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As someone with a slight amount of tech knowledge (10 years of experience) my reading of the situation was that he was totally correct that there was a lot of fat that needed to be cut - but the problem was that the fat was heavily contributing to keeping twitter on one side of the culture war even as they let technical debt accumulate to absurd levels. He is facing an avalanche of negative press and stories because not only has he threatened to make Twitter a place where dissenting opinions can exist at all, but also because he just made a whole swathe of social justice jobs evaporate. Even if they don't get explicit about it, I believe that activists understand on a basic level that someone demonstrating you don't need to pay their cultural commissars in money or do-nothing sinecures is a real, serious threat to their movement and way of life. If you're a diversity officer who helps people deal with micro-aggressions at Meta, you REALLY don't want to see Elon fire everyone with a job that looks remotely like yours and then have the company do better as a result - so you lean on the advertisers and government connections, make sure the legacy media savages them, make them an acceptable target for mockery, etc.
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