While you're right that it's unlikely, I think you're half right and half not.

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.

You do need to take all the support costs for staff into account. Buildings, network capacity, hr staff, managers, software licenses, hardware, benefits, fica/etc. It's not unreasonable to assume 30% extra for every head than their salary.

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.

Yeah as a reference - I do a lot of this type of planning for non-equity employees and our number is 37% right now (site costs + US payroll taxes & benefits + hardware + incidentals).

Thanks for the reference. I've heard numbers thrown out but never anything asserted as an actual researched number.

Yeah the org I work with has an interesting setup where the employees are employed by the parent organization and then we have dozens of projects as legal entities but no staff on their books. So to calibrate the passthrough cost that we charge those projects, we do a big analysis every quarter of all of our expenses for tax, 401k matching, 'staff development', non-capital hardware purchases, health/dental/vision, life insurance, etc. etc. So it's a pretty robust number. For highly paid employees over ~$200k, it's probably more like 34% since a bunch of that stuff doesn't scale with salary, but lower employees are closer to 40% so the blended rate covers a "typical" company.

Ah, fair, good point. 30% is what I've heard as well, but I did forget about that when commenting. I do still think that 300k is pretty generous even for engineers, which won't be the entirety of the cuts and so the average would be lower.