Let's say you run a company and you want to reduce staff. Let's also say you want to make an unpopular decision (or multiple unpopular decisions) that you know will drive a certain percentage of your staff to leave the company. Wouldn't it make the most sense to announce those decisions before making layoffs? Let people self select whether they want to stay and work for you and then make your layoffs after to ensure all teams are properly staffed. Instead, Musk has already laid people off to the point that they are trying to hire back people previously laid off and current employees are sleeping in the office. Now he is pushing even more people out the door with no control over what teams will be hurt the hardest.
In 2020 the company I worked for did ~25% temp salary reduction so they could feel safe that they could keep everyone employed and such. 3 months after everyone did it they said "thank you thank you we are so happy we don't need to let anyone go". 2 months later they laid off ~50% of the development team and people throughout the company...
At the end of the year they said no bonuses, followed by an email saying despite covid they made a profit.
Zebra did a 5% salary cut during the start of the pandemic while saving costs on the offices, forced a pto burn, hiring freeze, and then had to spend $500 million to buy another company it wanted to buy.
In what I guess is confusing to many, when a company buys another company, or even purchases capital equipment of some kind, it can finance that by a loan, and the result is that the asset side of the ledger doesn't take a hit. But when a company pays salary, it can't finance that with a loan, as expenditures on salary do cause the asset side to take a hit. This is the difference.
I understand that to many people they seem like they are in the same category of "spending money" but spending money on an income earning investment is not the same as spending money on operating expenses.
If labor isn't an income earning investment for a company when compared to acquiring another company then it sounds like the most mismanaged company ever.
I had a run in with Zebra a few months back. I was impressed by that small interaction. I had no idea they operated this way!
I spoke to people from the UK (seems they were from an AI related acquisition .. not sure what acquisition). They seem to have good infra and intelligent technical people.
My friends and I have no loyalty to our employers at this point. Big or small, we've all been burned. Some places are just less unpleasant than others. My bar is so low that as long as no one is screaming at me or threatening my coworkers I usually call that a good day. Getting out of retail helped.
For now. Things like "learn to code" initiatives teaching everyone including coal miners how to code, the bootcamps and other programs like that are trying to take away this freedom we have. Its an ongoing war between the capital class and everyone else.
Employees need to get everything in writing as part of a contract/agreement. If a company won't put it in writing, then you should assume they are lying.
Touche, no doubt they'll probably try to settle for less than the contract but it still puts you in a much better position and sets an industry standard that is much needed. Otherwise, simply standing up for yourself or asking for a written agreement will get you fired.
> That's literally the raison d'etre of commercial companies
Maybe for some financial companies, perhaps crypto or high-frequency trading firms, I might imagine.
But for most companies, the reason they exist is that they provide some product or service to customers. For example, FedEx delivers packages. Apple makes smartphones and runs its App Store. Netflix provides video streaming services and makes its own programs. Etc.. Without such a product or service, there is little reason for any of these companies to exist.
I've yet to find a company mission statement which is "make as much of a profit as possible." There probably is one somewhere, but they certainly aren't the norm.
If we look at Netflix, for example, we see
"We promise our customers stellar service, our suppliers a valuable partner, our investors the prospects of sustained profitable growth, and our employees the allure of huge impact."
In this statement they acknowledge multiple stakeholders: customers, suppliers, investors, and employees. A company without customers is either a startup or a pyramid scheme.
Even Coca-Cola seems to acknowledge multiple stakeholders:
"FOR A BETTER SHARED FUTURE
• Invest in employees’ personal growth and talent
• Empower people’s access to equal opportunities, build inclusion
• Create value for customers—big and the many small
• Support our local communities, both to achieve more and in times of need
• Deliver returns to our investors"
Well yes, the actual best approach for the wellbeing of employee is to combine these two moves. Give employees the choice between taking a voluntary severance package or coming back to the office. Make it known that a round of layoffs is possible depending on the number of people who take the severance. That way no one is misled into moving and the company doesn't have to be as concerned with the distribution of people who refuse to work in the office.
And let's be honest, Musk isn't doing it in this order for the wellbeing of Twitter's employees.
I don't think I've ever seen a company leave a question of "possible" layoffs up in the air like that. If they happen the announcement is made the same day, otherwise you have people questioning their employment for months.
I was at a medium-sized company (~100 employees) that laid off ~60% of their employees. Including 95% of the dev team. Everyone could see just how much of a bad move it was, and that was only the first bad move.
