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Elon Musk reportedly wants to lay off 75% of Twitter’s staff
- koyanisqatsi 4y agoWhat would happen if Twitter had an extended outage because of these cuts? Or is he not planning to reduce the number of engineers?
- david927 4y agoIt doesn't require 7,500 people to keep the lights on.
- koyanisqatsi 4y agoYou'd think so but the reality is probably a little bit more complicated for a legacy software codebase like Twitter.
- 6510 4y agojust delete everything and charge a fee for keeping ones blog posts. Do it in waves, oldest stuff first so that people can pay more often. Make each wave more expensive so that holes appear if one doesn't pay. Newer stuff should be considered more valuable. Make a desktop client that preserves the tweets for everyone who doesn't want to pay. Repackage the company so that it makes an attractive purchase. Make a Tesla Twitter auto and replace the twitter logo with a tiny automobile. Show videos of spaceX launches and Musk Today at the top of every page. That way you can load the content for each page and only have to pull in the specifics after the audience watched 3-5 minutes of it. Plenty of time for the slow swarm of desktop clients to find and serve the content. Make an elaborately advertised but minimal effort to oppress alternative clients and have happy little accidents in the protocol so that undesired content is "accidentally" distributed unless it is top priority not to. Purchase and merge with Reddit, eventually buy Facebook from meta. Call it TwiReFa. Dedicated hardware for the desktop client. Offer a free Tesla auto mesh network internet where internet refers to TwiReFa access only. Give Tesla's their own TwiReFa account so that they can talk with other autos to negotiate deals. ...wait.... did I say that out loud?
- querulous 4y agoyeah but if you fire 5500 there's little hope that the 2k you keep are the right 2k. nor are they likely to stick around to see things through
- version_five 4y agoIs there any objective way to define and measure productivity at companies like Twitter and estimate how few people they could get away with? The story implies they have 4/3×5600 employees which I could easily be convinced is a lot to do what they do. Likewise with Google and Facebook (who both give the impression of doing way more research and product development so you'd expect more people) - it's certainly plausible that the my could run their core business with way fewer people. Obviously the status quo will push against any changes, it would be interesting to see some information on what a reasonable size is
- metadat 4y agoI don't think Mussk will keep running the status quo. Entire departments and long-standing projects will be axed, and sights set on one or more new major milestones. Logically and practically speaking, the cuts will be focused on retaining employees perceived or known to be loyal to Master, and then backfill hiring folks who will work "really hard" without questioning too much or complaining. The relative "openness" Twitter enjoys today will transition to secrecy and proprietary-ness, similar to the way Tesla and Space-X both operate.
- throwawaylinux 4y agoWhat is all the "openness" that twitter is able to enjoy today?
- LegitShady 4y agodorsey once went on rogan but he brought a lawyer.
- dirtyid 4y agoMakes me wonder what's the largest web / service operated by the fewest amount of people?
- frogperson 4y agoI'm not sure if it's still true, but Craigslist used to be run with 8 people.
- eesmith 4y agoIts Wikipedia entry says "By April 2000, there were nine employees working out of Newmark's San Francisco apartment" and says there were 50 employees in 2017.
- rogerkirkness 4y agoSignal is 40 people and approaching 100M users.
- bergenty 4y agoAmazing. No cushy jobs there.
- barbazoo 4y ago40 people? Why does it take 40 people to run a ... no just kidding.
- tinyhouse 4y agoDo they have revenue? When they make $5B/year with 40 people we can compare it to Twitter. Most people in tech companies are not there to run the core product.
- rogerkirkness 4y agoIt's a non profit, and they do sustain themselves with donations at this point. I thought we were comparing team to impact but I agree re: business functions.
- almog 4y agoThis is how I read it: Elon Musk (is yet again) seeking new ways to withdraw from the deal, this time by convincing share holders/employees that he might wreck even more havoc if the deal goes through.
- raydiatian 4y agoSeriously. This is 180° on his prior stance of “Twitter won’t be hArDcOrE engineering like SpaceX or Tesla.” Just when you want to like a guy he behaves like an abject doofus.
- heliophobicdude 4y agoWhy would shareholders care if they are all selling it to him?
- almog 4y agoWell, I could have been more clear: I imagine that Such headline could start mass exodus of Twitter employees looking for new jobs and leaving the company to avoid being fired by Musk if/when recession hits. If people start leaving to a degree that interfere with Twitter operations, all while the case is still in court (even though Musk offered to dismiss it and settle the deal while Twitter shareholders were wary of it being another trick), I imagine that Musk could try and argue that while he was trying to close the deal, the company has deteriorated and thus he's eligible to withdraw. This is just a hypothesis based on myself being cynical and obviously not quite familiar with what legal ground such ploy might have.
- WheelsAtLarge 4y agoAny Twitter employees? What are your thoughts? Any Tesla/SpaceX employees? What do you think?
- badinsie 4y ago80% of twitter users are bots. probably half of those are controlled by orgs similar to CIA Mockingbird. i imagine this is elon trying to get twitter staff to revolt and cancel the deal?
