The cheapest way to downsize is to have employees quit of their own accord. Removing benefits like WFH incentives this.
This is why I found reading his published chat messages [0] so interesting.
From the horse's mouth (the horse in this case being Jason Calacanis) to Musk, when talking about restructuring:
> "2 day a week Office requirement= 20% voluntary departures"
So it does seem possible that this could be at least partly driving this.
As an aside: The other interesting nugget in the msg logs was discussion about taking Twitter private to restructure (because it would require haemorrhaging users while they cleaned up bots etc. - and also likely because you wouldn't be able to take such aggressive actions re. mass sackings in quite the same way when public) and then going public again once this restructuring process has been completed.
Basically, if an employee is consistently given a perk for a certain time, said perk implicitly becomes part of the contract and taking it away allows the worker to quit receiving the same compensation as if they've been fired.
Law of unintended consequences and all that.
The only way this would make sense as a downsizing tactic would be if you believe that employees that prefer to work remote (enough to the point where they would consider quitting) are significantly worse than the average Twitter employee.