It's entirely self inflicted. A bunch of the headcount is thrown at exploratory initiatives which aren't necessary for keeping the lights on. The leadership has done an incredibly bad job at diversification (compared to Google for example). If the Metaverse was successful and revenue generating, the "true" headcount of non-bullshit jobs would be larger for example.

Also the company is publicly traded, Twitter is a private company. The stock is priced at a current forward multiple which expects future growth. If the ads growth story stops happening (and they're not diversifying in other lanes, which it seems like they're incapable of doing), the stock is going to take a hit. "Keeping the lights on" is not going to pan out well in this case.

Also if you fire 60%, how do you (the hypothetical CEO) identify who to fire if every manager at every level of the chain is incentivized to lie to you and overstate the significance of what they're doing? There is no precision here.

I also think it would be good for the industry, too many really talented people are tied up in these super high paying jobs at the top companies, when they could be contributing elsewhere (the "golden handcuffs" effect).

In fact it was always my assumption that companies with basically unstoppable revenue streams (Google, Facebook, Visa, etc.) were, in part, overpaying and over-hiring just to remove the top end of talent from the market completely, and reduce the risk of being disrupted from startups and smaller competitors. It's interesting that they are finally backing away from that - I imagine that the AI boom has made them feel threatened for the first time in a long time.