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Notes -
Did they ?
Twitter was well known for the being the most do-nothing company in big tech for some time before 2022. My friend (deliberately) joined there in 2021, and did zero work. I mean it. He wanted to start a startup, so he he built his own product full time and free-loaded as a Twitter employee. Yes, he likely would've been laid off even without Elon's interference, but any other org would've kicked him out within the first 2 months.
Twitter at it's first user peak (around 2015) had 3500 employees. In 2022, It had 7500 without any additional user acquisition. In 2024, it has 2800. Twitter was a bloated company in dire need of layoffs. Twitter was totally fine in 2015, and it's only down 20% employees from that period. Twitter's work life balance is well known to have gone to shit. If every employee is working 20% more time, the effective hours worked haven't changed much.
A lot of twitter projects were 'growth projects'. They were trying to expand to other markets, build new products and worked on optimization. All of these people got fired. Some deserved it, but many were already net-positives for the company from a revenue standpoint. Eg: 2% code improvement = $2 million saved for $400k spent on an engineer. That sort of thing.
Elon has separated the AI org out of twitter. XAI already has 100 employees, and will quickly scale up to a few hundred. It may not be counted as part of twitter, but pre-elon twitter was trying to do exactly this under their cortex [1] org.
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