Love him or hate him, but you cannot ignore Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and the brain behind Tesla, Spacex, Boring Company, Neuralink and the recently added to his portfolio, social media platform Twitter. While many do not agree his management style and term his technique as erratic, for always thinking out of the box, the man sure has a method to his madness. To be fair to him, being so wealthy he could have easily hung up his boots, sold his companies and would never run out of money having a gala time, yet he has chosen to burn the midnight oil solving world problems and expects nothing less from his employees.
Twitter is available to practically any user that gives a chance to convey their feelings, react with anguish or happiness while responding to events, share news, memes, all in a jiffy and free of cost until the Musk takeover. Twitter revenue model is to earn through advertising (85%) and the rest through data licensing. In 2019 they were in the black but in the past 2 years have slipped in the red although their losses narrowed down in 2021. The dip in profits has made it an attractive buy for Elon Musk, but his primary goal is to fix the ills of social media, and also make twitter profitable.
How does one make twitter profitable? Well, cut down expenses and in this case Elon’s priority has been to cut down staff either by firing them or giving them a choice to be prepared to work hardcore or leave. Most employees who were not willing to work long hours resigned. Guess what, even after a massive exodus of employees twitter still runs with no major issues to speak off. What were these excess employees doing in Twitter in the first place? Jokes aside Elon will start rehiring again to make sure the existing employees don’t burnout, but he is not going to the previous employee count. The new employee number will be much less and the ideal number will be enough to run twitter without any hindrance. The rest that mostly loitered around will have no place in the new twitter with most positions cancelled. This should keep a check on future unnecessary employment.
Musk mostly takes decisions in 4x speed, it is natural some decisions are taken on a whim and hence turn out to be wrong, but anyone willing to accept his mistake and rectify should be given the benefit of doubt, given his excellent vision for the universe . So what looks like the #twitterturmoil at the moment, might be a blessing for the company when the dust eventually settles down and he achieves profitability to the company and sanity in general to the social media space, all at the same time. Most twitter competitors have followed Elon and have started downsizing their staff, albeit in a conventional fashion.
These companies have shareholders to answer and while firing employees might look cruel, companies have to walk the fine line of profitability and excess employment. Some positions do get redundant due to technological advances and it becomes the manager’s duty to downsize in the survival of the company. Goa Government is one of the biggest employers, but cannot be compared to private organisations because they have unlimited revenues at their disposable, it does run out of cash sometimes, but has the capability to generate unlimited revenue by taxing the hell out of its citizens. Does not mean we keep generating careless employment endlessly.
For how long will we the citizens fund government employees in Goa? Why does the government invest in technology if the positions cannot be extinguished? Why should the citizens pay for tech and also the salaries of redundant employees? Why go for smart meter reading and pay a bomb for the tech if it is not going to replace the manual readers and their office staff generating inflated bills. Goa must come to terms words like ‘sacked’ or ‘fired’ a little more frequently in an age where tech is replacing most human labour.
Looks like the government has realised its folly that it cannot offer jobs endlessly to win elections. The recent announcement of telling prospective employees to work in the private sector for a year before applying for government jobs is probably the first step in that direction. Putting hurdles at the entry level will mean nothing if you don’t have the guts to fire the surplus that are employed in government. While government needs to retain and recruit more and more technical, medical, teaching, cleaning, environment protectors, law and order staff basically the ones that work on their toes, it can get rid of staff at desks only pushing files. These file pushers have even designed their offices to face each other in a room giving the impression they are at some kitty party.
There is another way Government can downsize its staff in one stroke, bring the retirement age to fifty, yes you heard it right 50, without any exceptions. If any smarty pants, gives the impression that he is indispensible, the government must pull them for not working smart enough in delegating their work. On one hand you have the unemployed Goans knocking at the government doors for jobs while on the other hand you have existing government employees not willing to vacate space. Goans cannot accommodate both, so there has to be some give and take from both sides. Goa can’t expect Elon Musk to do it for us, can we?
(The author is a
business consultant)