"Elon could have come in, aligned the website to be a lot more neutral"
How?
"slimmed down the employee count"
Why would you care about this? How could he know which half of the company should be fired? How does this improve Twitter?
" and pushed for more features and more payments for features to get away from dependence on advertisers."
Besides paying to be verified, a system which changed rapidly over weeks being enabled and disabled, what else did he do?
"I saw some headline a few weeks ago about Japanese trending on Twitter went from a whole bunch of political stuff to more neutral cultural stuff"
What does this mean? That the Japanese Twitter population all shifted to discussing culture over politics? Why would they do that? What does it have to do with Elon Musk taking over?
"Stuff like that is what I wanted to see."
Culture is shaped by politics, at least to some degree. Also "culture wars"
Look to that example about Japan.
The idea is that the Japanese Twitter population did not shift over to discussing culture over politics. Instead, the tags were being pushed towards politics, and once they stopped being pushed they returned back to something neutral.
The people who were pushing the tags in that direction were removed. I want to see a website like Twitter have absolutely no people are ever interested in doing something like that.
For the employee account, it's not something I care about personally, but from the perspective of Twitter as a business, being able to have a smaller number of better employees is ultimately a win because the company is able to do more with less money, and be more successful as a result.
How?
"slimmed down the employee count"
Why would you care about this? How could he know which half of the company should be fired? How does this improve Twitter?
" and pushed for more features and more payments for features to get away from dependence on advertisers."
Besides paying to be verified, a system which changed rapidly over weeks being enabled and disabled, what else did he do?
"I saw some headline a few weeks ago about Japanese trending on Twitter went from a whole bunch of political stuff to more neutral cultural stuff"
What does this mean? That the Japanese Twitter population all shifted to discussing culture over politics? Why would they do that? What does it have to do with Elon Musk taking over?
"Stuff like that is what I wanted to see."
Culture is shaped by politics, at least to some degree. Also "culture wars"