Joseph Vazquez
Reprinted from PA Pundits – International
Joseph Vazquez is the MRC Associate Editor for Business & Free Speech America. He graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in Political Science from The George Washington University in 2018. In June, 2019, he completed an exclusive fellowship with the Hertog Foundation, where he participated in their “Nuclear Strategy and World Order” program. For MRC Business, he oversees projects and media coverage concerning dark money, political spending, economics and finance. In addition, his oversight includes Free Speech America’s CensorTrack project, which involves documenting cases of Big Tech bias against conservatives and crafting censorship studies accordingly.
It appears the liberal media doomsaying over how Twitter owner Elon Musk was supposedly going to make the company implode by cutting the old regime’s censorship-obsessed workforce in half was nothing but noise. And even a Washington Post columnist had to eat crow.
Post columnist Megan McArdle was blunt in her Feb. 19 op-ed: “How Elon Musk fired Twitter staff and broke nothing.” She admitted right off the bat that she was “incredulous” when “Musk said he was going to cut up to 75 per cent of Twitter’s workforce last year.”
McArdle noted that she initially viewed Musk’s workforce overhaul as “over the top,” “so obviously irrational” and she pointed to an October 2022 column where she lambasted Musk’s method as nonsensical.
“Layoffs of that magnitude mean critical operations running at half strength,” she said at the time. But now, in retrospect, it seems McArdle has had a change in perspective. “[S]ure, in the end, he only laid off half the staff, but … half the staff! Yet the site is still running,” she said.
McArdle said that Twitter’s ability to keep chugging along despite Musk gutting its workforce raises questions about how many of the cut positions were even necessary to begin with:
Sure, there have been transient service issues, often accompanied by apocalyptic predictions (on Twitter) of the platform’s imminent demise. But if there has been an outflow of users (hard to say, now that Twitter is private), it seems to be driven by political objections to Musk, rather than a decline in the technical quality of service. Which raises a question: If Twitter can get by for three months on a fraction of its staff, how many of those folks were actually necessary, [emphasis added].
McArdle’s about-face flies against the babbling liberal media anti-Musk squad which acted like his staff crackdown was a display of incompetence for months.
NPR castigated Musk based on comments made by an unnamed tech lawyer. The outlet claimed that Musk’s ultimatum to employees – work harder or leave – “not only hurts his employees, but also the platform’s ability to operate seamlessly and to earn a profit.” NPR whined in its Nov. 17, 2022 propaganda that “Musk’s actions are also likely costing the company qualified talent and more money in the long run.” Fortune magazine pleaded in a Dec. 2, 2022 story: “Don’t make Elon Musk’s mistakes when hiring and firing in an uncertain economy.”
The leftist former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich attempted to throw a zinger at Musk’s business decisions in a Nov. 21, 2022 column for The Guardian headlined: “Elon Musk went on a firing frenzy at Twitter. Now he’s paying for it.” Apparently, Musk’s choices are “paying” dividends.
The score, for now, is abundantly clear. Musk: 1. Media: 0.
