Apparently, Musk looked at places he could make cost cuts and decided that engineering teams, including those supporting the main Twitter app, technical infrastructure to keep Twitter's systems running, and advertising technology were surplus to requirements.  We don't know how he reached this conclusion, because we are not business geniuses like he is, but we guess he would not finding enough praise from those who knew what they were doing.

Twitter product manager Esther Crawford has also been laid off from the company. Crawford spearheaded various projects on Twitter, such as the company's planned payments platform and the Blue subscription service that allowed anyone with $8 to get their own verification badge. She was one of the people behind the "Official" label that Twitter launched in November of last year as a way to distinguish between Blue subscribers with checkmarks and accounts that are verified as official.

Crawford appeared to be following what ever daft idea Musk was coming up with including his galley slave work rules. Evan Jones, one of her former colleagues, tweeted a photo of her on the floor with a sleeping bag and eye mask. Crawford acknowledged the tweet, saying that "When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork."

Martijn de Kuijper, the founder of the defunct Revue newsletter platform that Twitter acquired in 2021, was also given the pink slip.

All this seems odd as Musk recently said in an interview that he wants to stabilise Twitter, make sure the company is in a financially healthy place, and that the product roadmap is clearly laid out. We doubt you can run a technology company without engineers, but then as Musk would tell us, we are not business genius like he is.