Elon fired roughly 80% of Twitter’s staff without crashing the site the way every “expert” swore it would. After the November 2022 cuts and the “hardcore” ultimatum that drove hundreds of engineers out the door, the remaining team handled record World Cup traffic that was supposed to break the platform. When Musk later told the BBC the cuts were painful but necessary to avoid bankruptcy, the results were already clear. Zuckerberg watched it happen, called 2023 Meta’s “year of efficiency,” and cut about 21,000 jobs while saying the leaner Twitter was probably good for the industry. 4 years later, X still runs on a fraction of the old headcount, which shows the large staff everyone religiously believed was essential was mostly optional the entire time.