[paxys]

In any tech company out there only a small number of employees are tasked with keeping the lights on. The majority are working on new feature development. So "you can run [company] with fewer employees" is trivially true.

Of course the flip side of that is – without these employees you will also not be able to deliver on all these new features. In Twitter's case Elon has decided that whatever new features the previous leadership were cooking are irrelevant now.