I think it's about politics. Lots of Twitter employees are left-wing, and they hate Elon. They were probably creating trouble for him. The loyalty pledge is the typical Elon approach of taking sudden and drastic action in response to a problem.

Why would you assume it's about politics instead of the whole "shitty asshole boss who has open contempt for you and your coworkers, who is promising to massively overwork you, who might fire you any moment and has already fired half your peers"? I think you'd have to be completely insane to want to work there right now.

Well, there was twitter drama that preceded elon's buying twitter, and there was clearly a lot of employees pushing their politics using it. Hell, we got recent thread about how Japanese Twitter changed the moment the "moderation" got kicked out.

But yeah, asshole boss gonna be #1 cause here with literally anything else being barely related.

You're putting a lot of stock into this idea that the root cause is some left-leaning employees. I don't buy it whatsoever. But even if we assumed it true (it's not), if you bought a company where the employees hate you and you immediately start antagonising them doesn't that indicate that you were the problem?

Something being typical for Elon does not make it intelligent move and does not make it not destructive.

I didn't say otherwise :-)

Weird how twitter is running just fine huh

I think any reasonably well engineered system of this scale should run fine for a few weeks without ops, barring any weird Murphy's Law madness. Staying up for two days is not much of an achievement. Perhaps the real test is still ongoing.