> What is he looking for, algorithm interview tricks like a quick sort or graph traversal?

This is so obviously not the point of the exercise that it feels like bad faith. I doubt he's firing anyone at this point. Just looking to see how does what and talk with them about their impact. The code examples are just to get the ball rolling. Basically everyone in leadership at twitter is gone, Musk needs to figure out who can be trusted to keep things from collapsing, not who to fire.