My best guess is that in Musk’s model, purchasing Twitter only makes him the legal owner. On a practical level, he has to figure out how to take power at Twitter. He wants to be able to radically change Twitter, but Twitter’s former staff mostly wanted to retain the status quo.
So regardless of the effect on short-term profitability, the right move for Musk was to create chaos. His power to reshape Twitter increases as whatever power networks that might have been capable of resisting his influence get thrashed by massive and unpredictable firings. He is creating an environment where he is in his element: small enough to understand, weak enough that employees know he’s willing to suffer sharp short-term social and monetary costs in order to keep control, malleable enough to reshape at his will.
So read it all as a costly signal: “I am in charge, I can torch this company, I will burn your job arbitrarily just to show you I’m not afraid to do it, there is nothing you can do to humiliate me that will make me change course. Comply or be fired, and have no doubt that I will gleefully fire you.”
My best guess is that in Musk’s model, purchasing Twitter only makes him the legal owner. On a practical level, he has to figure out how to take power at Twitter. He wants to be able to radically change Twitter, but Twitter’s former staff mostly wanted to retain the status quo.
So regardless of the effect on short-term profitability, the right move for Musk was to create chaos. His power to reshape Twitter increases as whatever power networks that might have been capable of resisting his influence get thrashed by massive and unpredictable firings. He is creating an environment where he is in his element: small enough to understand, weak enough that employees know he’s willing to suffer sharp short-term social and monetary costs in order to keep control, malleable enough to reshape at his will.
So read it all as a costly signal: “I am in charge, I can torch this company, I will burn your job arbitrarily just to show you I’m not afraid to do it, there is nothing you can do to humiliate me that will make me change course. Comply or be fired, and have no doubt that I will gleefully fire you.”
I don’t really know about this or about this type of stuff in general, but my instinct is to disagree with your guess due to Occam’s Razor reasons.