>Buy a company, drastically reduce unnecessary expenses.

This famously works out very well for PE firms.

It seems very naive to assume Twitter was casually spending 1B/yr in "unnecessary expenses". Maybe the previous CEO/CTO was a baffling moron, but I tend to have more faith in people absent of evidence otherwise. I'm going to be surprised if Twitter is around in year - I'm just they have the capital to keep the lights on but it will be a very different story if advertisers start to abandon the platform because the adops infrastructure was gutted as an "unnecessary expense".

Weren’t they spending almost half a billion a year on r&d?

That usually just means regular engineering staff

Twitter has expenses of $5B per year.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TWTR/financials/

So just view this as "A 20% reduction in expenses". Doesn't seem quite to scary huh?

All those unnecessary expenses like content moderation and robust fault tolerant infrastructure.

It's an app for billionaires and journos to crank out viral memes, not a pacemaker. The world will be ok.

Not really the point here. If you spent tens of billions purchasing Twitter you presumably don’t want the world to be without it. You have a very active interest in making it a success.

Unless you're so beyond caring and vindictive that you're willing to do that just to screw over the shareholders who forced you to buy the company.

Screwing them over how, exactly? As far as I can tell most of the shareholders got cashed out at a valuation way above market. I'd love to be similarly "screwed over" given the opportunity.

Then that’s a sign Musk has absolutely lost it. Writing off tens of billions for petty revenge is insane.

(also the shareholders just cashed out, they don’t care)

From the buyer’s perspective the only result that matters is the profit.

Twitter going down occasionally wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

Or gigantic offices in expensive down town areas, all the coworkering space rent, food served at said office buildings, and personnel.

This was my thought. Or at least move HQ somewhere else. Although he’ll probably end up doing that anyway.

Except "content moderation" is a euphemism for banning accounts that e.g. question the effectiveness of the pfizer covid vaccine (which ended up being rather justified).

And team that communicates with advertisers for advertisers.

would have been smart if you bought it for a good deal.