Most of the remaining skilled employees started looking for new jobs immediately. They could see the writing on the wall. Others just checked out and stopped caring about their work, doing just the bare minimum. The bulk of the remaining experienced employees were gone within two months.
The people who remained were the lower-level employees, without the experience to keep the company working.
Coincidentally, the company fell apart and went into liquidation 6 months later.
No executives lay off 60% of their employees for fun. Typically, this course of action is reserved for when the company believes they have a 95% chance of failing and that doing the layoff will mean they now have an 80% chance of failing.
That the company later failed is not proof positive that the layoffs were a bad idea.
Yeah, when a company is going to crash, it's better not to stay around until the end. Quite often, the last month(s) of work is unpaid.
With all the upheaval at Twitter, I doubt it's going to survive. Well, the name will remain, and as long as servers keep running, some people will keep using it, so as long as Musk can hire enough people to keep the servers running, Twitter might be able to continue in some form, but it will never be the company it once was.
In this case, actually coincidental. It was externally trigged event 3 months later that ended up killing the company. Even a healthy company would struggle to navigate such a scenario.
But it was absolutely on a fatal path before that event, just a question of how long.
"Musk came in saying he wanted to get rid of 75% of the employees:"
Well known tactics, usually employed by politicians.
Want to raise taxes by 5%? Don't tell that, just announce previously that the country needs a 10% taxes raise, then for pretend for a while you're struggling to lower them because you care for the people and finally settle to 5%.
thats just another way of "price anchoring". When you go to the department store, and that $40 shirt is 'on-sale' for $15, they never expect to get $40 for it. (in fact, many never actually sell that at that price) but it does make you suddenly look at it as a $40 shirt, that your saving money on, instead of comparing it to other $15 shirts.
But the problem is where do they go? Yes, Twitter laid off 3750 people, but Meta just laid off 11000, so the job market -- at least for that pool -- is saturated right now, and I'm not sure if anyone wants to voluntarily walk off their job in today's economy.
Number I saw this morning showed meta had added 15k workers since Jan 2022. Laying off 11k still has a higher headcount than a year ago. The question of who those 11k were May be more interesting, but this doesn’t seem like some end of the world bloodbath.
This is nothing. The NYC developer market was completely saturated in 2008 when Lehman brothers went under and AIG made huge cuts to their IT organization. I recall the number being 60-80k developers looking for jobs all at once.
Might find work, but is it at the same comp level? I'm unemployed, I'm worried I'll have to take less then pay then I was making before (270-320k based on the stock price)
I’m also in BigTech and have seen my compensation drop (unless there is a major uptick before my next vest in a month).
But, seriously, I’ve got the worlds smallest fiddle for someone who is worried that they may not make 270K+ going forward.
Yes my stock has dropped by 50% from its 52 week high. It stings. But it doesn’t affect my life at all. I made sure that I could live off of my base pay - and still max out my 401K.
That may become the case in the US, but in places like Sweden you have to announce long before the actual layoffs to give the unions a chance to negotiate.
I went through a layoff where they announced they had to make major reductions in headcount (it ended up being about 30% but I'm not sure that number was announced). There was then several months of discussions with the unions before they announced who had to leave.
If you were not impacted they didn't tell you anything until the announcement. The people who were impacted had been briefed beforehand. As I was staying on I didn't know anything, which was stressful, but I guess that if I had known about the process it would have been less so.
That is the law in the US. In California specifically they needed 60 days public notice before a large layoff. That’s why employees have already sued Twitter.
The poster is talking about something more protective. in Spain before a massive layoff a company has to submit a plan to the government and get approval, as well as negotiating it with unions. Nothing like this can happen suddenly. That's on top of obligations to pay severance and give individual notice in some timeframe.
I’ve recently been through the WeWork layoff, and it was in the air for 3 months. Meta’s layoff from 2 days ago was also “possible” for at least 2 quarters, with comments from leadership and q&a responses that made everyone’s life even more miserable than usual. So in my personal experience at least, it’s pretty much how layoffs go
A more deliberate (some might say sneaky, but I'd prefer it if I was in the situation) move would be to take an extra week or two to have some of your management do some feeling out of who would be 100% opposed to remote so you could include them in the layoff list, but also don't force people to uproot just to be laid off.
But at least you could avoid some of the "unregretted attrition" of people you decided to keep.
