It is likely they will try to maintain the total comp levels for at least a year, meanwhile they will reassess the entire talent pool and make whatever correction they deem necessary. Twitter has no meaningful assets other than the talented people that work there. If sufficient number of critical talent leave (intentionally or accidentally), it could hurt twitter significantly in the near term. People from other industries sometimes don't get this – in a live internet app service, software code has very short shelf life. It starts to rot/smell very quickly if there aren't engineers who understand it tending to it. Without engineers who understand the codebase well, it usually results in more frequent outages in production, super slow productivity in adding features, and any feature change resulting in buggy/broken functionality etc. Bringing in new engineers who can dig out a working understanding of the code, then refactor/rewrite the whole thing can be done - but it requires talent that is very scarce and even then it is super slow – likely multiple quarters to couple of years – for any such transition.
Your argument that there are key people at twitter that need to stay on to keep up understanding of the code makes sense to me. But I don't think the following quote is true:
> Twitter has no meaningful assets other than the talented people that work there.
I think the main asset of twitter is their userbase and more importantly their brand. The simple fact that twitter is at the core of politics and the news-cycle is where most of the value at twitter comes from.
Twitter's engineers are vital to keeping twitter running. But that doesn't make it an asset. It's not something you can sell on or somehow convert into cash.
Not to trivialize Twitter's infrastructure and the people who keep it running--remember the fail whale?--but the #1 through #10 reasons of why it would/will be very difficult for anyone/ones to stand up another Twitter is that everyone (to a first approximation) is on Twitter and the vast majority won't move somewhere else or they'll try moving to a bunch of different places.
It will take very little disruption to the service quality (think slow/janky app, service/feature outages, buggy functionality like search/filter not working reliably) for users to flee the service and move on to the next happening thing. The current user base twitter has is a result of key input activities – stable/performant software service at scale, growth hacking and marketing to cultivate/retain high-profile content generators/curators, third party tools ecosystem for whale users etc. Each of these things are not in a stable equilibrium. They need constant attention to keep them working. That requires talent AND understanding of current systems/mechanics. So if I were buying a service like Twitter, I would consider the brand/userbase as output (it is what I'm valuing, but not what I'm buying) and consider the code/mechanics and the talent that goes with it as the input (what I'm really buying).
