He also cut 80% of the traffic... And the fact that it kept running with him willy nilly pulling network cables is a credit to the work they did to make it resilient to failure.

Source on pre/post traffic numbers?

I don't have it at hand, but if you look at all the products and apis they cut - and then all the users who abandoned it in the first few months, I think that's how this was derived.

It was significantly worst, could not keep ads, became overrun by bots. The quality went down significantly. And earnings too.

I don't understand this take. Do people think engineers go in to work to turn handcranks to keep the machines running? It's actually a credit to the automation built by the engineers he fired that it kept running!

At the time I joked that like Chaos Monkey, we should have an "Elon Monkey" to "fire" arbitrary people by sending them on mandatory vacations with no connectivity to see what falls over.

the people that built the infrastructure that runs twitter left before he showed up. most of it was written by a half dozen people that left around 2016.