(This assumes Musk isn't intentionally sequencing things to limit the "official" size of the layoff while actually wanting to cut a significantly larger percentage.)
The other problem is that these unpopular decisions end up driving away the people who are the most confident about being able to find a new job, leaving you with less-skilled employees who maybe feel less comfortable job hunting.
> Wouldn't it make the most sense to announce those decisions before making layoffs? Let people self select whether they want to stay and work for you and then make your layoffs after to ensure all teams are properly staffed.
He's got huge debt and declining revenue - both of his own making - so he doesn't have time for employees to self-select based on minor incentives. He has to strip down the car fast while somehow also keeping it road-worthy and operational. He also wants to recreate the place per his own vision, so it makes sense to get rid of as many people carrying the previous culture as you can and then start hiring as necessary with the kind of people you want.
>then start hiring as necessary with the kind of people you want.
That assumes that people will still want to work for Twitter after all of this.
Given that there is no shortage of jobs for engineers even after massive layoffs at Facebook/Meta and Twitter, many people are going to think twice about signing up to work for a company and owner that have a reputation for treating people as disposable trash.
Employees are the company's most valuable capital - so if you unceremoniously boot out the most experienced staff that was keeping the ship afloat and expect to replace them with cheap new hires while maintaining productivity, security and revenue (which weren't great at Twitter to begin with), you would have to be delusional.
Some layoffs were likely justified but thanks to the hamfisted way they were done I am sorry for the recruiters that will have to look for new staff now. They will have a very unenviable job.
> That assumes that people will still want to work for Twitter after all of this.
Just a data point, but Twitter is now much more interesting to me (as a place of work) than it was before. Which is to say, it went from zero interest to "maybe?"
* Chaos provides opportunities to make real changes instead of being just a tiny cog doing what you're told.
* Advancement is going to be faster in a fast-changing organization.
* It's in "go big or go broke" mode. After a year you're probably going to know which. Better than spending a decade working for a zombie.
* I'm left-of-center, yet... I find political tribalism really fucking annoying. Musk could only improve Twitter in this regard.
So it's a mixed bag. I don't have strong opinions about Twitter (I'm not really a user) but it's way too early to be writing epitaphs.
I agree. I still don't think I could bring myself to work for an adtech company, but pre-Musk twitter seemed particularly bad. Bloated, slow-moving, and stale, no direction, no vision. And if the vlogs coming out of there were any indication, a boring vapid, shallow, and entitled culture.
After Musk, there is potential where previously there was none.
> Chaos provides opportunities to make real changes instead of being just a tiny cog doing what you're told.
You think you will have autonomy or ability to make changes you want in a company run by Elon Musk? Cause by literally everything I read, his management style is pretty much the opposite.
> I'm left-of-center, yet... I find political tribalism really fucking annoying. Musk could only improve Twitter in this regard.
I can see Musk making polarization bigger, but for the love of god I cant see him making smaller.
> Given that there is no shortage of jobs for engineers
Where are these jobs? At startups that see they may not get another round of funding soon? At unprofitable recently IPOd unicorns that are losing money and cutting back staff? At Amazon (where I work) that just announced a hiring freeze? At Google where they admitted over hiring?
So let’s talk about the other side of the market that I am also familiar with “enterprise development” [1] - banks, bespoke internal apps that will never see the light of day outside of the company, etc. Those companies are also cutting back.
[1] I work at $BigTech. But my work involves cloud consulting mostly with enterprises and I spent most of my 20+ career as your standard “enterprise dev”.
The market is going to get tight if FAANG is on a hiring freeze/laying people off. Other companies are going to look to the FAANGs to make their decisions. It was real hot for a year but if you stick 20k developers on the market at the same time you take 20k jobs off the market combined with other companies going cold. The market is going to get tougher, even for SWE/OPS.
Yup. I've been that guy twice on projects. Started a contract. Oh all the other guys were fired/left! I laughed inside a bit, took the 6 months pay and watched it tank both times because there was fuck all I could do about it but was contracted for butts on seats only.
> He also wants to recreate the place per his own vision, so it makes sense to get rid of as many people carrying the previous culture as you can and then start hiring as necessary with the kind of people you want
So, he's destroying all of the institutional knowledge, the brand image, and the existing business relationships, while pivoting to a radically different market.
He wanted a fresh startup to sink $44 billion into, not an existing business with employees he doesn't want, a legacy product that doesn’t fit his vision, and feature iteration velocity constraints from FTC consent decrees that a new startup wouldn’t have.
