Setting aside the political reasons for less advertising revenue, it's still running and there are 200M DAU. Many ex-employees swore the servers would catch fire by now.
> Many ex-employees swore the servers would catch fire by now.
They've 'caught on fire' many times, such as the time login/2fa broke, or the weeks/months where you were rate-limited to only a few hundred interactions per day.
Wrong. A substantial number of advertisers dropped X.com because it isn't brand safe (for example their ads are located next to racist or Nazi or pornographic content). A substantial number of the staff let go were involved in keeping the site brand safe.
Aren't the two disconnected? The revenue lost is a result of advertisers not wanting to be connected to Musk's politics. Downsizing isn't what caused that.
Musk got rid of the people who owned the relationships with the brands and agencies that drove the ad revenue. Burning those relationships plus getting rid of content moderators made sure advertisers were very skeptical of being on the platform. Then there's the GARM lawsuit causing that tiny org to shut down, suing another non-profit for point out brand safety issues, etc.
I thought the advertisers pulling out was more a direct result of the tweets he posted or liked. Perhaps those relationships were strained already due to what you've pointed out, but I don't know that those employees could have made a difference in relation to those posts.
Firing the teams that manage moderation and letting Coca-Cola and Nike paid for ads show along side Nazi and porn content, basically allowing the ad side of the platform to go to shit, is actually much of the reason for the advertiser exodus.
I'm starting to see ads during Great Replacement and Kill The Brown People threads on Twitter. It's not pushing me towards buying a product or clicking an ad.
Twitter is just a relatively simple website, though. They aren’t doing anything particularly complex or innovative and aren’t releasing any new products.
It could survive for years in maintenance mode as long as people continue using it.
Letting go of 80%of intel’s employees and the company is dead in weeks other than a skeleton crew of lawyers, bean counters, and top level execs stuffing their golden parachutes with maximum parachute.