[curiousgeorgio]

Elon is a genius - seriously. Having worked at similar companies myself, I have a pretty good sense for how this went down (mostly speculation of course):

• On day 1, Elon probably talked privately with some of the head engineers at Twitter. He told them he wanted to trim the fat, and asked them how much could be cut while basically keeping the lights on and the website up (accepting some risk of temporary outages).

• I'd bet money that some of them told him something like 80-90% of the staff could be cut. I think that's true of a lot of large companies.

• Then Elon had the balls to actually move in that direction. Rather than make arbitrary cuts, he's letting people self-select. Obviously the company will lose some really good engineers as collateral damage, but for the most part, the dead weight will reveal themselves through silly shenanigans like this. Elon knows it's silly, but there's no graceful way to make such drastic moves.

He's painting with broad strokes to clear the canvas and re-imagine Twitter as a startup. And I think it's brilliant.

If you think he's out of his mind (as many commenters appear to think), show me your billions of dollars and multiple successful companies as proof that you know more about success than he does.

[golem14]

I don't think this is genius, it's hard nosed decision making.

I personally think he wants to move Twitter mostly on maintenance mode until he has cleaned house, and then slowly rehire when new features are more clear. For that, running on 20% staff might be actually ok.

The key would be to retain the right people. And I'm not sure which filter I'd use.

[curiousgeorgio]

Agreed. To me, the genius is just his courage to actually do it while probably feeling like the entire world is against him. A lot of leaders might come up with similar plans, but execution in the face of so much opposition is what separates Elon from the rest.

[qwytw]

It hardly offsets the fact that he massively overpaid for Twitter in the first place. For 44 billion he could have easily handpicked a team and built a new product without all the issues Twitter has.

He'd have to actually compete against Twitter but that should be too hard for a genius.

[curiousgeorgio]

Building a Twitter clone is so trivial that it's basically become the new todo list app for people showing off any new web technology.

The value of Twitter has nothing to do with the product, and everything to do with the name and market share. For that reason, it's been almost impossible for any other alternative to call itself a real Twitter competitor.

[qwytw]

You could do a lot of things for 40 billion though. Same could be said about Tesla, building a car from scratch and mass producing is almost impossible, no way it could challenge the entrenched car makers. Yet look what happened.

And again, he overpaid, massively. Just to fire 50-90% of entire workforce and to lose a lot of Twitter's biggest customers due to his erratic behavior.

[DimitriPetrova]

Past performance does not make every action an individual does correct.

[curiousgeorgio]

That's true, which is why I explained why I think he's making smart moves.

Maybe he has departed from his usual trajectory towards success, but at this point (given his history), the burden of proof falls on the people who think he's lost his mind to explain precisely why they assume they know more than he does.

[62951413]

Now imagine him dropping the leetcode hazing too. That would seal the deal.