Zuckerberg’s Meta Copies Musk’s Twitter Layoffs

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Zuckeberg’s Meta will layoff thousands of workers this week. Elon Musk has begun firing about half of the workforce of Twitter. Twitter was losing $4 million per day. The layoff of 3500 workers enables Twitter to reduce the losses by $2 million per day. Twitter will also need to get another $1 billion per year on interest for $13 billion in loans. [Corrected a miscalculation in the savings. Previously miscalculated $10 million per day in expense reduction.]

Meta layoffs will help Meta make money even while burning cash on the Metaverse.

The big money for X (renamed-Twitter) will be creator monetization and adding video to Twitter. This could be added relatively quickly.

Longer will be adding a payments system to it.

46 thoughts on “Zuckerberg’s Meta Copies Musk’s Twitter Layoffs”

  2. “Copies”? You know layoffs have been a thing for quite a while now, and are common in companies hemorrhaging money?

    I do love that the hubris of these billionaires is finally catching up to them. They think nothing they do can go wrong, and it’s biting them hard.

    • Also, $14m daily difference from firing 3500 employees? They’re averaging $4k a day? $1.5m per employee, per year?

      • That’s not how it works. Probably a few high level executives were costing 90% of that and the other 3490 employees had regular salaries.

      • Maybe the fired employees had considerable negative productivity? If they were busy banning customers, that’s possible.

  3. Sorry, math doesn’t check out. Even if Twitter was paying each employee 1000 per day, that only shifts the needle 3.5m per day.

    Still leaves Twitter in negative territory, and certainly doesn’t turn a 4m daily loss into a 10m daily profit. Doubly so, since each fired employee was given 90 days severance.

  4. So Zuckerberg runs his company by imitating others?
    He knows what I purchase what I like, But He doesn’t know what’s happening in his home turf.

  6. “Twitter was losing $4 million per day. The layoff of 3500 workers enables Twitter to make about $10 million per day.”

    Um, 14 million, divided by 3,500 . . . wait, the Twitter employees were costing $4,000 a day? About a million and a half dollars a year, each? That’s almost an order of magnitude more than I get and I’ve been at it awhile. Maybe he should have fired everyone and started over.

  7. The rumour is the Musk simply ranked all the Twitter developers by the number of lines written, and sacked those with the lowest number. The old adage of :

    The learner dev does it in 10 lines.
    The competent dev does in in 5 lines.
    The expert dev deletes 5 lines.

    Is now broken. I’m filling my code with blank space and comments from now on.

    • We had a bit of a discussion about that rumor. As a first order filter, “take a look at these guys” it’s a good approximation of who is writing the code. Yes, more competent developers do it in fewer lines, which allows them to move to the next module and write more lines, so I never felt that adage was terribly accurate.

      With his git/subversion/file copy tweet, I do wonder what the Twitter code repo looks like. The rumor assumes it’s something like git or subversion, if they really were just saving file copies, then the line count becomes much harder to do. Automated recursive diffs, is the way I’d approach it.

  8. The news of the day is that Twitter is trying to re-hire people that just fired. So maybe meta will do the dame in a week or so.

    • If true, I suppose that’s one way of figuring out which people are actually needed.

      “If true”; I wouldn’t assume any rumors at the moment are true; Musk/Twitter is under a PR (And not just PR.) assault at the moment, as the prospect of one of the major social media platforms not being subject to reliable left-wing censorship has the left scared. Having nearly 100% control of social media censorship was a powerful thing, but only so long as it WAS nearly 100%; If they’re losing control, they need Twitter to die, fast.

      Well, on the bright side, the major companies that have been jumping ship before any policies even change have given us a list of corporations the left have zombified.

      • That’s one way to ruin your business too…
        Just to clarify one thing:

        “the prospect of one of the major social media platforms not being subject to reliable left-wing censorship has the left scared. Having nearly 100% control of social media censorship was a powerful thing”

        Is quite an absurd statement.

        The problem is that social platforms rely on advertising to make business and being associated with hate speech and polarizing political views is bad for business. THERE ARE multiple right-wing-leaning platforms, but they are marginal and poorer because:
        1) Fewer advertisers are willing to be associated with a certain radicalized rhetoric
        2) Fewer users are interested in politicized platforms, which shrinks the customer base making such platforms less appealing to a general audience.
        3) Due to the demography of the customer base, in absolute numbers there are MORE progressive-leaning people than conservatives on social media platforms. This is independent of the political content on the platform, It is just a matter of age.

        Claiming that there is some sort of global conspiracy because a minoritarian point of view is minoritarian is as absurd as complaining that radio broadcasting networks are conspiring to keep medieval madrigal music from being mainstream and transmitted 24/7

        Radical-Right and Radical-Left leaning platforms are just niche markets, with the Right-leaning one being more vocal but slightly smaller than the other.

        • “Claiming that there is some sort of global conspiracy”

          Give it up, we all saw what happened to Gab and Parler.

