Twitter has remained functional largely because all the former employees did their jobs effectively. I've seen what happens when companies lay a tech department to waste and it looks like this. This is a one-way cost reduction program that will forever reduce the quality of workers available to the company.
The way this pans out is that in the short term, nothing much happens except deadlines start to get pushed out. As time goes on everything becomes more and more dysfunctional. All progress grinds to a halt; simply treading water created by ongoing churn and operational needs ends up becoming impossible. Next the business tries to get more and more out of the remaining staff until they get fed up with it and leave. Shortly before the wheels really come off, legal and compliance issues will suddenly start ballooning. That's where we are now. Nobody wants to work on these kind of projects -- they do nothing for your career and nobody will celebrate your work -- but they are not optional. Elon seems to have decided simply not to comply with laws he dislikes in regulatory environments where he thinks he can get away with it. This can work for a while, but companies with no internal governance and that regularly flout laws can don't tend to last for too long without making painful changes. Let's see how it turns out. Given the reported state of the company it sounds like he has about a year to figure it out.
The way this pans out is that in the short term, nothing much happens except deadlines start to get pushed out. As time goes on everything becomes more and more dysfunctional. All progress grinds to a halt; simply treading water created by ongoing churn and operational needs ends up becoming impossible. Next the business tries to get more and more out of the remaining staff until they get fed up with it and leave. Shortly before the wheels really come off, legal and compliance issues will suddenly start ballooning. That's where we are now. Nobody wants to work on these kind of projects -- they do nothing for your career and nobody will celebrate your work -- but they are not optional. Elon seems to have decided simply not to comply with laws he dislikes in regulatory environments where he thinks he can get away with it. This can work for a while, but companies with no internal governance and that regularly flout laws can don't tend to last for too long without making painful changes. Let's see how it turns out. Given the reported state of the company it sounds like he has about a year to figure it out.