At least one source I found says the average salary of Twitter employees is $97k. (US only total compensation is closer to $300k with an average of $270k. But a lot of that is probably stock options which now must be paid in cash).

So I would imagine the total savings are closer to $250m compared to when Twitter was public but maybe a lot more in savings vs what Twitter would have bled considering the stock options portion of the compensation would have had to have been cash.

> a lot of that is probably stock options which now must be paid in cash

I won't say that's not a big deal, but it's a one-time cost. Paying $500k today to save $300k / year is an excellent move for Twitter - assuming, of course, that Musk is correct in his estimation that the employees cut were not contributing to the company's revenue.

Although level.fyi is probably biased to high earners who post their salaries and has less data for non-engineers.

Why didn't Ford and Boeing, companies with a much better footing than Musk, simply move into those sectors (EVs and re-usable rockets, respectively) and mop up all those subsidies for themselves?

Tesla did lobby, quite a bit. They've also been angry about the subsidies that require cars to be union made.

Tesla was already a successful, innovative electric car company before it started lobbying like a regular car company.

All of the risk that paid off (what makes a businessman a good businessman) was done in the early days when he invested 6.5 million that he turned into billions.

He didn't create the company, and he didn't create the Roadster.

He deserves credit for believing in the David and turning it into Goliath (of EVs), even if government subsidies helped.

I support the government subsidizing clean energy, electric cars and cheaper access to space and I think it's hypocritical to turn around and shit on the companies that take advantage of those subsidies and do exactly the thing that they are meant to encourage.

FWIW I have no idea how finances work, just can imagine Elon getting into weird loopholes.

SpaceX is privately-held, but has raised billions of dollars from dozens of investors, so that won’t fly neither.

Why not, when twitter's operational costs are ~5.5 billion and you are reportedly laying off 50-75% of staff?

And trolling does not help either. The sink thing was trolling and between that and layouts, the remaining people will be dysfunctional for quite a long time.

As you note, it's really hard to cut deep enough to cover $1B in interest payments without cutting stuff that ends up hurting your revenue. As Twitter cuts their R&D, they're leaving themselves open to missing out on the future. Should Twitter have continued to invest in Vine? Well, the benefit of hindsight says "yes" given TikTok's success. As much as everyone is making fun of Meta's metaverse plans, it's certainly possible it'll be important in the future. We really just don't know. I remember everyone saying the iPhone was a silly toy and people would want to keep their Blackberries and Windows Mobile devices with keyboards. We can literally see the future and say, "nah, that'll never happen."

If Musk cuts engineering too much, does the service just become mediocre?

As you say, it's hard to cut deep enough to come up with $1B.

Half right: Cash comp is unlikely to be that high, and that's the GP's point. They could only very optimistically cut payroll to cover $1-2 billion.

Half wrong: Cash comp isn't the whole story, you have to use total comp as equity the acquisition of Twitter also included employee equity plans, so as they vest the company will owe employees a cash value. I'm not sure if Twitter RSUs are dollar denominated (fixed cost, $X/quarter) or share denominated (e.g.: Y shares/quarter). The latter will be more costly because Musk paid a premium.

Half again as wrong: total comp is not the all-in cost of an FTE. Benefits and other associated costs, I don't know enough about payroll to even begin to estimate that.

Also most of those folks on levels also get compensated with stock or equity, so it's more than base. Going private means that goes away and their comp also gets slashed. Is he going to take it back public, what beyond base does twitter offer as comp.