Question: How many people does it take to run a tech company?

Answer: Elon Musk.

But seriously: How many people does it actually take to keep the lights on, or, heaven forbid, grow a tech business?

It’s a salient question these days, not only because of Elon and Twitter, but also because it speaks to the raft of layoffs now hitting Silicon Valley and the tech sector writ large.

Eliminating some jobs makes sense during a downturn, but cutting 50% of a company's workforce raises bigger questions — How were so many people hired in the first place? What were they all doing? And back to the first question, how many are really necessary?

Let’s start with Twitter, because the numbers there are truly mind blowing.

As you’ve probably read, Twitter had 7,500 employees when Elon took over last month and he almost immediately fired half of them. Weeks later he asked those remaining to commit to being “hardcore,” or leave, which resulted in 1,000 or so reportedly departing, leaving Twitter with some 2,700 employees, according to the Verge. All that has prompted many to predict Twitter would soon crash. So far, it hasn’t.

I’m not a huge fan of Elon’s management style — which seems in part to be about getting in touch with his inner 13-year-old boy — but it does make you wonder: if you fired half the workers at the local dairy, I bet some customers wouldn't be getting milk tomorrow.

In the midst of Musk’s bloodletting, Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube and, along with Elon, a PayPal mafioso, tweeted out: “I don't know who needs to hear this but Craigslist has being [sic] running for the last 20+ years with a team of ~50 people.”

True, but an apples to oranges comparison. Craigslist is smaller and has fewer features than Twitter. But Hurley’s tweet does point towards the question Musk seems to be asking at Twitter, which is how much functionality do digital consumers really need?

To help address that, let’s take a look at what’s going on at some other tech companies.