[steveridout]

Interesting point but I don't think it's that clear cut. Twitter/X seemed to increase the pace of product changes directly after laying of the majority of its employees after Elon Musk took over. Also, when Steve Jobs returned to lead apple in 1997 he fired a significant fraction of the company before starting an incredible period of innovation. So I think a lot depends on the leadership and incentive structures.

[kalleboo]

Both of those examples started with laying off basically all of top management.

If you’re just laying off engineers to meet some profitability measure for Wall Street then you’re not going to fix innovation. You need to replace all of management who are the ones who are in charge of what the engineers are doing.

Google is completely lost and doesn’t know what it does. Management launches new products just to look good and shuts them down a year later, and still the only thing making money is search and ads. That’s not going to be fixed by laying off engineers.

[nusl]

Twitter laid most of their staff off then Musk gave them an ultimatum of: commit every day, all day, sleep at the office, to Twitter, or get fired. I wonder why there was more work produced in that period.

[fifteen1506]

Maybe because most are on H-1B and thus have no other option than to sacrifice personal life to have a job and not be deported?

[sabellito]

Twitter has lost 70% of its value since Elon took over.

[baq]

Which it only had because Musk thrown out a number and people fought very very hard to make him stick to it. If he wasn't such a dumbass and forfeit due diligence, this wouldn't be the story.

[infotainment]

Important business lessons from Twitter: try not to antagonize your biggest customers, because they might stop buying your products.

In addition, if this occurs, make sure to blame external factors or wide-ranging conspiracies.

[trashtester]

Another lesson: Don't ignore the users, as one of them may get angry enough to buy your company and fire you and most of your peers.

[baq]

Another important lesson: do your DD when you buy a company

[tgma]

According to rando analysts who don't have a stake. Note that Twitter pre X as a business was unsustainable and I don't think it ever made a net profit in aggregate over its lifetime. It was all selling the dream even before the acquisition.

[oblio]

> According to rando analysts who don't have a stake.

Says another rando who doesn't have a stake.

It was starting to be sustainable: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/

I don't know exactly what they did in 2020 to mess up their numbers, but 2017 - 2021 shows a company that was stabilizing at ok profit margins.

[tgma]

You state that as if your link does not substantiate what I said earlier. For the benefit of the people who don’t click on the link you cite, it simply proves as I said, that they never made an aggregate profit over their lifetime and you are linearly extrapolating the past (“starting to become…”) coming into the high interest rate environment where peers like $FB and $SNAP crashed and Twitter would surely have too.

[lapcat]

> Twitter/X seemed to increase the pace of product changes directly after laying of the majority of its employees after Elon Musk took over.

Changes? Yes. Often superficial changes. Change "Twitter" to "X", change blue checkmarks to yellow or gray or whatever, and sell blue to the lowest bidders. As for improvements? No, I haven't seen Twitter improve much if at all since the acquisition. In fact, the removal of third-party clients for example was a gross vandalization of the service.

> Also, when Steve Jobs returned to lead apple in 1997 he fired a significant fraction of the company before starting an incredible period of innovation.

This quip misses the biggest part of the story, which is that Apple didn't cut its way to success but rather acquired NeXT for over $400 million, a massive investment at the time, and Steve was merely replacing the old guard with his people.