> So, he's destroying all of the institutional knowledge, the brand image, and the existing business relationships, while pivoting to a radically different market.
Sounds about right. Also, I don't think he values the institutional knowledge much, and thinks he can replace it quickly, because he thinks Twitter employees were idiots and he makes reusable space rockets something something.
Now he has to find a way out of his predicament. First step, fire a lot of people to stop the monetary bleeding he caused. Second step, find others to blame - activists organizing boycotts - or have his buddy the founder take public blame for him. Third, bring in his "A-team" of super rocket EV tunnel software engineers to fix it all up to work better with 1/5th the people. I don't think he cares if he has to do institutional and human damage to achieve it.
I'd like to hear your thoughts on what kinds of unique institutional knowledge you think they've built up and what sets the Twitter employees apart from their peers at other companies. My main guess would be scaling caches and services, but even that isn't a super rare these days compared to say 2006. I'm not sure what about Twitter specifically, the app and its functions, is that complex to pass on. Coming into codebases that large is very challenging, but it's doable. Isn't the current calculus ~ lowering headcount to stay solvent vs. the risk of more lost knowledge and the other 50% of the company losing their jobs?
Well, for one, Twitter is under a 20 year consent decree with the FTC and all of the relevant leaders in charge of this resigned this week and individual twitter engineers now need to "self certify" that they're complying with the decree.
People who have intimate experience with just exactly the degree of latitude the FTC will allow for twitter and have a personal relationship that allows them to negotiate with the FTC isn't exactly a skill you can just find on the street.
For details, there are at least 2 issues with the FTC.
in 2011 there was a settlement about Failure to Safeguard Personal Information [1].
"Under the terms of the settlement, Twitter will be barred for 20 years from misleading consumers about the extent to which it protects the security, privacy, and confidentiality of nonpublic consumer information, including the measures it takes to prevent unauthorized access to nonpublic information and honor the privacy choices made by consumers.
Then in 2022 FTC charged Twitter for using account security data for targeted advertising. They have a $150M fine and some other conditions [2].
> what kinds of unique institutional knowledge you think they've built up and what sets the Twitter employees apart from their peers at other companies
Literally knowing how twitter codebase works. Knowing about existing issues and workarounds for them. You wont find this knowledge in other companies.
> Coming into codebases that large is very challenging, but it's doable.
Sure, but it takes awful lot of time if there is no one around to explain you stuff. By awful time, I mean really a lot of additional time.
I have followed Tesla closely over the years and this is par for the course of how he operates(similar things have happened at SpaceX but I know more Tesla specifics).
The issue is that in the case of Tesla, automakers have tried a lot of stupid things Musk have done and failed beforehand. Musk ignores those prior learnings and repeats all the mistakes that incumbents made decades ago.
What has saved his butt time and time again is the fact that he has been able to conjure up enough financial runway to re-learn the mistakes and recover and the fact that sometimes mistakes made by others in the past are no longer mistakes given today's environment and end up becoming competitive advantages. So he wins some and he loses some.
One example of him losing is when he attempted to automate all the assembly in the factory in 2017. He messed up and hired the wrong people to design the body of the Model 3 and it ended up too expensive to manufacture. In response he attempted to use robots in assembly to cut costs. The technology for what he wanted to do was still not ready just like it was not ready in the 70s when GM tried to do the same thing. Robots are Blind, one armed, and stupid. They cannot handle finesse when dealing with a noisy real world.
On the other hand, GM and others were adamant to design their cooling systems with multiple loops because that was the way things were done and it was a reliable way to accomplish the task. As a result this thinking was ingrained in all the OEMs. They have cooling departments that defend their approaches and it causes stagnation. Musk's approach of repeating all the things that OEMs already did led to him discarding beliefs that no longer are the best way of doing things and led a much better and cheaper design using one cooling loop and adjusting between heat/cold using software. When every penny counts as it does in automotive this was a competitive advantage that now competitors are copying.
As long as he has enough runway I wouldn't count him out as he seems to running the same playbook as Tesla and SpaceX.
It's weird how many people are experiencing sudden onset amnesia. Prior to Elon getting control, everyone understood Twitter was a mess, was losing tons of money and not able to get anything done for the past decade.
IIRC, Twitter was (just barely and recently) profitable, before Musk took over and saddled them with $1 billion/year in debt service and tanked ad sales.
