Could you honestly keep firing staff even after already crossing the 75% threshold of your total workforce? Well, apparently Elon Musk does. It’s a grueling story to keep having to retell, so for the sake of context, we’ll quickly recap how this maelstrom of chaos that is not Twitter’s staff structure came to be. Musk initially cut 50% of Twitter’s total staff early last November, followed by a metric ton of international office closures and, well, more staff cuts. Roughly 3 months later, you would think that it’d be over, right? Not for Musk.

Whittling to Ruin

You’d think that losing more than 5,000 staff would have its impacts, and you’re right – while Twitter is still running, for some miraculous reason, it’s also plagued by frequent outages, slowdowns, and other bothersome nuisances that make the whole Twitter experience just awful. This persistent ‘resilience has emboldened Musk to cut even more staff over the recent weekend, with his delusional ‘Twitter 2.0’ cutting another 50 roles, including Musk loyalists and various engineers. He fired even his hardest supporters? This man must be on some substance, surely?

To make a highly relatable analogy, it seems that Musk is currently undergoing an Icarus scenario, despite not actually achieving the same magnitude of success. The Greek legend of Icarus is about a man who dreamed of flying, so he created wax wings and managed to climb to the heavens. He was successful, but his own hubris and pride caused him to overlook that wax wings don’t meld with the Sun’s heat, so they melt and he fell to his doom – very reminiscent of what’s currently happening to Twitter, right?

Twitter use to be relatively stable, but now, nobody even bats an eyelid anymore when there’s a sudden outage, which speaks loads of how bad Twitter’s maintenance has gotten, but you can’t really blame if just 1000 people are doing what 7500 people were meant to do. Musk, as part of his excessive cost reduction efforts, has even unplugged servers in the hopes of saving just that bit more.

To be fair, Musk’s reductions have significantly reduced Twitter’s costs, which it needs to get back on neutral footing, but most of these decisions seem, at least in the long run, more detrimental than anything; it’s one thing to save on costs, but it’s another thing entirely to ensure that everything runs as they should, despite reduced capacities. Before Musk took over, Twitter’s Q2 ‘22 staff costs were $950 million, which he was able to supposedly reduce by a whopping 80% (down to $190 million). Twitter’s declining ad revenue, Twitter has to keep cutting to stay in line with the reduced intake.

The Wrap

In the simplest terms, for every lower-than-expected revenue figure that comes in, Twitter needs to reconsider and reassess its costs, which is further complicated by Twitter Blue’s less-than-ideal uptake. With Musk seemingly unhappy with the app’s revenue stats, more staff cuts aren’t really too surprising by now. However, it’s disheartening to hear about them, especially when you consider how some staff literally only had Twitter as their income source. Just how much more can Twitter take? We’ll all just have to find out when it happens.

Sources

http://bit.ly/3SvHAHm