If they only intend to maintain it's basically dead - where is the turnaround going to come from ?

Yup, seems like they could scratch zero from that number for such simple product, even the apps can be just wrappers for website.

It's a tip of the iceberg. The part you see - the UI - is a small part, the complexity is in the backend (advertising/marketing tools, content moderation, metrics, devops etc).

Musk being the archetypal Mr First Principles Guy, he probably thought just the same: "it's a simple webapp, how hard can it be?"

I think Elon should invest in some internal tooling that Twitter can take advantage of, such as infrastructure management or ad dashboards.

We don’t know the code complexity.