          • Gab and Parler (as well as TruthSocial) are niche markets, they were niche and remained niche. Most of the people on facebook (or twitter) are not interested in political content (most of the content is family-friends related/local info, sports, celebrities/gossip, food, fashion and THEN political content, just before games/hobbies/crafts).
            This apps were already small (few million users worldwide) before they had issues with the credit card companies and Gooble/Apple app stores.
            The issue is that, again, while free speech rights protect you from THE GOVERNMENT, when a company signs and agreement with another company it is bound by the rules of that contract.
            Visa, Mastercard, Google and Apple, do not care and are not bound by the first amendment.
            You can open your own company and state in the contracts that everybody in your business deals cannot use the word “horse” or whatever you like. You are not the government. Obviously if you sell saddles or horseshoes that might be a problem, but that is on you and your business model/preferences.
            Visa/Mastercard/Google etc… are multibillion dollar companies and care only about money, and they quickly realized that supporting apps catering to small niche markets with a very high negative impact on most of the public opinion was not worth it.
            Companies can stop serving customers if they breach a contracts/terms of service.
            Gab, Parler, are still there, they managed to have a somehow viable business model, they are just not mainstream because most of the people do not care and do not like them and major service providers do not feel it is worth for them to support them. It is never about high principles or political views. You have viable business that (legally) sell landmines or other businesses that (illegally) sell narcotics. If there is a big business opportunity someone will pursue it. It is just not as big as you might think. That does not mean that there is a lot of right-leaning people, it is just that anything catering only to the left or to the right is cutting is customer base in half even before starting, and the more extremist your content is, the smaller will be your potential customer base.
            Regards

            • EDIT: “That does not mean that there is NOT a lot of right-leaning people, it is just that anything catering only to the left or to the right is cutting is customer base in half even before starting, and the more extremist your content is, the smaller will be your potential customer base.
              Regards”

      • Yep. The lefties are in full TDS freakout mode now.

        Seems they are only happy if they own or control the communication channel(s) as you say.

      • Do you ever just sit back and actually think about what you’re saying, or is it just reflexive right wing dumbassery morning, noon, and night with you?

  9. I donā€™t get it about meta, why pushing this crap stuff ? Zuk donā€™t understand that nobody want it! When I talk to my friend, this get absolutely no interest

  10. The amout of whining about those firings, required to keep the companhy afloat, was unbelievable. How he dared firing all those precious snowflake human right experts and world class censors?

    As if it was the first boss ever to hand off pink slips by the truckload to save a sinking boat.

    If they are so world class, they won’t have problems finding jobs somewhere else.

    Oh wait, Meta is also in a massive layoff? too bad. I guess it’s no more being paid to censor the Orange Man Bad and his evil followers.

    • I’ve been a software developer for a quarter of a century and I didn’t hear a single thing about the Twitter workplace that made it sound like a place where people do work.

      • Agree. Not a single comment I’ve seen is about laying off core developers or technical staff, even if a number of them were let go, maybe.

        Seems the firing squad is at full throttle trimming the fat, cutting the people dedicated to censoring and defining what gets said or not.

        And that’s what causes the lefties’ freakout.

        • But I’m sure they would not dare to lay off their “Director of Diversity” or whatever exists as that at Twitter.

        • Maybe that’s what the story about “lines of code” mean?
          It’s not ranking code writers by how many symbols they use to create an algorithm.
          It’s ranking all the employees and seeing which ones don’t do any code at all.

  11. If what Iā€™ve been told about plans to make the ā€˜Blue Checkmark of Shameā€™ purchasable for $8 a month and effectively shadow ban everyone not paying by putting them far below all the posts and replies of Blue Checks is true Iā€™d not recommend buying or holding Twitter stock ever again. Is it really changing itā€™s name to ā€œXā€? There were no cringier options?

    I wonder what will replace social media now that itā€™s all going down the tube.

    • I say this not as a knee-jerk opponent of Musk. Iā€™m not happy with his attempts at international diplomacy and I donā€™t think he is the super-genius his fans feel he is but I have admired his ambition on certain projects. Twitter was in severe need of a coup or a collapse and I held out hope for Muskā€™s takeover fixing itā€™s many problems. In a sense it has the way that euthanasia fixes many problematic medical conditions.

      • I’m sure it’s going to be a real ego blow to previously blue checked users, but this is actually a viable anti-bot strategy; Bot nets are only economically viable as long as individual bots are essentially free. Even a small charge makes the bot net tactic economically crazy.

        So the blue check has changed from meaning “Important person!” to “Real person!”. My heart bleeds for the people who thought they were important.

        • It will eliminate some bots, but corporations already pay over 1 usd on pay pr click advertising. Spending 8000, or 80000 for an army is small beans.

          Itā€™s pay to win. I just hope they are willing to turn down the 8 bucks if they suspect itā€™s a bot.

          • As per Musk discourse, he’s really against bots that try passing for people, while barking their programmed bollocks ad nauseam for someone’s benefit.

            But not the bots per se. If a bot announces itself as such and it’s easy to know its owner, it’s not a problem.

        • Yep, anyone that wants to put an email in one of my accounts should have to pay me a penny. That wouldn’t stop anyone with something to say. It wouldn’t stop me from sending any email I have ever deemed worthy of sending. But it sure would kill all the spam instantly.

          • I had thought about a digital stamp to limit spam, but your idea of paying the receiver
            beats it. No more hate mail, and everybody happy to receive.

          • I’ve been proposing “My 2 cents worth” – original tweets are free, but posting a response costs 2 cents, and up-voting/liking a post costs 2 cents. One cent (of each 2) goes to Twitter, one cent goes to the original poster being responded to, who collects the money by viewing the response.
            Has similar impact on spam bots and hateful responses. Bootstraps Musk’s payment system. Other benefits.

    • So for $8 you can rise above the bots? Sounds pretty good.

      Mrs. Combinatorics is eagerly awaiting paying $8 a month so Musk is doing something right.

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