[karlgkk]

There's a few things at play here.

First, Elon cut a bunch of "non-essential" core Twitter staff, like the trust and safety teams. This is going to cause long term brand damage - in fact, it already is!

Second, Elon completely cut all non-core Twitter projects. Twitter was being used by its major investors as a platform to build and test new social experiments and startup concepts. As far as I can tell, this was about 1000 engineers and product people. This was probably a pretty solid cut for someone like him, but also a pretty gross example of the whims of capital - who knows what great idea was killed off.

Lastly, when they say Twitter cut 80% of their staff, they never mentioned what happened after: massive attrition from people who "survived" but could go elsewhere. Way beyond what Elon thought would happen. Way beyond the 10-20% additional resignations after a normal layoff happens. This may have almost killed Twitter