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Longer Answer: Musk has a reputation for being a very demanding boss and a bit of an asshole (kind of like Steve Jobs actually).

New engineers would be thrilled to work 60-80-??? hours per week to design a Mars lander. And many would also be willing to take the wrong side of work/life balance to work on extremely innovative potentially self-driving electric cars. But very few are willing to work that many hours on a wanna-be social media company with few distinctive features and an unclear future.

It’s very easy to see “Gender Vocabularity Consultant” and axe them immediately. But it’s impossible to axe half the workforce without losing major market momentum. It’s not clear Elon has a workable vision for Twitter. And I think it’s already too late for Elon to avoid creating an environment where anyone with the skills to move on is leaving, meaning that the only old-guard employees will be the ones who aren’t hireable anywhere else.

I know a few freepers are imagining a situation where Elon/Twitter has 100% turnover and brings in all new employees to rewrite/rework the platform. For those Freepers I’d like to share a story about Netscape Mozilala. Netscape was one of the very first web-browsers and at its peak had over 90% maketshare of an exploding market. It faced growing and eventually serious competition from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and (sound familiar?) trailed down to 50% market share with a lot of people were claiming it was old news and needed a major reworking from the ground up. So they did just that — they spent ~3 years re-writing their code “to have a more stable foundation” and the result not only did not add any new features, but actually had fewer features than the old version. During those three years, their market share dwindled to extinction, and Netscape Navigator was first bought by another company then disbanded.

So no, completely outsting the old team to revamp the product from the ground up is a terrible idea.