- crazygringo 4y agoJust for actual reference, here's how expenses broke down for '22 Q2 [1]: Three Months Ended June 30, 2022 - In thousands ----------------------------------------------- Cost of revenue - $540.676 Research and development - $454,859 Sales and marketing - $308,301 General and administrative - $216,586 --------------------------------------- Total costs and expenses - $1,520,422 So just running Twitter is 35%, R&D is another 30%, sales/marketing is 20%, while general/administrative is 14%. If running Twitter includes a lot of server/infrastructure costs on top of headcount, and general/administrative includes a lot of rent and overhead, then maybe by totally cutting R&D and sales and marketing you could cut 75% of employees but Twitter would still run? [1] https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2022/q2/Final_Q2'22_Earnings_Release.pdf https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2022/q2...
- streetcat1 4y agoHis plan (and I am not joking), is to try and run the company using AI.
- WheelsAtLarge 4y agoIf you're buying Twitter to maximize value as soon as possible then reducing cost to the bone and maximizing earnings would make sense. It's how many private equity funds would maximize value to sell it at the earliest point. Musk is different. He wants to maximize value by innovation. It's very risky. I would say that Marketing and Sales are probably the most important right now. R&D is next, since Musk wants to change its course. Reducing them to the bone will probably backfire. Reducing head count is probably imperative since it reduces cost plus new hires will have a different mindset that's in line with what Musk wants to accomplish. He'll probably replace most top management ASAP. I suspect that we'll be hearing a lot of bad news from Twitter from people that get laid off and feel it was unfair. He'll also try to fully automate (thru AI) as he tried with robotics in Tesla - but backfired. Full automation is hard there are just too many variables. He'll see that and reverse course. I expect there will be a lot of drama coming from the company but ultimately Twitter will change course. It will be interesting. He's making sure he has total control over the company so what ever he decides to do will be done without opposition. People that think he will ruin the company are wrong. It will take time but the investors will get a very good return on their investment.
- raydiatian 4y agoWhat I see here (especially with the recent Tesla worth 4 trillion statement) is boldfaced Elon going “not for my money.” He’s literally trying to coerce every cow in his gravitational neighborhood to pay for this too keep himself out of pocket. He doesn’t want it. It’s so fucking ridiculous.
- fzeroracer 4y agoEven if you assume that somehow 50%ish of employees do literally nothing at Twitter, the people that remain will still have much more work shoveled on their plate for the same pay. Actions like these are a great way to completely kill a company because no one wants to jump to a ship that's currently on fire.
- cplusplusfellow 4y agoI would join Twitter after a 75% culling if the stock grants and pay were proportional with the risk taken. Culling 75% from sales and marketing departments is easy. It’ll be harder in engineering.
- TrackerFF 4y agoAs far as hypothetical situations go - what would happen if the remaining 25% followed pursuit and jump ship in protest/solidarity?
- saos 4y agoWhy does Twitter have 7500 staff seriously?
- polski-g 4y agoRunning a clustered postgres database takes a lot of manpower!
- thinkingemote 4y agoIn the chat logs of the recent lawsuit it seems he explains the reasons why. Compared to other social media companies Twitter gets in less income per employee. The idea is to make the ratio similar to other companies then make it public again. So firing people and increasing income is the aim. I doubt 75% is accurate however and I think that Twitter blue is a bad idea for income. The logs suggest video, music etc giving most revenue cut of any platform.
- logicalmonster 4y agoI believe that Twitter is 2 top-down edicts away from drastically improving their efficiency with fewer employees. 1) Dramatically reducing the size and scope of the speech rules they implement to something akin to "If the speech is legal in a country, then it's legal on Twitter" would reduce technical and operating complexity. Between developing the technical infrastructure to automate restrictions and bans, to having staff trying to judge all sorts of petty bickering between groups trying to take advantage of the rules to report and ban their rivals, I feel like Twitter is wasting a large amount of resources on stuff that they shouldn't even be trying to do. A smaller team could focus on the essentials: removing illegal content and responding quickly to actual issues of safety (stuff like death threats that might pose an imminent harm). Hell, I feel like Twitter is so involved in trying to get involved in Internet drama and disputes that they currently do a mediocre job on actually dealing with genuine safety issues. 2) I realize that the infrastructure to run a site as large as Twitter isn't trivial to maintain, but for a site that has so few real user-facing features, it's kind of surprising that their technical team is so large. If somebody just laser-focused them on a clearly defined set of important features and policies for the business to execute on, it seems like Twitter should be able to move much faster on the handful of things that are core to their business.
- greendude29 4y ago> I feel like There's your problem. You're feeling more than realizing. Twitter's most complex problems aren't infrastruture; it's adhering to various national laws on language while trying to keep hate speech off as well (they are doing a terrible job at this of course). But saying that they should just allow "free speech" is an extreme oversimplification and lacks an understanding of jurisdictions outside the US.
- logicalmonster 4y agoI'm not sure why your word-salad was a necessary response given that I explicitly said that they should remove illegal content where required.
- 4y ago