It wasn't awesome, but it had found a working groove.
I had no idea what the financial situation was, other than that it's not part of FAANG for a reason. According to [0] Twitter was actually on a positive trajectory. Revenue has generally gone up over time. Profit wise 2020 was bad, but overall the last 5 years were much better than the 5 years prior to that. There is no shortage of companies that needed a shakeup more than Twitter.
But back then Twitter was run by the right sorts of people, not a wildcard with conservative leanings. They were running the business into the ground, but they were card-carrying socialists, so it just meant they were fucking the shareholders over and protecting workers and the marginalized. Musk is acting purely out of self-interest and spite.
I think you're right about the whole "fresh startup" idea. Some of his comments around Twitter have suggested that he might be treating this as his road to being a trillionaire by owning the public square in the US.
A lot of large companies have used twitter to announce some new product launch of marketing initiative. With the recent spate of fake blue checks like "Nintendo" posting Mario giving the middle finger or "Eli Lilly" posting insulin is now free or "Twitter Blue" announcing free twitter blue if you buy an NFT, I imagine many are rethinking this going forward.
It's still pretty much the go to place for journalists to mine quotes and sentiment from "normal people".
I'm addition, it remains a significant platform for informal celebrity and corporate announcements.
People in tech are pretty bearish about Twitter these days (myself included), but there are clearly a significant number of people who believe otherwise.
You don't have to follow "most of Twitter". There are countless awesome communities for almost any given subject.
There is room for both to be true: most of Twitter (content) is a cesspool, and yet it still is great place id you take care to curate the accounts you follow.
I think Musk wants a do-over for X.com. Whatever that means. Some kind of everything app.
If true, he bought Twitter for the branding, rather than build a new brand. If true, Twitter is about to get an extreme makeover.
$44b seems ridiculous to me. But what do I know? I've never understood the point of Twitter. Whatsapp, a mere chat app, sold for $16b. And Musk builds rockets and launched the EV auto market and...
--
I highly recommend Jill Lepore's podcast about Musk called The Evening Rocket.
"Elon Musk’s visions of the future all stem from the same place: the science-fiction he grew up on. To understand where Musk wants to take the rest of us – with his electric cars, his rockets to Mars, his meme stocks, and tunnels deep beneath the earth — Harvard professor and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore looks at those science fiction stories and helps us understand what he’s Musk missed about them.
The Evening Rocket explores Musk’s strange new kind of extravagant, extreme capitalism — call it Muskism — where stock prices are driven by earnings, and also by fantasies."
> He also wants to recreate the place per his own vision, so it makes sense to get rid of as many people carrying the previous culture as you can and then start hiring as necessary with the kind of people you want.
Twitter isn't going to have the same "pull" as organizations like Tesla or SpaceX where you can attract top-shelf talent by virtue of working on some of the most interesting problems. Twitter is... Twitter. It's Adtech + SaaS. I'm not saying this is boring or easy - it's not, it has tons of challenging problems... but how is Twitter under Musk more appealing to engineers than Twitter under any of its previous CEOs?
Twitter under Musk would presumably have less bloat, a lot faster decisions, I'm assuming an easy escalation path that doesn't have to go through multiple layers of management, and you can be confident none of your peers are coasting.
Hiring is expensive, and people can take months to get up to speed on a new role. If too many people quit, he'll have simply wasted money and time.
I've joined two teams where everyone previously on the team quit (plenty of openings). There was indeed a benefit to fresh eyes on things, but those projects took months to get back up to speed.
And how do you find "the people carrying the previous culture" and other deadwood?
You have to observe them over several weeks/months. But Elon didn't do this at all. He is about as likely to have fired the best people as the worst people.
Even then. If you are a low performer, in this market, that’s managed to survive to this point? It’s head down, cover your backside, sacrifice the person next to you if you must, and hope you make it through… People in survival mode will do anything to keep on surviving.
In crumbling organisations, being willing to just stubbornly stay can even give underperforming people a shot at promotions they'd be unlikely ever get otherwise by virtue of becoming the most senior persons in teams with gaps above them.
>He has to strip down the car fast while somehow also keeping it road-worthy and operational.
But this is my point. By doing it in this order he is risking continued operation of Twitter because he no longer can ensure Twitter can either properly staff business critical teams or retain critical institutional knowledge for how to run the company. He is jeopardizing the continued viability of a $44b investment to save maybe a few hundred million max.
