Coming from a software engineer perspective comparing a company like X to T is a bit silly.
X is a software product, most of the additional staff that Elon cut are probably related to HR, accounting, “event organizing”, “outreach”, “harm reduction”, and a bunch of other side projects that didn’t related to the product in question (X/Twitter).
I hear he didn’t actually cut many of the people who ACTUALLY worked on Twitter (developers).
There’s also the fact that T has a large physical infrastructure to maintain which can’t be accomplished by a few devs remotely.
X/Twitter infrastructure is likely all cloud based or hosted by an external partner therefore all the infrastructure and maintenance responsibilities fall onto a third party and X is only responsible for maintaining the codebase and deployment of said infrastructure (as in the cloud deployment spec, Kubernetes, docker containers, load balancers, DNS, etc).
This is a much more manageable task for a small team of skilled developers than it is for a legacy company with a ton of first-party infrastructure spread out across the entire country of various types and different manufacturers that all adhere to no standard (Ericsson vs Nokia)
For a purely software based product like Twitter, the number of employees was pretty crazy but I suspect they had plans to try and grow the company, and they were overly concerned with moderation and other “priorities “ they felt were important.
T needs a minimum level of employees to remain minimally functional, coming from a development perspective we’ve lost tons of talent and with the Ericsson migration are severely overworked already. RTO and layoffs have been devastating to productivity and the Ericsson migration is a complete cluster due to incompetence of Ericsson software team.