I suspect if we look into the advertising revenue we will find that any savings have been wiped out, and not just in the short term. As I posted elsewhere, the “upfront” for on-line advertising is taking place now, this is a time when a sizable percentage of adbudgets for the next year are locked in and contracted for.
And so far, with his reduction in staffing we have seen a dramatic increase in racist tropes (not good for advertisers), hate speech (ditto), impersonations (ditto, including a multi-billion dollar hit to one corporation’s market cap), general trolling, and searches for and increased uses by other, similar, competitive social media companies.
So as bad as the company might have been, it’s inarguably worse now, including the CEO’s public declaration that bankruptcy is an option. Surely there was a better way to handle all of this, and if there wasn’t, who buys a $44B lead weight with no plan, or such a bad plan that contains nothing but “slash everything, see what happens.”