> He is jeopardizing the continued viability of a $44b investment to save maybe a few hundred million max.
Both he and the market know that he paid too much for Twitter. It isn't worth $44B, but he needs to make it lean enough to start throwing off enough cash to pay back the loans he took to buy it at that price.
Since it is very hard to increase revenue (especially when he is allowing more advertiser-repellent content), he is trying to dramatically cut costs while trying to increase non advertising revenue.
He can't go back to the banks and the Saudi sovereign wealth fund and explain to them that he needs a deferment so he can invest in more efficient SRE and content moderation. He has to sleep in the bed he made, which means show his creditors the money.
Counterparty risk.
Do you have think the banks and Saudis want $1B this year and $0 after when Twitter collapses, or $0 this year and $500M in future years?
Do you Elon wants the banks to foreclose and seize Twitter? Or have to sell TSLA?
Seems like he's trying to speed run employees jumping ship - I'm surprised he didn't try these tactics for a month or two before firing a bunch of people and paying severance.
That's not trying the tactic though, that's just saying an idea he has, which with Elon is the sort of thing that happens every 2 minutes and I doubt anyone takes seriously.
> He's got huge debt and declining revenue - both of his own making
While I think he has done a huge amount to scare away advertisers, I expect the ad industry as a whole is going to be seeing reduced profits for the next couple of years.
Making a bunch of unpopular changes and waiting a month still seems more prudent. The people most likely carrying that culture are gonna be the ones most inclined to leave over changes, and if they are leaving on their own that would decrease costs associated with benefits or the increase to the unemployment tax that comes with layoffs
Changes to terms of employment make employees who quit because of them eligible to collect unemployment. It's one of the few reasons workers are eligible for unemployment when they voluntarily quit.
Yea was just reading how this likely prompted facebooks giving the November vest to their laid off employees was likely driven by similar labor protection laws. After having worked for a Georgia headquartered company for 2 years I don’t think I can work for a company outside a blue state again. The worker protections, minimal as they are in the US, kicked in multiple times as the company kept trying to fuck us over
Agreed, I've gotten some really great offers out in Texas but I'm not willing to live somewhere that gives employers and asset owners carte blanche to do what they want and everyone else can just go screw themselves.
I'm currently hearing some horror stories from friends who did take similar offers and were enticed by the relatively lower cost of living. Turns out there are reasons it's lower.
Twitter was losing money but for years they would have been profitable except they were handing out executive stock compensation like they were Facebook.
That wasn’t great but there was an obvious path to profitability. Musk just added somewhat over a billion in new annual debt servicing so it went from “stop going to nightclubs every day” to “sell the furniture”.
I made a half-joke here on HN a few months ago that Musk was buying
Twitter just to destroy it for the lols.
Maybe everyone's wasting their time with rational economic analysis,
trying to figure out a pretty simple guy with an obscene pile of
fuck-you money and an axe to grind.
Everyone is looking at it too short term. Twitter isn’t going to disappear and he has shown a willingness to ride through rough economic times to reach his vision.
Social Media is how people interact with the world now, most info we receive is filtered through it in some form. In the last 10 or so years the idea that these platforms need tight moderation to control what and who is speaking on them has become ubiquitous. I think his main gamble is that the future of social media does not involve automated moderation and tight content restrictions, but a more open platform and he is gonna use twitter to play that bet out. It isn’t a horrible bet.
He has a pattern where attempts to create false peril in an effort to motivate people. Which is maybe telling about his managerial style that he relays on fear rather than inspiration.
Bankruptcy isn't always a bad thing. It can be a good thing, depending on how you use it.
People who do not understand bankruptcy laws often perpetuate wrong myths. Bankruptcy is just a legal insolvency mechanism to stave off problematic creditors, while you find way to handle assets against the liabilities of the company. A bankruptcy isn't always the end of the world, and smart businessmen know this.
Musk has a ton of people advising him on legal issues. It's possible that he's making the wrong business moves, but the fact that he's publicly seeing ahead at the possibility of bankruptcy, tells us that he's navigating the waters cognisant of avoiding it rather than to ensure the outcome arrives.
2 is enough to show a pattern that never existed before. Twitter now has a king and if you insult him and it hurts him, you will be restricted or banned.
If that is how we judge bad behavior, basically Elon Musk could block 100,000 tweets per day because he doesn't like them and it still would be statistically insignificant, and thus it wouldn't matter? Your logic is incredibly porous, but I think you know that and you don't care.
