> Something like 80% of the company left or was let go, and despite all the smug laughing about how the platform would go under within weeks, it just kept on going

I’ve heard this claim many times and is not backed by any more evidence than “it works on my machine”.

If the company really did continue to operate in the same manner, it wouldn’t have been worth 80% less in 2024 (https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-...), nor would it need to be rolled up and financially engineered into being part of an AI company that then gets rolled into a rocket company.

It has been losing users, safety standards have dropped and overall the platform is worse off than before. There’s a reason why no other company has done something similar with their employee counts.

Price's Law (more of an observation than a law) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%27s_law impacts and software with large teams are no exception. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34736936 )

50% of the output is produced by the square root of the team size.

In bloated organizations, there is a lot of fat to cut.

they were doing far more than propping up twitter. they were also doing tons of engineering on the side like bootstrap, and shaping fundamental internet technologies.

Musk, in traditional private equity ways, killed anything that wasnt immediately making money. Then he made it pay to play and monetized the hell out of it. All of that BEFORE he opened the far-right floodgates.

Now its a shell of its former self and coasting on the momentum it once enjoyed.

It kept on going, but they have been far less stable from a technical OR leadership perspective. They had a user exodus. They had advertisers leave in droves. I suspect it was a net negative change.

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-firing-wor...

I strongly disagree with this take; do you think all companies are 80% SREs? Did Twitter make money by serving pages to users?

The Twitter exodus does relate to this, kind of; it's an example of the "fall back on existing revenue streams" strategy (you could call it a private equity playbook, but it's more universal than that) exaggerated by the guy acquiring it not needing more revenue and clobbering the revenue part too.

Twitter pre-Musk had an _enormous_ amount of experiments going on. They were building streaming services, clones of every social network you can think of (Spaces etc.), an entire sports brand around MLB, and so on and so on.

They also had an army of sales people who sold ads and an army of engineers building and optimizing an ad platform, which is (or was?) their actual business.

The "platform going down" narrative from both sides was 100% irrelevant to what was actually going on. "We laid off PMs, salespeople, and engineers and the system didn't crash" is a complete non-sequitor that should be obvious to anyone who's involved in software engineering or maintenance. If anything, I'd expect laying off most of any company to make it much more stable; when you don't change things you introduce fewer bugs.

I'm sure their dau decline and actually blocking most usage (non-logged in users) has helped a lot.

This is because nobody can say how many people are needed to develop or maintain some body of software. So companies hire however many employees they can afford. When the number they can afford changes they hire more or fire some. The number of staff has pretty much nothing to do with the actual work. AI introduces another factor to the equation: it allows one person to perform N times as much softy-work as before. So even if you have no idea how many people you need (as always, see above) you do know that you can get by with 1/N.

Platform was super unreliable for a while after that - although that might be related to making all the software changes to turn it in to an even worse cesspit.

Edit: Enron Musk apologists will always crack me up.

There is enough until the company hits the early 2020 approximate headcount, adjusted for business changes in that time. The exact adjustment is hard to know, but in general, if a company was growing at, say, 10% per year, prior to the covid-craziness, then one would expect something like that natural growth to continue. Very generally speaking.

For example, Google had been growing somewhat quickly for decades prior to 2020, but in 2021 and 2022 it grew by over sixty-thousand people, and the crazy growth actually started in 2020, so even more than that. Sixty thousand!

Undoing that takes a very long time--they should have been much smarter about it. You need four rounds of twelve-thousand person RIFs (whether layoffs or buyouts) to get back to the earlier growth trajectory. Each round generates several stories that hit HN.

Is this MS still dropping back to pre-Covid? I would bet at least some of it is.

a lot of places, including Microsoft, drastically cut or are in the process of cutting down on WFH also means what, vast distances between teams, coworkers, buildings, cafeteria, etc (for campus based companies). How many of these places that are "going back to office" (or have already) are doing more in-person and less or no Zoom/Teams meetings now, anyway?

AI investment is also money not spent on salaries. LLM ROI is hotly debated, but it's no secret that companies are diverting money to it regardless.