[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.