the headcount. I could see half that number being made of moderators if so.

I was curious about the numbers that other tech companies may employ as a comparison... from some cursory googling:

* Meta: 71,970 [2021]

* Apple: 164,000 [2022]

* Amazon: 1,298,000 [2020]

* Netflix: 11,300 [2021]

* Alphabet: 156,500 [2021]

* Microsoft: 221,000 [2021]

* The New York Times: 5000 [2021]

* Fox Corporation: 9000 [2020]

* Reddit: 700 [2021]

(Anyone else I should add?)

I can't really find any trends. I think Reddit is an outlier, and my impression is having only 3750 employees would probably put Twitter on the smaller end of the scale too.

Reddit planned to double to 1400 in 2021 alone [1], it wouldn't surprise me if they were at 1500-2000 by now.

1. https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/9/22274077/reddit-funding-ro...

Craigslist: 50

I think Reddit is an outlier because they offload a lot of their moderation to volunteers.

We'd need to also see the money (income/revenue/profit) of these companies, and then see the ratio of employees to money. Musk saw that list and noticed that Twitter had the lowest ratio.

To get the ratio metric up, they have to increase income or reduce employees.

This rationale, given by Musk (and I imagine VC friends) is all outlined in the discovery documents of the twitter vs musk legal case.

edits, i dug it out and made it a top level comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33467305

Also product market type. Building pure software and ads is different than building consumable hardware, data centers, etc

These numbers are misleading as many of these companies have an army of contractors that are not included in the official headcount numbers.

Google, for example, has more contractors than full-time employees, bringing the total employee count up to over 300,000

Reddit can barely stay up and constantly has weird bugs so they likely need more!

I've been using Reddit daily for a couple of years and have never seen downtime or any weird bugs. I use the mobile app, not sure if that's what you were referring to.

I have no doubt Elon expects to hire a bunch of people to replace those hire laid off.... but I suspect he wants different people.

Perhaps that's the point. It's not worth $44bn.

Twitter rinsed Musk on the way out, which I deeply respect considering his behaviour.

That will only be some salve for the employees losing their jobs, but hopefully their packages get some of that.

Pretty significant salve. I imagine the buyout netted most employees with stock hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Good to hear. Thanks.

> I imagine the buyout netted most employees with stock hundreds of thousands of dollars.

One of the theories knocking around last week was that these layoffs are just before a stock vesting was to happen, presumably in an attempt to avoid paying them.

Which is just hilarious. He can't do mass layoffs without 60 days notice as per WARN, so the idiot just bought another lawsuit against him.

But he didn't violate WARN because the employees are getting severance.... The warn act is an either/or

The lawsuit has already been filed against Twitter.

Should be quite easy if it is about the warn act then. You can read it yourself or one of the many very easy summaries.

https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/labor/wrongful-termination/warn...

Right, isn't it basically 60 days notice or 60 days severance?

However, that theory was proven false. Today is Friday and vesting was Tuesday.

I find it very odd that people keep mentioning it despite it not panning out, and not sure what to make of it.

Out of honest curiosity, what was your intent for bringing it up?

> I find it very odd that people keep mentioning it despite it not panning out, and not sure what to make of it.

Has anyone confirmed that the stock vests actually happened? Or did they get postponed whilst the layoffs where being organised? Haven't seen anything either way.

And I don't think it's that odd to consider that a man well known for flaunting the law would flaunt the law on this as well.

I haven't seen any screenshots of pay stubs to verify it. Given that it was a conspiracy theory to begin with and there is no confirmation to follow up, my assumption is that no, it did not happen.

Elsewhere it has been announced that laid off employees are getting quite generous Severance packages, so this would be out of line with that.

Depends on how you value the company. Twitter is very overvalued if you look at accounting & finances more than influence and popularity and hype.

Consider revenue and income (losses) and Twitter doesn't look good at all, they look horrible. They don't have that many employees, but they must be very very highly compensated and concentrated in very high cost areas. Otherwise the company is wasting serious money somewhere else, because to lose money on $5B/yr revenue with 7500 employees year after year in a business that's as high margin as pure software is incredibly terrible performance.

The finance folks have this term: "Intangible Assets", it affects the valuation big time.

Market cap has always been a bullshit metric. It's not liquid.