Very rough numbers here:
Elon Musk wasn’t lying last October when he told Bloomberg that 75 percent of the employees at his newly acquired toy, Twitter.com, wouldn’t lose their jobs under his ownership, as The Washington Post had reported at the time. Turns out, it’s closer to 80 percent. Of the roughly 7,500 people working there before Musk’s takeover, CNBC reports Friday that barely 1,300 in total, and fewer than 550 full-time engineers, are left at the husk of a company, either through said layoffs or voluntary resignations.
Twitter’s costs were around $5 billion a year. Around and about you understand.
Costs don’t run exactly according to numbers in employment but it’s not going to be all that far off. $5b divide by 7,500 and that’s $666k per head.
And, well, actual proper engineers in SF might well be half that in actual wages. Around and about. Plus office space, support and all. We’re not that far wrong at least. Certainly not out by more than 2x.
Now there’re 1,300 at Twitter. Or close on $900 million in costs.
Twitter’s revenue last year was maybe $5 billion. It didn’t lose that much after all. Imagine now that Twitter revenue has halved. Twitter is now nicely profitable, isn’t it? Rev of $2.5b, costs of just under $1b, success!
Now, agreed, very rough figures and all that. But start from those numbers. Now how badly do you have to torture them – or how bad does the ad revenue fall have to be – for Twitter to be losing money? And think that it has fallen that much?
You can even add in $1 billion and up a year in debt repayment if you like. Even then it’s not obvious that it will have negative cashflow.