I think the employees are pretty expensive to keep, even compared to other tech companies. Twitter now has a lot of debt to service from the acquisition and I think the employees now get cash instead of RSUs (paid based on the acquisition price) whereas employees at other tech companies have effectively seen comp decrease as the stock prices went down.
So there might be some philosophical attempt to reduce headcount. There might also be some attempt to hire more later and at a lower price (or at least one that isn’t artificially high).
This is a great point. Employees at Twitter may be vesting RSUs that need to be converted at Elon's inflated purchase price. Even laying off those people today and rehiring all of them tomorrow would save the company a boatload of money.
So there might be some philosophical attempt to reduce headcount. There might also be some attempt to hire more later and at a lower price (or at least one that isn’t artificially high).