"How quickly can you bring people on board when you're notorious for a culture of overwork and abuse?". I agree that could be a challenge but then again, he's gotten people onboard at his other companies where I've heard the work/life balance is awful as well.
"who's going to lend to you when you're massively in debt from an LBO and you can't provide more than "long term" promises that in six months the company can actually function?". Valid point in today's economic climate, but there have been countless examples of investors making risky bets repeatedly. Uber is a perfect example.
Needless to say, employees will do one of two things. Even very mediocre employees will demand high-end consultancy fees, and "rock-stars" or whatever you want to call them will demand factors of that, or they'll just avoid you like the plague. But frankly, after a relatively short period of time even the high pay won't justify coming back anymore.
And then the time will come to hire and your competitor will be able to hire great people (with intimate knowledge of your company's inner workings), and you won't be able to hire anyone for double the pay. And that's IF you can avoid your company suffering regular sabotage when firing people. People do stupid things when they get fired. Seriously. It's scary.
I'm not one to defend Musk's management practices, but I think the main idea motivating this purge (which may or may not be a correct idea) is that Twitter, specifically, does not need "rockstar" engineers anymore at all.
Sure, he'll take them if they kiss the ring and work for peanuts, but he wants people who follow orders and don't talk back. He's not unique here: all management everywhere always wants this wants this but, in some endeavors you have to tolerate people who aren't this way, either because you don't know the right orders to give, or just because they're the only talent that can get done what you need to get done. Twitter's main corporate priority at this point is keeping the lights on as cheaply as possible, since they have a huge nut of debt they they can't afford to service, and on top of it all revenue is down. Again, I'm not saying this situation is desirable for Twitter employees, users, management, advertisers, or ownership (or even Musk himself), but this is the situation.
https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159527086740295680...
So clearly mr. Musk thinks twitter needs rockstar engineers. I also find it extremely unlikely he paid anything less than a full year's wage for these 12 weeks.
Startup vs mature service codebases can be quite different in conplexity... getting engineers up to speed and ready to contribute on the latter can take much more time.
"Deep pockets" don't do anything on their own, especially not when no one believes in your company's ability to consistently fulfill its obligations to customers. You can hire engineers, sure, but how are you going to ramp them up when all of your engineering capacity is dedicated to keeping a small group of core services from falling over dead? How quickly can you bring people on board when you're notorious for a culture of overwork and abuse? You can borrow some money, sure, but who's going to lend to you when you're massively in debt from an LBO and you can't provide more than "long term" promises that in six months the company can actually function?