Isn't it? Ok, maybe Musk has a magic wand that he can use to make it profitable (which it has been for only two out of the last 12 years), or is willing to subsidize it indefinitely out of his deep pockets... but I wouldn't bet on it.
It’s not a new idea though, having a completely open platform. It quickly devolves into cp, racism and general abstract violence. We’ve learned this lesson already at this point.
Obviously not completely open. Open in the sense of ideas and viewpoints, not like an open market for illegal activity. More like one where Trump wouldn't be banned.
Is that a good or bad thing? I don't know, in an ideal world humans could self-regulate and make good decisions about how they use information. The status quo is that we cannot control ourselves, and need to have sophisticated controls that filter out objectionable info.
This is important, he can fund it but not forever. He’s owned it what 2 weeks now? In the current market I’m lucky if I can order paint for a small building and have it arrive in 2 weeks - these days it takes more like 3-6 months. He appears to be moving at lightning speed with these changes. The thing is, when you are moving 10 times as fast as normal you can trip up 10 times as much and still arrive on time.
Musk loves Twitter. You don’t have to point to the billions he spent on it, you can just see that he loves using it. He might want to change it, might destroy it accidentally in the process (like a kid who hugged their beloved pet too hard), but he didn’t set out to destroy it.
I made this comment to a friend recently that I don't think enough people are considering that he might actually be mad enough to have spent $44B to destroy a toxic business.
The hole in that theory is that by all appearances, Elon Musk really, really likes using Twitter. I don't think he wants to kill it. I think the madness is two-fold:
(1) he approached this with a "pfft, I could run that business better than the bozos in charge" attitude -- it's not as if Twitter has been known for great management up to this point, right? -- but never actually came up with a plan beyond "not what they've been doing." After he initially made the offer, he spent all the time he should have been formulating business plans trying to get out of the deal instead. Then it got forced on him, and he's had to scramble.
(2) Elon has millions of people who treat him as a combination of Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, and Tony Stark, and bluntly, I think he's started believing his own press to the point where he just figures, "Why, yes, I am a super genius who can do anything, and anyone who contradicts me is clearly not worth listening to."
I would be very surprised if Twitter recovers from what Elon Musk, Super Genius is doing to it; the question is whether Elon Musk is going to recover from it. The best case is that this will be his Steve Jobs Exiled From Apple moment; the worst case is that he becomes Howard Hughes.
That second point is something I think we see a lot in widely-praised successful people. I think this is also what lead George Lucas to make the Star Wars prequels on his own, instead of having others refine his characters, story and dialogue like he did with the originals.
I can't help but think about something I learned in school about the Roman Empire: when generals returned to Rome after a military conquest, they were paraded around the city on a chariot with everybody cheering him. But behind him on the chariot was someone constantly whispering in his ear: "You are only mortal". I think when everybody constantly heaps praise on you, it's tempting to start to believe that you are a god, a genius, or otherwise high above everybody else. Having people around you who keep you grounded is probably good for your sanity.
Despite recent stories making this claim, no, not exactly. The 4,100 jobs that were cut in 1997 -- 2,700 full-time and the rest contract and part-time -- came while Gil Amelio was still CEO, and there's a bit of revisionism in attributing it just to Steve Jobs having been brought on as an advisor. Apple had already laid off 2,800 people in 1996 and the cuts in 1997 were widely expected by analysts. They were made with Apple's existing executive team intact and were executed in a considered, directed fashion. I do not think anyone can make a credible claim that Musk's approach so far could be described as considered and directed.
No idea who that person is, why they're important and how this proves that Twitter became more toxic in just two weeks of Musk compared to 20 years of the previous management. Care to enlighten me?
That person is president and COO of MMA global, huge marketing firm, given the fact that he was in a call with Elon, along with that class of people regarding brand safety; he is an important person and his comments describe the situation. He mentioned that their concerns are brand safety and moderation, and that’s why people are pulling out.
For them to pull out it seems that associating with twitter harms their image, and that’s - according to them - related to moderation.
As for “proof” that twitter is more toxic;
> In the week leading up to Musk's acquisition, researchers said there were no more than 84 hostile tweets an hour on the platform. But from midnight on October 28 – the day Musk took ownership – to noon the next day, there were 4,778 hate-filled tweets. That accounts for more than 398 tweets an hour, about 4.7 times higher than the seven-day average leading up to that day. The potential reach for those tweets was more than 3 million, researchers found.
