If a few days is enough time for a new leader to decide half of the workforce is redundant, then it's enough time for others to decide the leader is an idiot. You can't have it both ways.

From an article published last month seems that with or without Elon a lot of people were still getting fired.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/20/musk-tw...

Twitter as a public company was a money pit. Now is Elon's money pit.

Twitter's interest burden wasn't this ridiculous as a public company, and they make $1bil/quarter on average (well, they were before Musk ran away advertisers). When you say "money pit" I imagine investors dumping in cash to make up for low revenue, and this hasn't been the case for years.

Musk's purchase, as you may know, increased Twitter's interest burden, so now Twitter is losing $4mil/day.

In the absence of Musk holding the company hostage from April to November, yes, of course Twitter would have to make some cuts like so many others who've had a drop in revenue.

But there's no reason to believe they would have cut the estimated 50-55% that Elon has.

edit: And now there's impact of this decision: of those who didn't get cut, how many will decide this isn't a healthy environment to work in?

But it wasn't a few days. Musk and his team had half a year to analyse the existing company structure and made preparations. Furthermore, it has been admitted that Twitter had layoffs in the order of 25% already planned, but those were placed on hold during the transition period.

More fundamentally, there's something deeply misguided about anyone complaining about layoffs at any corporation which haemorrhages money the way Twitter has for many years. Quite simply, unless Twitter has a path towards financial viability, there would be no point in it having any employees at all.

Musk spent half the year trying to not purchase Twitter. Or is the thinking that he was simultaneously attempting to not own Twitter while devising the management strategy if he did?

Musk spent half the year trying to not purchase Twitter for 44 billion. What happened was that he (unluckily or foolishly, pick your poison) signed a watertight buy agreement just before the wider stock market experienced a crash. He did try to get out of the deal, but that's not the same as saying that owning Twitter is something he no longer wanted.

Disagreeing with someone's approach or saying you think it will have a terrible outcome is fine. What's weird is seeing major media publications looking at the first few days of a transition period and pronouncing that this is the way Twitter will now be. For instance, this is was the top Washington Post story a day ago[1]: "Advertisers fleeing, workers in fear: Welcome to Elon Musk’s Twitter" with the byline "The company was hailed for its welcoming and relaxed work environment. Elon Musk made that a relic of the past."

I mean, a month ago Musk wasn't even go to buy Twitter. You'd think we'd want to wait at least a few weeks (if not much longer) before deciding that what Musk is attempting to do during the first few days is definitely going to be the way Twitter will be handled going forward.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20221104220914/https://www.washi...

I mean, if you lay off half of a company and make the rest work double time, "terrible" is not the most inappropriate adjective for an external observer to use.

The Guardian had a live feed of Twitter drama. It's beyond ridiculous and reflects the unhealthy relationship between journalists and Twitter. Compare it to the situation at Meta, where Mark Zuckerberg is calmly destroying his vastly larger and more influential company with almost no media attention.

I agree about the unhealthy relationship, but I think you're understating the media lens on Meta: there's been a running column on their (slow) implosion in the NYT for at least a year now. The recent "legs" affair was the tech news story for a day or two.

Twitter gets disproportionate attention because of the relationship you mentioned, but also because what's happening to it is pretty unprecedented. It stands to reason that it'll be the main topic in tech journalism for the next few weeks, particularly as Musk continues his attention seeking behavior (and journalists continue to feed on it).

I think that's because the media like twitter, and everyone hates facebook and hopes Zuck succeeds in destroying it.

> with almost no media attention.

Wow, that's not my experience of reading the tech media.

The war must not be going well in Ukraine.

For Russia? It isn't.

Oh you think things are great at a company that just did a 50% layoff haphazardly?

What is your evidence that it was haphazard?

The fact that they're starting to realize their fuckup (among many other reasons such as not giving advanced warning as so legally required etc).

https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1589075543420325888

So by your definition, a fuckup is when something isn't done absolutely perfectly? Let's be realistic for a moment here; surely it would be WAY more remarkable if a company laid off 3,700 employees and exactly zero mistakes were made.

What level of error would be sufficient to warrant the haphazard descriptor? Two percent? One percent?

A company like Twitter is complex, and it's very likely that some number of people are important in a way which cannot be seen from a top-down view. Hence error correction. It's a good thing. I see it as a healthy sign that Twitter management are identifying and rectifying their mistakes so quickly.

why? it's a major media takeover with a lot of big names/drama invovled same scale as the at&t/warner media deal it's one of the top stories in the WSJ too

Media doesn't exist to report news, it exists to harm their enemies. Musk is on the wrong side of the media.

This is a description of virtually all behavior visible online today. While it is true that the same poison infects the media, they are actually less affected on average than the general population. Of course, in a well-functioning world, this kind of infection would be near-zero among journalists.