IMHO Elon Musk is the smart one: After buying Twitter at a clearly inflated cost he trims the bloat and inefficiency out of the company ahead of the entire tech industry, keeps the best and brightest who are committed to making his company and their careers successful, and works to create a business model that will ensure profitability rather than a liberal college campus country club environment. Then as all the other tech firms make deep cuts to their staff he announces Twitter’s hiring and now has a chance to selectively expand his staff with more of the best and brightest who are committed to making his company and their new careers a success.

(If you have the just the right combination of talent (skills), management (direction), challenge (motivation), and compensation (gotta pay the bills!) the resulting personal & team satisfaction will result in tremendous productivity and usually (but not guaranteed) financial and career success. Achieving that combination, however, is rare, as it’s almost always driven by a strong, charismatic and perhaps even slightly psychopathic leader. During my entire career I’ve only been part of that “right combination” 3 times…but, I digress )

Of course the difference is that Elon Musk, once the darling of Liberals who rushed to buy his Tesla electric cars in droves, is now an evil, greedy, capitalist while other, apparently more liberal and socially-aware tech firms like Alphabet, Microsoft, etc. lay off essentially an entire Twitter’s worth of employees. The constant negative press being levied against Musk – some of it potentially life-threatening – makes the media’s attacks on Donald Trump and his Presidency look like a kindergarten coloring exercise.

Now big firms don’t instantly decide to cut thousands of employees: They’re smart enough to develop their technology plans and budgets at least a year in advance, and many (like the firm I work for) develop a long term plan looking 3-5 years ahead. And, some large firms are not only big enough to see how the market and economy will develop…they’re big enough to actually influence them.

Thanks for Reading!