SAN FRANCISCO--Brash business magnate Elon Musk may yet prove to be the salvation of Twitter Inc., despite laying off half the work force after acquiring the social media company for an eye-watering $44 billion (5.8 trillion yen).

That comes from a Japanese software engineer who was eventually caught up in mass firings that at the outset in early November targeted 3,700 employees after Musk declared Twitter had “unlimited potential.”

“I thought Twitter would not exist in 10 years if some big changes weren’t made,” said the engineer, who is highly regarded by U.S. media. “I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but I thought Musk was the best person to make a big change.”

The engineer, who goes by the handle @nabokov7, asked to be identified only as Ihara when he agreed to be interviewed by The Asahi Shimbun in early December.

A lot has happened since then, often at breakneck speed. Seemingly hardly a day goes by without some new twist in the saga with Twitter and Musk.

The interview was conducted around the time Musk reinstated the accounts of neo-Nazis on the platform and engaged with them on his timeline. The account of U.S. white supremacist Andrew Anglin was restored in early December.

Musk insists he is a champion of free speech, yet he banned journalists who criticized him. And, in the latest turn of events, he announced he will step down as Twitter chief executive officer after he finds a replacement.

“I was excited that Elon Musk was coming,” Ihara recalled as he looked back on Musk’s initial foray into acquiring Twitter in April.

The South African-born entrepreneur, one of the world’s richest men, has hugely varied business interests. To name two, he is the chief executive officer of electric automobile maker Tesla Inc. and the private space exploration company SpaceX.

Ihara’s assessment of Musk stands in sharp contrast to the widely held negative view in the tech world to the entrepreneur’s presence on the prominent global platform.

What is clear is that Twitter is in a state of flux, its direction uncertain and tech policy unclear. Musk has not faced any direct challenge to his dictatorial ways, and that may well be his legacy.

Ihara worked at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters leading a team of a dozen or so people handling machine learning (ML), which determines the order of Twitter users’ posts on its timeline. He joined the company in 2012 and worked at the main office until he was let go.

In 2017, Twitter upped the number of characters allowed in a single tweet in English from 140 to 280. Ihara played a pivotal role in the project by liaising directly with Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder.

Reaction to Musk’s ownership of Twitter was largely negative within the company, Ihara noted, although some employees viewed him as a visionary not averse to taking risks.

“He’s no good,” was a typical refrain Ihara recalled colleagues saying. “There was an atmosphere where I couldn’t say openly that Musk was good.”

‘SIGNS TWITTER WAS DYING’

Prior to Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, Ihara was involved in other research projects outside his regular work, similar to his “280 characters" project.

In October, Reuters published internal Twitter documents stating that the company’s “heavy users,” who account for less than 10 percent of overall monthly users but generate 90 percent of overall tweets, are in “absolute decline” as they move to other services.

“There were signs that Twitter was slowly dying,” Ihara recalled.

In mid-November, Musk fired off an in-house email to employees exhorting them to “be hardcore” and “work hard for long hours,” or quit if they weren’t up to the task.

“I’ll follow him,” Ihara decided as he replied “yes” to Musk’s email without hesitation.

Musk’s unorthodox way of doing business soon triggered loud grumbling among employees with his habit of shooting off emails to them in the middle of the night, only to change his mind in the morning.

Ihara’s day of reckoning came out of the blue one such morning with an email from Musk ordering employees to come to the office at 2 p.m. that day.

“I want you to send me a summary of the code you’ve written in the past few months and the revision history of the code you’ve written,” Musk wrote.

Ihara sent the code he developed and headed to the company assuming he would be safe from any layoffs. But no matter how long he waited, Musk never showed up.

“At that point, it was easier to understand if I looked at him like he was the president of a small company rather than a billionaire. He was like an old man who sent us an email saying, ‘Everyone, follow me,’” Ihara said.

“People in the tech industry trust and care about others. Twitter didn’t have a cap on paid vacation, but Musk might have come from a culture where if your company says employees could take unlimited vacations, they would literally take unlimited vacations.”

Still, Ihara couldn’t avoid the wave of layoffs after surviving large-scale personnel cuts in early November.

On Nov. 23, the day before Thanksgiving, while Ihara and his co-workers were talking on a private group on the messenger app, a co-worker got very upset after receiving a layoff notice.

It wasn’t long before Ihara, too, lost access to the company’s computer system and email account, and found himself frozen out. The dismissal letter, which arrived in a private email, simply said, “your code was not satisfactory.”

SERVER DOWNTIME ‘MAY BE LONGER’

“I was doing my job properly. It was like a (Korean drama) ‘Squid Game’ where I didn’t know the rules.”

Ihara had held high hopes Musk could turn the company around although he was concerned about the human cost.

According to Ihara, some departments were stripped of engineers who support critical infrastructure. The number of rotating teams known as “on-call” to deal with server downtime also dwindled, and people from related departments were brought in to watch over them.

Ihara was also scheduled to help out the following week, but then was abruptly dismissed.

“It was a miracle that Twitter survived the group stage of the World Cup soccer where the number of posts surged. We won’t run out of data, but the number of servers’ downtimes may increase in the future,” he said.

Regarding Musk’s aggressively cost-cutting, Ihara said: “I guess he’s used to moving his nerve-bearing hands and feet within the range of his own nerves. I get the impression that he wants to make the company an organization that is lean and agile.”

But whether that will work is a “race against time,” he said.

“Which should come first, limiting functions to the minimum so that they can be run by fewer people, or having the existing system become dysfunctional? It’s not something that will break in a day or two. But you will see how things will work out in the coming months,” Ihara said.