> Engineers are paid $1000 a day because they create value to the tune of $10 000 a day.

If this was true then either the non-engineers in twitter have been destroying many times their salary in value or twitter has been obscenely profitable these last few years.

SWE are not assembly line workers, they are the people that build the automated assembly line. It’ll keep functioning well enough without them and with a much smaller team performing maintenance. I’d even bet on new feature being released faster now that they’ll be owned by highly motivated individuals instead of committees of managers and randomly assigned engs.