Your comment continues to presume that there is a specific correct value or range of values. That's simply not the case. The list of potential reasons is long because there are a lot of contributing reasons.
What are Twitter's goals pre-buyout? Are those the same as Twitter's goals post-buyout? What are the decisions the company makes in pursuing those goals, in each of those contexts?
Analyzing all the decisions that brought Twitter or any other company to a specific count of employees is an extensive undertaking, and would require extraordinary memory and honesty of a huge number of people. And you'll still have a giant pile of decisions that could have gone either way depending on slight changes in conditions.
>No, I was replying to a comment that was attempting to justify ~7000 as a reasonable figure for what Twitter’s app needs to do.
Let's look at the comment you were replying to:
>If you view Twitter as a 'service for posting 140 characters', they don't need 7000 employees.
>If you view it as a 'service for supporting five billion dollars worth of ad spend across the entire world', with all the proprietary software, ads front-ends, ads back-ends and reporting services, weird one-off partner integrations, ads account management, sales, advertiser support, moderation and compliance, legal compliance... Well, all that quickly adds up to a lot of headcount.
You characterize this comment as justifying ~7000 as a reasonable figure "for what Twitter's app needs to do." The comment makes an important distinction between what you might need to run the most essential aspects of a thing that allows Twitter-like social media interactions to occur versus an enterprise that leverages those social media interactions as one part of a larger system. It says outright that you wouldn't likely need 7k just for the essential "let people make tweets" aspect.
TBH you appear to be the one with comprehension issues in this thread.
Its very simple if you think about it. Can you think of other web services with the scale and popularity comparable to Twitter that run on much lower headcounts?
Go ahead and make a Twitter clone this weekend. There are plenty of tutorials. Then let's assume you go viral and now your little service needs to scale. Then the email and issues start to come in. Now you have to balance fixing bugs and tending to customer support. Oh, are you going to outsource all cloud services or hire a 200k+ a year SRE to scale it out? One wont be enough you will soon find out. Did yo do your research on compliance? Are you sure your app is legal in every country it serves? Pretty soon you have a team whose salaries + benefits are costing you several million dollars a year. And you only have 10 people.
I could go on and on. Yes, creating a twitter clone is trivial. Scaling it and tending to real customers is a completely different story.
Telegram doesn't have "more functionality". It's significantly less performant and it doesn't have any global search or sophisticated recommendations system. It's also pretty lightly moderated.
What are Twitter's goals pre-buyout? Are those the same as Twitter's goals post-buyout? What are the decisions the company makes in pursuing those goals, in each of those contexts?
Analyzing all the decisions that brought Twitter or any other company to a specific count of employees is an extensive undertaking, and would require extraordinary memory and honesty of a huge number of people. And you'll still have a giant pile of decisions that could have gone either way depending on slight changes in conditions.