> The cheapest way to downsize is to have employees quit of their own accord. Removing benefits like WFH incentives this.
This is why I found reading his published chat messages [0] so interesting.
From the horse's mouth (the horse in this case being Jason Calacanis) to Musk, when talking about restructuring:
> "2 day a week Office requirement= 20% voluntary departures"
So it does seem possible that this could be at least partly driving this.
As an aside: The other interesting nugget in the msg logs was discussion about taking Twitter private to restructure (because it would require haemorrhaging users while they cleaned up bots etc. - and also likely because you wouldn't be able to take such aggressive actions re. mass sackings in quite the same way when public) and then going public again once this restructuring process has been completed.
This is exactly why in my country the law uses the concept of 'acquired rights'.
Basically, if an employee is consistently given a perk for a certain time, said perk implicitly becomes part of the contract and taking it away allows the worker to quit receiving the same compensation as if they've been fired.
Most high GDP countries don't have a business culture of optimizing for maximum cash in the owners hand at all possible costs, and indeed, even are interested in giving their employees a fair shake. Most places understand that employees are valuable and deserve dignity and respect, and have taken steps to ensure they get it.
People that quit voluntarily are always skewed towards the high end, because better employees have an easier time finding another job with similar benefits/pay but has that one thing they want.
The only way this would make sense as a downsizing tactic would be if you believe that employees that prefer to work remote (enough to the point where they would consider quitting) are significantly worse than the average Twitter employee.
