[hirsin]

The Twitter layoffs being used as proof of _anything_ is misguided no matter what you're trying to say.

If success is losing half their revenue, reverting to revenue numbers from a decade ago, I gotta know what failure looks like. You might argue that the revenue losses aren't correlated to their headcount changes and probably make a good argument, but I mean... It's not a great one

[com2kid]

Everyone predicted twitter would crash and burn within months of the layoffs.

It didn't.

Anyone who has worked at a large company knows that 1/2 the staff there is stuck keeping the lights on because it is easier to hire a warm body than fix tech debt.

I've worked at companies that are literally 10x more effective than other competitors in the market purely due to good engineering practices.

Even within large companies, you can have orgs that are dramatically more effective than others, often due to having to work under just the right set of resource constraints. Too little and no investments in the future, too much and it becomes easiest to build fast and hire people to duct tape the mess that is left behind.

[mike_d]

> Everyone predicted twitter would crash and burn within months of the layoffs.

It did, just not obviously. Twitter used to be the store brand social network, vanilla and reliable but not overly obnoxious. It made good money from brand advertisers like Ford, General Mills, and Sony. City governments felt ok with using it to distribute community information. The platform tried its hardest to stay middle of the road and not let things sway too far one way or the other.

Today it is a real time bidding marketplace for changing public discourse. You simply buy blue checkmark accounts in bulk and spread your message free of any content moderation or safeguards. So the Chinese, Russians, and Saudis can get into a bidding war over what rural whites believe to be fact.

With the ad revenue sharing program you don't even need to write the content anymore (one of the biggest things foreign influence campaigns struggle with). Just find someone who is saying the "right" thing already and promote them. Twitter in turn underscores the authenticity of these voices by adding "transparency" features that list where someone is from - because your average person does not know a damn thing about proxies.

[smileysteve]

You and the poster above disagree about the state of Twitter.

Twitter had been a growth company, it was early/missed the market with Vine, but was showing ad growth.

Now, as a private company, backed by the world's richest man, sovreign wealth funds, and banks that have written down their stakes, it has different economics than a tech / growth company.

It's ad revenue is now, not in the ballpark of the fortune 500 or trendy Instagram ads, but somewhere between reddit and sin site markets.

[jacobsenscott]

I don't know if I've seen "tech debt" do serious damage to any company, and I've been around a long time. I've definitely seen whole teams grind to a halt in pursuit of someone's idealized vision of the "perfect way to organize code" though. They always couch it in the language of tech debt, but really it's just the loudest person's preferred way to shuffle files around - and usually in the direction of more complexity and not less.

[hirsin]

I can't think of a more quintessential crash out of a major brand than Twitter from the past couple years. For a significant percentage (>10% publicly, I'm confident much more than that internally) of users it became unattractive.

If Microsoft did something that resulted in 300 million users leaving it would be considered crashing and burning, but I guess when Elon does the same proportion someone will show up to explain why losing half your revenue is better than losing all of it.

I just want to know who those people are so that I can pitch them on my next investment fund.

[watwut]

> Everyone predicted twitter would crash and burn within months of the layoffs.

I remember people celebrating and praising Musk, predicting new era of free speech twitter that earns tons of money and is massively effective.

Meanwhile, it lost on value, lost on income, became nazi echo chamber and overall much worst version of itself. It did not "crash and burned" simply because Musk was willing to pay huge amount of money for all of that. What it shows is that original engineering was good and reliable, actually.

[creativeSlumber]

> I've worked at companies that are literally 10x more effective than other competitors in the market purely due to good engineering practices.

Most big tech companies get taken over by leadership with no tech background eventually and the engineering bar drops to the floor.

[AlexeyBelov]

> Everyone predicted twitter would crash and burn within months

I was there, and no, it's not true. There were debates about it and no consensus.

[ulfw]

He's a VC now. That's how they think

[mike_hearn]

For that to be true, the revenue loss would have to be related to the loss of headcount, e.g. due to downtime or other issues. Rather the revenue loss was due to an advertiser boycott driven by Elon's rejection of woke politics. That wouldn't apply to other tech companies that made similarly deep layoffs.

Look at it this way. Could Google lay off 70% of employees and keep the lights on, even still launching some new features on core properties, whilst preserving revenue? It'd be surprising if the answer was no.

[Raidion]

Really? Revenue loss was pretty directly tied to Elon replying and supporting some "jews vs whites" type posts in Nov 2023.

That caused Apple, Coke, and many other large clients to stop advertising.

[abirch]

My understanding is that Twitters revenue was

  5   billion in 2021
  4.4 billion in 2022 (When Elon made bid and took over company)
  3.4 billion in 2023
  2.6 billion in 2024
  2.9 billion in 2025

[YokoZar]

Elon very publicly killed brand safety efforts. Advertisers care a lot about the context that their ads appear in.

[hirsin]

That would be the good argument, yes.

[DoesntMatter22]

Mo biggie on revenue loss. They axed most of their staff and went from 2k devs to 30. Trade off seems fine

[_heimdall]

I've never seen the motivation behind buying Twitter to have been revenue, or free speech for that matter. Elon wanted a unique content source to train LLMs on and he got it. Whether that proves out as a good training dataset is still up in the air, but I can't imagine he cared about Twitter revenue.

[sreekanth67]

This is not even intended for the LLM training use case. it is an afterthought use case. He installed a president who he can use. Twitter acquisition helped him achieve this.