I’m pretty sure that in the world of online advertising that counts as “engagement” and they charge the rubes extra.
It’s “agile” development, clearly. 
It depends on the cuts. If you are cutting excessive management and deadweight, zero-marginal-productivity employees, then yes, you can improve productivity. Small, high powered teams can be way more effective than large teams with some deadweight employees dragging it down. The Mythical Man Month should be required reading for those who think that more people always equals more productivity.
I’m not saying that’s what is happening at Twitter - I have no idea. But in general, cutting back and going lean after a period of extreme growth followed by stagnation can be exactly the right thing to do. Shrinking the size of teams, if it means removing the weakest members, is often the right thing to do after a long period of growth,
Twitter added 2500 employees just in 2021. They doubled their head count between between 2019 and 2022. It’s hard for any company to absorb that many employees so fast. If it wasn’t done extremely well, it’s entirely possible that a lot of those employees weren’t productive.
Maybe instead of asking how Twitter is going to fall apart with only 2500 employees, you might ask what the hell the other 5,000 had been doing, because Twitter has been a fairly stagnant product for a long time, both in terms of feature growth and stock growth, It has been the worst performing of all the big social media companies by a mile, was barely profitable, and was ripe for something to be done. 2500 employees is only a few hundred less than what Twitter had way back in the dark ages of…checks notes…2017. I suspect Twitter can survive on that just fine.
On another note, I was listening to the All-In podcast, and they mentioned that the biggest ‘get’ from the Twitter acquisition may be its database. They were saying that language models like ChatGPT will be commodified because they aren’t that hard to build. The real value is going to be in the training data, and the companies that have huge databases of data critical to indistries and vertical markets will have specialized AIs fine-tuned with their proprietary data to bring extra value, They are the ones whomcan maintain a competitive advantage. They mentioned the biggest winners from that will be the big cloud providers like Google and Amazon, Meta, Twitter, Tiktok, and other huge social media companies, Due to its nature, Twitter collects data at a furious rate.
The rumors about Musk using Twitter to go after Paypal may be true:
If we could put hatred of Musk aside for a minute, imagine the value of Twitter being able to allow users to transfer payments to each other, or for Twitter to be able to pay vendors on your behalf. Content providers will have a built-in ‘Patreon’ style monetization system that doesn’t require their users to go offsite and log in to a 3rd party just to reward content or subscribe. Twitter could also become an external payment provider like Paypal. And the system can also be used to broker micropayments, fixing a substantially flawed paywall environment for media.
As someone who has considered making paid content but is daunted by the minimum requirements and algorithmic foibles of Youtube, this could be an exciting development.
I once wrote a course on Internet marketing for a multinational software corporation. As one small part of the course, I mentioned the exciting potential of microtransactions, in which site visitors could easily use a website to pay small amounts of money.
This was in late 1998.
Yes, microtransactions are an exciting possibility. They’re hardly a new idea. I see no sign at all that Elon Musk is likely to make them work in a way that nobody else has figured out how to do in the past quarter century.
The problem is determining where the dead weight is. IME, it’s the biggest deadweight of them all that ends up in charge of making that determination. (And somehow, they never cut themselves.)
If you have “no idea” whether the cuts at Twitter were made intelligently or capriciously and without vision, it’s because you weren’t paying attention to all of the evidence.
To be fair, apparently neither is Musk.
So…Venmo?
ETA: I just realized that Paypal own Venmo. Hmm.
I must object to this bizarre misrepresentation. That is not at all the point of the book. The point it makes is that when a single development project with a single deliverable runs late, adding more people is unlikely to help and will probably make it even later. A second point is that because of dependencies in an integrated development project, certain activities are inherently serialized and cannot be run in parallel.
This is completely different than the need for adequate staffing in a large organization that has large numbers of different activities that are mostly or entirely independent, or the inherent need for adequate staffing on any individual large project. IIRC there are 10,000 employees at SpaceX and around 6,000 at Tesla. Elmo knows enough about the businesses to know that they’re needed – he hasn’t fired three-quarters of them. He doesn’t seem to know the first thing about Twitter, and is refusing to listen to those who do.
