[robotresearcher]

I've seen this statement a lot, and I think it's missing something.

Public companies typically have growth as a goal. Twitter was not making a lot of money. Some of these people were working on building a future Twitter that would grow bigger and richer. I'm not saying they were on the path to success, just that I expect a lot of the activity there could be described that way.

Five years ago you could say of Uber 'You don't need 5000 people to run a freelance taxi app', when they had hundreds (thousands?) of people working on autonomous driving. Amazon didn't seem to need scores of backend engineers to run a web store, but now AWS is a huge business. Google employs vast numbers of people but has a relatively small number of impactful products, only some of which make money.

Again, not claiming they were doing it well, just that they were trying stuff beyond maintaining what we see.

[harlequinn77]

To be frank, twitter hasn't changed in 10 years.

So in this hypothetical, the people building the future of the company have achieved nothing during this time and should absolutely be removed or replaced.

[robotresearcher]

No argument there. Just pointing out that it's common for head count to be larger than the visible product justifies.

Uber cut their losses. Twitter needed a change of owner to get there.