[snapplebobapple]

I disagree. I think he exactly calculated the kind of people at twitter, which is why he's trying so hard to get as many of them as possible to quit. He wants to make money off this purchase and to do that he needs to dramatically increase employee productivity, reduce headcounts to bare minimums to keep the current system running and then innovate something more on top of it to really make money. Work life balance people have no place in that kind of plan.

[solarkraft]

That does sound like a plan that could work (other comments have hinted at why it may not on this case).

But firing everyone immediately, with no chance to transfer knowledge? Funny!

[snapplebobapple]

In a situation you have to make choices as to what is important and, I don't think transferring knowledge is as important as everyone thinks in this case. The users don't directly make twitter money so there's no direct losses from downtime, plus advertisers are being scared away so the indirect losses from downtime from not being able to show ads is also minimized at the moment. The biggest cost is tipping the exodus numbers so far that what is left of twitter loses it's network effects to attract new users onces the next version is launched and the exodus is really far from that level right now. So, what's the expected value of a 12-48 hour outage on the small chance that something totally breaks and it takes your team of really smart people that long to figure it out without the knowledge transfer? I would say it's pretty small. On the other hand what is the benefit of using a decent chunk of the remaining six billion in cash in the company to pay off and push out all the people that will work life balance the plan into not working (and the smaller subset of wokes that will actively sabotage it)? I would say pretty high, given what the plan apparently is. There is also a time value to getting this done because the faster they do it the faster it can fade from collective consciousness and the faster things die down enough for Elon to step back from the CEO role, put a kinder, gentler but competent face in that role, rebuild advertiser relationships and make this thing print money.

I know if I was in his position I would be trying to fire more people than I actually think I need to right now just to make sure I don't have to prolong the bad press with later layoffs and to ensure there are roles to fill in three to six months when I get a full handle on the business and know what I actually need. This would accomplish both generating good press and ensure I can fill positions with people aligned with my vision and work ethic.