If the company had 8,000 employees, and is now innovating more, or at least trying to innovate more, with 2,000 employees… then I’m afraid that the ‘culture’ was not all that great…
I actually can't tell if you're being sarcastic. So far, the only innovation is to charge users a nominal annual amount as a mechanism to defeat bots. Other than that he's devastated the value of the asset by implementing ill-thought through measures (calling them "measures" is being generous as that implies a consideration over time) occasionally followed by reactive backflips.
I am not a fan of Musk, not at all. And I agree with you that he overpaid Twitter; and then threw away a brand that was probably worth 10% of what he paid for the company, and that many things got worse on the platform. And it makes me laugh that a company that cannot handle blue check marks now wants to... replace banks -- yeah, that's the latest from Elon, at least according to an article on Verge.
That said, nearly everybody, myself included, predicted that everybody would leave, that the service would be offline very often, like in the good ol' days of Twitter, and that he'd bankrupt the company etc. But none of that happened, or at least not yet. And they are moving towards a new direction. A new direction we might not like -- I'm not going to be banking with Elon, that's for sure! -- but if they are moving somewhere with 1/4th of the workforce, I suspect that for many years a lot of people had a lot of free time at the office...
So he's innovating by the fact everything keeps falling apart, but behold: everyone has not left yet (despite about 20% have). That's literally your explanation on how he's innovating.
It’s a function of time. Twitter loses unsustainably large amounts of money right now. This only ends with bankruptcy. But he’ll keep funding it through SpaceX and Tesla because he can’t be seen to fail.
