And that's absolutely his fault, but for crossing the news media and pissing off his advertisers, not cutting engineers. The site is still running fine. If he had just made the engineering cuts and kept his mouth shut he would be making a pile of money on the acquisition right now.

> If he had just made the engineering cuts and kept his mouth shut he would be making a pile of money on the acquisition right now.

Twitter cost $44 billion to acquire. The employee layoffs save maybe $1 or $2 billion per year. Where do you see the pile of money coming from?

You can keep a preexisting service running for a while with a skeleton crew. But what are the long-term prospects for that service? And when will the skeleton crew get burned out?

Companies like Twitter are valued at a huge multiple of earnings. e.g. META is 33x earnings. So if you cut costs by $2 billion a year, that would come back as $66 billion of equity value. It's not exactly that simple, but close enough.

As for your other questions, it's coming up on 2 years now. I'd say that's too long to be running on autopilot.

> Companies like Twitter are valued at a huge multiple of earnings. e.g. META is 33x earnings.

Meta is not a company like Twitter. Yes, they're both social media services, but otherwise the comparison is not apt. Meta/Facebook is in the top 10 companies by market cap, has about $117 billion in revenue per year, and has been hugely profitable for a very long time, unlike Twitter, which has barely made a profit ever.

> So if you cut costs by $2 billion a year, that would come back as $66 billion of equity value.

Um, no, sorry, that's extremely questionable, based on a false comparison, and if it were that easy, Twitter would have already done it before the acquisition.

Yes, in a free-market democracy we want to blame others for pissing off the wrong powerful people. In this instance, by not allowing the said powerful to dictate company policy lest they threaten to ruin the businesses of those who do business with that company. The pressure campaign was brought by another entity. Though, pressure campaigns always require MSM cooperation.

Yes that is specifically how a free-market democracy with freedom of speech and of the press works. Organizations are allowed to have political agendas and take any lawful action to advance them. In what human society that has ever existed does pissing off the wrong powerful people not have consequences? And usually ones much worse than losing ad revenue.

It isn't. The central pillar of democracy is a press that follows the guidelines and ethics traditionally associated with the institution. A press that deviates from those ethics and guidelines is no longer such an institution except in-name. Without the traditional institution, democracy either fails or was always a false promise. Depending on one's view as to whether or not the Press ever adhered to such principles.

I'd argue that a Press that that acts as a political bully and overwhelmingly a propaganda organ is the most powerful branch of government, given that the government can be almost wholly corraled by the Press. The Press is unelected, which implies that an unmoored Press reveals an inherently undemocratic society.

Case in point: as we saw with the 2019 riots, the Press has the ability to incite riots wherein people are murdered, grow and contioue those riots at will, and protect people from being widely arrested or prosecuted for those riots (especially those who incited them).

One cannot resolve such a Press institution, which has the ability to threaten murder with impunity, and a free-market democracy.

In-fact, the pressure campaign in question bears the deeply felt context of and ability to threaten those recent riots.

The Press is not the same as an individual, in terms of the ability to resolve its rights with democracy. Just as an individaul is not an institution.

In order for a Press to maintain its central role in democracy and therefore do its part in maintaining democracy, it has to adhere to principles which keep it from threatening the populace and other institutions. Especially when in the midst of advertising its power over lawless physical destruction.

The site is not running fine. Have you tried using twitter on mobile web? Go to twitter.com right now with your phone and try to play a couple videos. That's to say nothing of how bad the comment quality has become with paid accounts.

And the advertisers didn't just leave because of Musk's public comments. Musk didn't just fire engineers. He also fired the teams responsible for managing the accounts of major brands and keeping them happy (every business that sells ads employs account managers for good reason).

Twitter is absolutely doomed because Elon Musk nuked its entire business with no plan for how to make money. The company is now wildly unprofitable due to the collapse of ad revenue combined with its obligation to service the debt Elon saddled Twitter with through the acquisition. As soon as Musk gets bored of Twitter he'll sell it off to some C-tier media conglomerate for pennies on the dollar, which will conclude probably the single biggest individual financial blunder (measured by dollar-value-destruction) in the history of capitalism.

The value of the business tanked due to Musks poor decisions. The value of twitter didnt drop because a worker didnt add more unit tests. Actually not doing it may be the reason it’s not bankrupt yet. If bro wouldnt have run his mouth like the baby he is it would have skyrocketed.

It's still pretty funny seeing people cope about Twitter. Turns out you don't need that many engineers for a feature complete product.

Those in power seizing control of a product once it’s created is a timeless story. See the Prague clock tower or Daedalus the Labyrinth builder who was imprisoned there by King Minos. Not a new story, or a particularly wise business decision.

I'm not an engineer, but...Twitter doesn't seem to be doing all that well.

That might be so, but are those engineers being worked into the ground to make it happen?

Make what happen? Apply security patches? Engineers aren't needed to push the electrons around the computers, that happens automatically.

I don’t have much experience (4 years as a full time dev; FAANG and some medium sized startups) but honestly this is the truth. Some of the projects at these companies are so over bloated and redundant that if a company wanted to save money, they can easily fire a lot of folks, keep the necessary teams for the money making products and go into maintenance mode to keep the existing cash cows going

Yes that's exactly why their value dropped. Because value isn't the present value of the business. It's the future competitiveness and innovation they bring to the table. Twitter has none of that anymore. There's no hope for growth, a new product, etc.

Exactly why the value dropped was advertiser pullout due to a partisan pressure campaign. Which was not a free campaign in terms of political currency.

He's definitely doing a good job showing that the easiest way to create a $10B company is to start with a $43B company, that's for sure.

> it would have skyrocketed

How so?

Costs were cut, but cutting costs doesn't do anything to increase gross revenue, nor does it do anything to increase the user base.

You can't just cut your way to making a profit on a $44 billion investment.