I disagree. It's not about the culling, it has never been, and actually, it makes things worse. You spend countless hours and tons of money recruiting talented people not to lay them off because you don't want a bureaucratic org.

If the issue is inefficiency, tons of meetings, too much team alignment etc, then that's the issue that you need to tackle, and these issues can already appear in a 50-100 employee company. Sure, that's an easy problem to solve with a smaller size but unless you hired people for no reason, these people have a very specific set of problems to tackle and are often, in these companies, the best in class to tackle them, culling half of the company isn't going to make things better.

(And X rehired part of the laid-off engineers)

Google bloat gave us transformers. Apple bloat gave us a usable touchscreen only, pocket computer (famously an entire org within Apple had developed an iPod-based approach that was competing with what was released)

The leaps forward need bloat. A startup can execute on specific vector direction way better.

Now back to your point, what did X deliver with its lean ops? It seems that it needed 2 bailouts (one from xAI, and one from space X)

Is that you Musk? Twitter lost half its revenue, more than 80% of its valuation.

> Google and Apple both need a culling similar to what Elon did with Twitter after taking over.

You could cut Google's size by 40% and they'd still have more corporate employees than Apple.

(Google has ~190k employees, Apple has ~160k but 50k of those are retail staff, so ~110k corporate)

Eh, what has X/Twitter delivered since the cull? It’s basically in maintenance mode. Which is fine if that’s what you want to do, but Google and Apple definitely don’t (and I’m glad for that)

This is when it makes sense to split your business up into multiple smaller businesses. The government should be doing this via anti-trust but they have dropped the ball there so, at this point, the corps really need to just do it to themselves to better compete.

I know some pretty wealthy people. They are very aware of those who are 10x wealthier than them. If Noam has 1B, he is probably pretty aware of those that have 10B. He's met them and seen their properties, scope, and powers. Likewise, they are thinking about those that have 100B, and those are thinking about Elon, who now has "four commas."

Most are happy and stop at multimillionaires, but of course we don't hear about them. The focus on hungry billionaires is survivor bias.

We don't hear about Tom from MySpace.

How much money do you have? or are you just commenting from the peanut gallery?

Judge also consulted with various teams at places like Google; I worked with one of the guys who provided details that later showed up on the show (as well as many plushies). He didn't watch the show because "it hit too close to home"

And office space!

Agent harness?