Musk might have been right about some things. There probably was some degree of bloat. But to say he's badly mishandled this whole saga is a gross understatement. It is very difficult to utterly kill a site like Twitter; the fact that we're even considering that as a realistic possibility shows just how badly.

I think Musk is used to Tesla and SpaceX, which are both companies that a lot of people are (or at least were) excited to work for because they believe in the mission and what's being created. Plus there aren't many alternatives if you want to do that work. Twitter really isn't like that for most people; a Twitter developer has many other options to do similar work. Add to that the fact that he's both cranked up the intensity of the abuse and that it's more visible to everyone, and you can't expect a lot of good people to stick around. And despite the fact that it might coast for quite a while on the back of excellent work in the past, eventually you do need good people to keep a business going. (This is leaving aside the direct impacts of his actions on users and advertisers!)

> All signs so far are pointing to, yes

which signs? They launched a new feature (blue checks for $8) and had to turn it off immediately because it was bleeding money and ruining the platform and they have less ad revenue booked for next year than they had at the same time last time.

I don't think one should judge the new twitter course yet, but "well, the site is still up" is a very bad measure of success.

It's way too soon to tell. On a dramatically smaller scale my team went through a big drop in headcount. Day 1 the impact was nil. Day 10 the impact was negligible. Day 30 some minor problems were identified. But it wasn't until about Day 90 that we had our first outage and Day 270 that we had our first lengthy outage.

>Was Musk right? All signs so far are pointing to, yes.

Huh? He's been in charge for, like, two weeks. Did you think it could implode the instant the engineers received pink slips? Let's give it a year before we say he was right.

Way too soon to declare that Musk was right. I don't even think signs are pointing there. Twitter is bleeding some of its most valuable users, the content creators, to things like Mastodon. There do appear to be cracks happening at the edges. Bots and hate speech do appear to have increased.

Thing is, I think Twitter was bloated and it needed a kick in the rear. Pre-acquisition I heard the same from many I follow. How Musk has gone about it has been the problem. Ignoring his perpetual hates, he had a decent amount of goodwill the day the deal closed. Then, he squandered it with all his antics. A transparent content moderation board turns out to be a game-able Twitter poll. Blue check for all was completely missing any point. No one wants a blue check for money w/o the associated verification. Verification for all would have been awesome.

Ads quality has dropped from what I've seen. It looks like people are pulling out, albeit slowly. MBAs will be studying this, but how things are going means we may look back and see this as Twitters Yahoo/AOL moment when it sells for a few billion in a couple years.

Did Musk fire the right people? Or did he slash based on obedience, mood, whim? In what situation would one want THE senior SRE for the cache systems (which are unique and affect twitter across the board) GONE? There's a reason why managers were trying to claw back some engineers and employees after the big layoff. Sure you chop off a few fingers and keep working.... but lose a thumb?

What do you mean by "right"? He grossly overpaid for a business that isn't profitable and likely made it even less profitable. Even if it limps along and some husk of Twitter survives, it's hard to see Musk as making the right move here.

The only winners here are former Twitter shareholders no matter what happens next.

I guess you were also declaring Putin a tactical genius for reaching Kyiv so quickly after invading Ukraine? Military historians will be studying that advance for years.

Come on. There's no way to draw any conclusions only a couple of months after the change.