A huge amount of staffing cuts were to teams working on things like moderation or combating bots, which are areas Elon doesn't care about continuing development on. He's not so much doing more with less but rather doing less with less. We can debate about whether or not the projects he cut were worthwhile, but given the company's disastrous finances I wouldn't give him the benefit of the doubt.
The bull case is that he sacrificed Twitter capital in exchange for political capital, which I think is pretty sound. But that doesn't really apply to most CEOs running most businesses.
Good point. I shouldn't have said more with less. I should've said Twitter lost 80% of its employees and somehow still exists (I thought it was "only" 50%). 80% is nuts. That said, if 100% of those reductions were outside of engineering (they weren't, I realize) then I'd mostly agree with your point. But I do think that even in that case it would cause every other company to ask some hard questions about staffing that could lead to layoffs and/or have implications for hiring.
All feels on my part just to hopefully add to the dialogue. Nothing scientific here.