With Elon Musk taking aggressive action at Twitter and slashing head count, many suggest the company is poised to collapse.
Another view is Twitter might have been bloated with a lot of people not doing “value chain” work. Maybe the company can function with 50% or 75% fewer staff if the positions lost were not adding much value. Who knows?
If this approach of dramatically shrinking head count works, it might carry over to other tech companies that are similarly bloated with a lot of non-value-chain workers. All of sudden the alleged tech worker shortage might vanish – once the dead weight is cleared away.
I have worked in teams where productivity went up after non-performing staff were removed. High performers were covering for the low or non-performance of some team members, to meet deadlines. Once the non-performers were gone, productivity went up – by a lot! The morale of the teams also improved – by a lot!
Finally, Musk’s purchase of Twitter could be fortuitous. The platform is basically TikTok for text – and it would not take much to turn Twitter into a TikTok-like video and media platform that could compete strongly against Twitter. As you may know, TikTok has been taking market share away from Instagram, Facebook and Youtube. The simple short video format has proven successful.
The U.S. government is discussing banning or limiting use of TikTok over alleged national security fears and data privacy – Twitter would be positioned to step in as a TikTok replacement “just in time”.
Musk is a master at using the government to further his business interests. Tesla profited from all kinds of government subsidy programs, including consumer subsidies. It would be just like Musk to have identified this opportunity – in fact, behind the scenes they are probably lobbying the government to take action against TikTok.
