That is certainly a hot take. When a company is losing $4 million a day drastic measures are in order to save the company so the remaining employees still have a job. Having worked in tech for over 20 years and being on both sides of layoffs I can tell you how hard it is for the people making the decision of who to layoff is exceedingly difficult and heart breaking.
It definitely looks like Twitter was a hot mess and needed an amputation to save the patient.
Of those 4M/day, 2.7M are the interest on the leveraged buyout debt that Musk had Twitter take, they weren't there before!
In comparison, assuming an everage yearly cost per fired employee of 200K, by firing 3000 of them they are saving 1.6M a day.
Musk added 2.7M/day of purely financial cost, and then tried to reduce the damage by firing half the company and it's not even nearly enough!
And this is before the lost income from advertising...
I won't pretend to know business better than the richest man in the world, but from down here this sure looks like the train wreck of the century. We'll see I guess.
I wonder if all these commenters blaming Musk for screwing up Twitter and the layoff realize that the pre-Musk Twitter had already planned layoffs.
> Before Musk took over the site, Twitter had already planned broad layoffs, which would have affected up to a quarter of the staff, according to people familiar with the plans. The Post reported previously the company’s board was planning to cut thousands of jobs as part of an effort to save $700 million in labor costs.
This is like saying that people who call new painting as super ugly on the wall should stop complaining, because there was originally plan for different painting. Size of layoffs matter. How you execute layoffs matter. How you choose people to be fired and how you treat them matter a lot. And also, it matter a lot whether you dont play into hostile attitude nonsense toward them on social media (they were surely all lazy useless zero product employess think should be at least commented on).
You can come in, have respectful speech, announce yourself as an owner, announce future layoffs and then work on one that at least appear semi reasonable. Or, you can come in with sink, hahaha, make it into twitter joke, spend weekend planning layoff while joking about it on twitter.
It really does not seem so to me. They complain about size of it, speed of it and the way it was done. They are however reacting in more of emotional way.
The thing is, Musk really went out of his way to troll Twitter employees and those who like twitter. And his fans really went out of way to mock fired people, call them lazy and so on. It was not just layoff, it was layoff designed to let you know how much looser you are.
People respond in kind, with schadenfreude and bullying back.
> They complain about size of it, speed of it and the way it was done
I haven't seen much of that here in HN though. Do you have examples?
> It was not just layoff, it was layoff designed to let you know how much looser you are.
Again, I don't see that. It just needed to be done. Could have been handled better? Were mistakes made? Probably. But I don't think it was intentional to show what a loser people are.
He quotes Jobs during his return and reboot of Apple
> Some mistakes will be made. That's good. Because at least some decisions will be made too. We'll fix them... But I think it's so much better than where things were not very long ago.
I have no doubt that for most of the people making the decision of which person to lay off it would be hard. They are human.
But, I wonder; are these the same people (managers) that were making decisions that allowed the company to loose $4 million a day? If so, then hard to have sympathy for them.
If the decisions were being made above the managers, in the C-suite, then it is their asses (which we all know Elon sacked them as well). If I had to make an educated guess I would assume their severance pay is orders of magnitude greater than the 90 day severance that the regular Joe and Jane got.
So let's say the decisions that cost the company $4M/day came from the top, not middle managers and not the end employee. The people who say "we have to lay off X amount of people, today, tomorrow, ASAP" are not the ones who are doing the actual telling individuals they are laid off. So in their mind this is "the price of doing business". Again, fuck 'em. Why should the individual who got laid off, rehired, found a new job then give the requisite 2 week notice? It's the price of doing business.
In my mind either we are going to take out the human aspect or we aren't and both sides need to take the same approach. It can't be "it's business" on one side and "the human element" on the other. It can be, but I'm not going to play that game. In a couple of years (if that long) I'm going to be forgotten about and the business will probably keep on keepin' on.
> But, I wonder; are these the same people (managers) that were making decisions that allowed the company to loose $4 million a day?
Twitter is losing US$4 million a day now, with the added interests Elon has to pay back on his US$ 1 bi loan to buy Twitter. So using this claim as a justification is exaggerated, by the sheer fact that most of that US$ 4 million figure is from Elon's own creation.
Did you know that Musk's acquisition put Twitter under massive debt and his actions chasing off advertisers means they're losing even more money by the day?
Twitter was a mess prior to Musk, but stable enough to remain afloat. When Musk acquired it, it became a flaming hot mess. Layoffs like these is like treating an infected finger with amputation. It temporarily solves the problem, but then you're still left without a finger.
> I can tell you how hard it is for the people making the decision of who to layoff is exceedingly difficult and heart breaking.
We want C-Suite execs to think of employees as people. But in reality the C-suite execs just think of them as another expense, albeit a necessary one.
At the C-Suite, everything is a number: number of employees, income, expenses, etc. The most important ones are cash on hand, and profit after expenses.
Here's a thought experiment: If Elon offered you $100 million to fire half the company would you do it? Personally I'd have a hard time saying no to that.
It sounds like it just recently got some potentially terminal disease, so maybe the cure is to cut the tumor out, instead of all the limbs? But it might be just too late.
It definitely looks like Twitter was a hot mess and needed an amputation to save the patient.