Available evidence shows that Twitter/X did lay off well over 50% of its employees after Musk’s 2022 takeover, but key business metrics clearly did deteriorate, contradicting Sacks’s claim that there would be “absolutely no impact to the business” and that it would probably “run better.”

Layoffs condition was met (≥50% of staff)

• In November 2022 Twitter cut about 50% of its ~7,500‑person workforce in one round of layoffs. (goodmorningamerica.com)
• Subsequent cuts left about 1,300 employees vs. 7,500 pre‑takeover (roughly an 80% reduction) by early 2023. (cnbc.com)
  So the scenario Sacks described (firing “half … or more”) did in fact occur.

Uptime / reliability: more and larger outages, not “no impact”

• Since the takeover, X has had multiple major global outages, including the largest user‑reported outage since Musk’s purchase in December 2023 (over 94,000 reports). (business-standard.com)
• 2025 saw repeated large disruptions: in March 2025 outages hit tens of thousands of users multiple times in a single day; in May 2025 another outage drew ~25,000 reports, prompting Musk to admit that recent “uptime issues” showed “major operational improvements need to be made.” (cnbc.com)
• Reporting in early 2024/2025 explicitly links these recurring technical problems to drastic staff cuts and loss of institutional knowledge. (businessinsider.com)
  This is inconsistent with the idea that firing half or more of staff caused no operational impact and that the service “probably [runs] better.”

User activity: stagnation and decline in key segments

• Just before the acquisition, Twitter reported 237.8 million monetizable daily active users (mDAU) in Q2 2022, continuing pre‑Musk growth. (twinstrata.com)
• Third‑party data show global daily active app users down ~15% from Sept 2022 to Sept 2023, and U.S. app usage down about 20%. (theguardian.com)
• A 2025 Pew study finds the share of U.S. adults using X fell from 25% in 2021 to 21% in 2025, indicating erosion of its U.S. user base rather than growth. (thedailybeast.com)
  Overall, user activity at best stagnated and in important markets declined, contradicting the claim of no deterioration.

Revenue: sharp, sustained drop vs. pre‑layoff baseline

• Twitter’s revenue peaked around $5.0–5.1 billion in 2021 and was about $4.4 billion in 2022 before going private. (stockanalysis.com)
• Under Musk/X, revenue fell to about $2.9 billion in 2023 and $2.5 billion in 2024, roughly a 50% drop from the 2021 peak and a steep decline from 2022. (businessofapps.com)
• Advertising, the core business, plunged from $4.5 billion in 2021 to about $2.3B in 2023 and $1.7B in 2024, a fall of more than 60%, amid widely reported advertiser flight. (businessofapps.com)
  These are clear, multi‑year deteriorations in a central “business metric” Sacks claimed would be unaffected.

Operational performance / profitability

• Some estimates suggest that after deep cost‑cutting, X’s EBITDA and net profit margins improved (e.g., reports of ~$2.7B revenue but ~$1.3B EBITDA in 2024, and positive net income in 2024–2025). (deepnewz.com)
• But these margin gains came together with lower revenue, advertiser loss, more outages, and user declines in key markets.

Sacks’s prediction was that massive layoffs (50% or more) would cause no deterioration in critical business metrics (uptime, user activity, revenue) and that Twitter would “probably run better.” In reality, while cost cuts improved some profitability metrics, the platform experienced more frequent outages, reduced usage in important segments, and roughly halved revenue. That is a substantial negative impact on the business, so the prediction is best classified as wrong overall.