The floodgates were already wide open by the time Elon showed up at Twitter (in Nov 2022). Mass layoffs in tech started sometime in the fall. Microsoft laid off thousands in Oct 2022. Stripe did a similar number in early November. Facebook had the largest layoff in company history (11,000 people) the week after Twitter. Salesforce was the same week. Amazon laid off 10,000 a week after that.

So it wasn't really Twitter setting the trend. The company was simply reacting to the same market conditions as everyone else.