A lot of tech companies have bloat in the form of AI ethics people, DEI people and so on. They need to go. But Musk probably hurt twitter a lot in short term by firing a lot of engineers and making it a place that made people unhappy.
These do actually have a proper job. They do ethics laundering for the tech companies and are very valuable.
Introduced failing ideas that made him ridiculous world wide, ... to finally hire a CEO.
And now he is using the platform to influence elections and events - free for all. Sure.
Not to mention HR managers.
I have seen situations where there are 10% engineers to 50% "assorted management" in tech companies. (the remaining 40% being a mix of sales and support staff such as office management).
When you cut the company to 1/3 and keep foreigners because of their visa status, nobody is gonna say anything of course, but that says a lot about you!
I do not believe that half the company was just "overstaff". I have been in situations where 1 manager had 1 reporter, but they were single cases - it can't be spread to the entire company and nobody does anything.
That... you care about people regardless if they are foreigners and that you try to help those that would have the most problems if they were let go, especially as these problems are a consequence of your hiring of them?
I'm not familiar with the story, but from the way you presented it it sounds like a proper thing to do.
EDIT: not taking Musk's side, just pointing out the issue with the parent's argument.
He had a point there though: He said that there seem to be "3 managers 'managing' one engineer", and I believe this is a common problem in the industry. VC-funded startups are terribly overstaffed and over-inflated.