| ▲ | Gareth321 4 hours ago | |
> 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. Musk paid an absurd premium for the company. Far more than it was worth. It was intended to force the board to sell. So an 80% estimated drop (it’s private so it’s a very rough estimate and I won’t go into the various reasons you should not accept it at face value), sounds scary but it’s by design. Twitter as a company was doing quite poorly leading up to the acquisition. It lost more than $1.3B in the two preceding years. A big downgrade from its previous $1B+ annual reported profits. As for the 81% headcount reduction, Musk confirmed that, but if you think he’s lying about that for some reason, CNBC investigated it. Journalists examined internal Twitter records and reported approximately 1,300 actively working employees, with another 1,400 still receiving pay but no longer working. CNBC also interviewed two recent employees who corroborated the scale of the reductions. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-tha... Prior to acquisition, Twitter's SEC filings confirmed more than 7,500 full-time employees. I don’t see why this claim is so unbelievable. Twitter was famous for its army of social media staff whose entire day comprised two meeting between matcha tea and meditation. https://youtube.com/watch?v=buF4hB5_rFs Musk just fired everyone who wasn’t an engineer and it turns out the engineers keep the lights on. | ||
| ▲ | darth_avocado 3 hours ago | parent [-] | |
I don’t see anything in what you wrote really support that Twitter did well after firing 80% of its staff. As for this: > Twitter as a company was doing quite poorly leading up to the acquisition This is objectively false. 2020 revenue for Twitter was $3.71B while 2021 came in at $5.07B. The company was on a growth trajectory and path to profitability. In fact, after the acquisition, the ad revenue dropped by a lot. https://www.businessinsider.com/x-revenues-plunged-months-af... All of this is public information. | ||