Only days away from Elon Musk closing on a $44 billion deal to take the hell-site Twitter private, word has leaked that one of Elon Musk’s earliest acts will be to fire 75% of the magenta-haired, non-binary mouthbreathers who have mistaken their job for a lifelong sinecure and way to achieving social status.
“Twitter’s workforce is likely to be hit with massive cuts in the coming months, no matter who owns the company, interviews and documents obtained by The Washington Post show, a change likely to have major impact on its ability to control harmful content and prevent data security crises.”
“Elon Musk told prospective investors in his deal to buy the company that he planned to get rid of nearly 75 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 workers, whittling the company down to a skeleton staff of just over 2,000.”
“Even if Musk’s Twitter deal falls through — and there’s little indication now that it will — big cuts are expected: Twitter’s current management planned to pare the company’s payroll by about $800 million by the end of next year, a number that would mean the departure of nearly a quarter of the workforce, according to corporate documents and interviews with people familiar with the company’s deliberations. The company also planned to make major cuts to its infrastructure, including data centers that keep the site functioning for more than 200 million users that log on each day.”
Let’s take a quick look at the numbers. According to the article, Twitter’s manpower budget is $1.5 billion. That is $200,000 per employee. That is just mindblowing — I’m assuming the $1.5 billion is salary plus benefits, if it is salary alone, it is unconscionable, and the Twitter board should be keelhauled under the yacht of some sanctioned Russian oligarch.
The article gives a good overview of Musk’s general plans for turning Twitter around. In the tech and social media worlds, Musk’s plan to cut costs and improve performance is radical. The big complaint is that cutting social justice warriors is “likely to have major impact on its ability to control harmful content and prevent data security crises.” To call that bull**it is a disservice to all the top quality bullsh** generated by hardworking bullsh**ters every day. If you are relying on hundreds or thousands of humans to “prevent data security crises,” you are in the midst of one of those crises right now and are just too stupid to realize it.
No, data security is not the concern; the left’s concern is that they will lose control of the information on Twitter. Framing it as “harmful content” is cute, but banning the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop, banishing a sitting US president while allowing the main-mullah of Iran to remain active, and crushing scientific information on COVID that conflicted with the “zero COVID” approach our government tried to impose was not fighting “harmful content.” Instead, it was Twitter’s employees acting as the Sturmabteilung of the anti-freedom, liberal elite.
Don’t let anyone convince you that Twitter’s staff gives a rat’s butt about your “online safety.” If they don’t like your politics, you are open to doxxing, death threats, stalking, and, if you’re a conservative woman, threats of sexual assault. If they don’t like your politics, any perceived violation draws a timeout or a ban.
Musk is on the right track. Twitter is not some unique company immune to basic principles of economics and management. A substantial part of Twitter’s reputational problems is due to the simple fact that it has far too many staffers who have nothing better to do than congregate on Slack and think of ways to control how the company operates as a way of furthering their political goals.
I don’t know if Musk can make Twitter profitable; I’m not sure I even care. But I am willing to pay for a plane ticket to California to be outside Twitter’s offices when security begins escorting these overpaid Antifa thugs from the building.
