Even before Elon Musk offered to buy Twitter, the social media company was apparently already looking to downsize. Twitter’s current management planned to layoff nearly a quarter of the workforce and make infrastructure cuts that could hinder its ability to moderate harmful content and prevent hacks by the end of next year, the Washington Post reported Thursday. However dramatic those cuts, what could be coming under Musk is even more radical: according to the Post, “Musk told prospective investors in his deal to buy the company that he planned to get rid of nearly 75 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 workers, whittling the company down to a skeleton staff of just over 2,000.”

The news of these cuts—both those that Twitter had planned (some of which were put on hold pending Musk’s offer this spring) and the ones Musk proposed—comes as users wonder how their experience may change if/when the Tesla CEO buys Twitter. The $44 billion deal, after much back and forth, is expected to close by the end of the month. Data scientist Edwin Chen, a former Twitter executive who oversaw Twitter’s spam and health metrics, told the Post that Musk’s proposed cuts would be “unimaginable,” and would create a scenario in which “you’d have services going down and the people remaining not having the institutional knowledge to get them back up.”

Twitter's staff has been well aware of Musk's eye towards layoffs; he suggested his plans to fire under performers in a virtual town hall with employees in June. Documents reviewed by the Post showed “extensive plans” to cut staff and infrastructure costs—“including data centers that keep the site functioning for more than 200 million users that log on each day”—before Musk offered to buy the social media company. In the wake of the Post report on Thursday, Twitter General Counsel Sean Edgett sent an email to staff saying that cost-savings discussions occurred earlier in the year but “stopped once the merger agreement was signed” and “there have been no plans for any companywide layoffs” since, according to Bloomberg. “We do not have any confirmation of the buyer’s plans following close,” Edgett wrote, warning staff to expect “tons of public rumors and speculation” as the closing nears.

Corporate governance expert Nell Minow seemed skeptical of how Musk’s planned cuts would work in practice. “He’s got to be able to show if he makes those cuts, what happens next?” she told the Post. “What’s he gonna replace it with, AI?” There's been a lot of speculation: my colleague Nick Bilton recently surmised that Musk would "take the company private, fire the board of directors, fire a lot of the staff, and then rebuild it from there,” while likely adding some new features and integrations with his other companies along the way. Per the Post, Musk reportedly told associates that mass layoffs would be “the first step to executing a turnaround strategy that would then involve bringing in more effective workers and profitable innovations.”