But Twitter might be in a unique position there. It has a massive user base, and a mechanism for linking people to content. It can also be done in parallel with a newspaper’s paywall - you can have the API pay a microtransaction to a media company when a twitter blue user reads an article behind the paywall, while maintaining the paywall for all other content and other users.
I think only Facebook might have had the capacity and size to do this, or maybe Instagram or Tiktok, but they never seemed interested just like previous Twitter. The obvious company to have tried this is Google, but for whatever reason they never went there.
Maybe it won’t work. I don’t know. Maybe media companies won’t buy in. But with Twitter there is at least a clear technical path for achieving this at scale.
Yes, but there are several reasons. One is the transient reason you mention: in the short term the training and supervision costs outweigh the value a new team member can bring. But the other is that when scoping a project you simply can’t cut the time in half by doubling the number of people. Adding people increases all sorts of overhead, and at some point you hit diminishing returns.
A project scoped for one year with 50 people cannot be done in a month with 600 people. Productivity does not scale linearly with head count. That’s one of the points in the book.
IMHO, what Elon has is an issue similar to the “Nobel disease”
In essence, a guy like Elon can be very smart, but fail to think critically.
Unique? Really? You realize that Twitter is the seventeenth largest global social media platform, right? Facebook has 3 billion active monthly users; Twitter has 400 million. Why doesn’t that mean that there are many other companies in much better positions to do this?
It’s not good enough to just be a ‘social media company’, it has to be one with the right audience and application. I don’t think Tiktok users do a lot of clicking on Wall Street Journal articles.
Services that pop up short form video ate probably not appropriate. Nor are Chinese or other foreign services.
That leaves a handful of big players, like I mentioned. Maybe throw in Apple and Microsoft, although to a certain extent they are platform locked - Apple more so than Microsoft. Twitter runs everywhere.
I don’t know if you’re missing my point or being deliberately obtuse. That statement is generally correct, with the key word there being “project” and the implication of a particular deliverable. Or as I just finished saying, “A second point is that because of dependencies in an integrated development project, certain activities are inherently serialized and cannot be run in parallel.” This is additional to the fact that adding people to a later project tends to make it later because it introduces both learning delays and exponentially increasing lines of communication.
All of this is true. For a project. But the functioning of a large enterprise is not “a project”. It’s a large and highly diversified set of functions that are all necessary but are only loosely connected if at all. Even Elmo acknowledges that his other businesses need many thousands of employees. Yet somehow he seems to think he can run Twitter practically alone.
Looks like Elon is going after all those freeloaders who use Twitter’s API to provide the hugely valuable services that have made Twitter as popular as it is today. As I understand it this would affect every interaction with Twitter from outside Twitter itself. Want to have Twitch tweet for you when you go live? Want to use IFTTT to automatically cross-post your insights to Twitter? Have a twitter bot that tweets a cool randomly generated image every couple hours? Are you a municipal mass transit service that would automatically tweet updates and delays? Get ready to cough up some dough. These features are what made Twitter as popular as it is and directly attacking them seems to me like the stupidest move imaginable, like if Google abruptly decided from now on you had to pay for each e-mail on Gmail. Unless the paid API price is extremely cheap I expect most of the folks who were using the free API will just shut down their projects and leave Twitter even less fun or useful as a result.
This might temporarily stop the disruptive bot operators, but I expect they’ll just switch to hijacking the web interface or spoofing official API calls to avoid having to pay money. The funniest thing is that a bot disruption will surely further crater the engagement numbers of the right wing cranks that are already whining about their reduced engagement.
website in german, possibly pay- or nagwalled:
long story short … TW was selling off office furniture and even used keyboards to raise some cash…,
… yet they have 1000s of top-of-the-range apple notebooks still with fired ex-workers - but nobody has an idea of who-has-what, as the relevant inventory-drone-people were fired (see the pattern, again?).
Same is true for company-credit-cards, 1000s of cel-phones, monitors etc…
Is anyone surprised by the “stupidest move imaginable” part? Just business as usual over at Elmo’s.
Of course when it all blows up in his face, Elmo will restore the status quo. This is called “agile development”.
It’s almost like that was the stupidest move imaginable! 
Yes, but here you see why Elon is a genius and you are not.
He can imagine even stupider moves.