Report: Elon Musk Plans To Make Twitter Profitable By Firing 75% Of The Staff

Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter is likely to close within a week. The deadline before the Court of Chancery wakes back up is October 28th, which is rapidly approaching. I’ve discussed in the past ways in which I think Musk could actually be good for Twitter, but it requires having a pretty basic understanding of a bunch of things he has, to date, shown little capacity (or interest) in understanding. One thing that has been widely expected is that he was going to fire a bunch of people. He’s hinted at this repeatedly, suggesting that the company was bloated with people who weren’t star performers, and that he wanted to clean house.

But there are reasonable ways to clean house, and then there are ways to clean the house by burning it down. There are indications that Elon’s plan is the latter. The Washington Post has an article, saying that those briefed on his plans note that he’s intending to fire approximately 75% of the employees at the company:

Musk told prospective investors in his deal to buy the company that he planned to get rid of nearly 75 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 workers, whittling the company down to a skeleton staff of just over 2,000.

If you read the various text messages that various influencer-wannabes sent Musk, many of them talked about cleaning house, so this is not that surprising. There is also a weird (and false) impression that Twitter employees don’t really do much work, and therefore the site would function fine with a greatly reduced staff, but we’ll see how that goes in actual practice.

It does, also, seem a bit odd for Musk to keep claiming that his number one focus is on ridding the site of spam and bots, and then immediately turning around and ditching 5,500 employees. When those people walk out the door, many of them will take important institutional knowledge with them, including the knowledge of how the site actually functions, and what it takes to actually fight spam and bots — and also the challenges and trade-offs associated with Musk’s previously proposed “solutions” (such as verifying everyone).

As the Washington Post article notes, in talking to someone who used to work on these issues at Twitter, simply kicking the majority of the employees out the door is likely a recipe for a security disaster on the site (which is notable, given how Musk tried to use Mudge’s questionable whistleblower complaint about security problems in Twitter’s infrastructure as a wedge to get out of the deal).

The impact of such layoffs would likely be immediately felt by millions of users, said Edwin Chen, a data scientist formerly in charge of Twitter’s spam and health metrics and now CEO of the content-moderation start-up Surge AI. He said that while he believed Twitter was overstaffed,the cuts Musk proposed were “unimaginable” and would put Twitter’s users at risk of hacks and exposure to offensive material such as child pornography.

“It would be a cascading effect,” he said, “where you’d have services going down and the people remaining not having the institutional knowledge to get them back up, and being completely demoralized and wanting to leave themselves.”

So… just weeks after Musk tried to get out of the deal to buy Twitter citing way too much spam on the platform, and misleading claims that hid just how fragile Twitter’s infrastructure and security are… he may be planning to fire a bunch of the people who actually understand how to fix such things. What a strategy!

Indeed, this really does feel reminiscent of the kinds of private equity buyout deals that have been known for decades, in which someone buys out a company, fires a huge percentage of the staff to make the company “profitable” but on an incredibly shaky and flimsy foundation, only to then try to sell it off before anyone realizes what a mess it really is.

I guess that is one potential way for Musk to deal with the fact that he was going to lose the lawsuit and have to buy the site anyway — just agree to buy it, and tank the whole thing, trying to avoid losing too much money in the process, and see if he can slap a fresh coat of paint on the thing to sell it to some other sucker?

Doesn’t seem great either way.

That said, the sourcing on the report could be flimsy, and it’s possible that it’s just Elon being Elon and spouting off whatever comes to mind (he seems to do that a lot) without putting much thought into how this is actually going to work. But, at the very least, even if that’s the case it again suggests that he’s making decisions impulsively, without understanding any of the underlying factors.