> Researchers also said there was an increase in negative sentiment, with more than 67% of the tweets sent after Musk's takeover having a negative tone.
Spending $44B to prevent the endless terrible hot takes of the Twitterati from polarizing the world to the point where the rest of his stash becomes worthless. I like it.
Letting Russia do whatever they want is arguably not a great strategy towards stopping proliferation, since it sends the message that you're free to do as you please if you have nukes.
I would. But it's true, aggressors rarely listen to reason. They care about strength and about cost. The US didn't withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan because it was the right thing to do, but because it was too expensive and there wasn't anything to gain. Russia may also withdraw once it becomes undeniable to them that there's no winning this and it's too expensive to continue trying.
There's lots of people arguing for peace talks, and I'd love for that to work, but it won't work if Putin isn't interested in peace, and by all appearances, he isn't. He's made pretty clear that he isn't. The only alternative is to make is aggression unsuccessful.
That's a bit extreme. I'd prefer something in between: stopping Putin but without escalating to nuclear war. Pretty much what's going on right now. It's not great, but it's the least bad option; preferable to nuclear war or genocide.
It is extreme. Remember the news about the 2 people killed in Poland from stray missile(s)? Commentators and the Ukraine Government were quick to assess this missle was launched by Russia while the USA investigated. Yesterday the news was that the USA found that the missile was not actually launched by Russia. But the west could have made hay about it and decided those two farmers that died would have been plenty justification for a nuclear war. Lots of ordinary people wanted it.
> Not for the lols, I don't care how rich you are losing 44b hurts.
A band named KLF burned a million quid back in the mid 90s. It was
ostensibly "performance art" [1].
In 2000 formative internet commerce pioneer Josh Harris blew about 80
million in a few weeks on an "arts project". He is the subject of Ondi
Timoner's 2009 documentary "We Live in Public" [2] He described it as
"liberating" and said that other dot-com millionaires had "wasted
their money" and didn't "know how to live".
Is it true that $13bn came in the form of loans and that those loans are secured by Twitter, not Musk or any entity he'd personally be responsible for?
If the business under new ownership turns a profit their bankers make money. If the business folds or is not turned around then the loans sour but the private equity owner also loses their money. In bankruptcy bond holders get paid before shareholders.
I think his ego is too massive for that. The man bristles at the slightest criticism. Destroying Twitter, even intentionally, will provide enough fodder to his critics that I don't think he'd be able to actually suck it up and follow through.
Watch Musks interview with Ron Baron instead of reading second hand quality hack articles if you want to understand the scale of his plans for twitter.
At first this was my thinking as well, but then towards the end of the article, the author mentions an "all hands meeting" he had with employees before completing the acquisition, and apparently he said in that occasion that he was against remote work.
Having said that, remote work is up there with compensation in my book, taking it away is just as likely[1] as a salary cut to make leave the company.
the correlation in my experience is if anything the other way around. The best and most productive employees tend to be involved and in-person is still the best way to get things done and actually exchange ideas. This is the one thing Musk is 100% right about, remote work is awful for productivity and it's most popular among the "least amount of effort" crowd. It's also why almost any major tech company after covid is trying to scale remote work back again.
You need to include the commuting time into the productivity calculation. If a person has to commute 1 hour for 200 days a year while working for 40 years, this would result in 8,000 hours of work-related unproductivity during a life, which is equivalent to 5 full years of work. This is the benchmark that you first have to surpass. In other words: such a person needs to be on average 12.5 percent more productive on site than at home to break even.
>The best and most productive employees tend to be involved and in-person is still the best way to get things done and actually exchange ideas.
I'm having a hard time believing this. The people in my company who want to end remote work were the people that needed it for a social output. Nothing as shown that productivity suffered during the pandemic due to remote work.
>This is the one thing Musk is 100% right about,
Elon Musk is a 100% remote worker.
>t's also why almost any major tech company after covid is trying to scale remote work back again.
Hard disagree, most companies want people back in the office because they are run by middle managers who have spent their careers climbing the ladder by putting in face time and building relationships. Remote work is a huge detriment to that style of career advancement. They basically want everyone back in the office so they, the middle managers, can feel productive.
There is a reason they focus on abstract concepts like water cooler conversations rather than hard data. The data says there isn't a problem
I feel like any discussion around remote work often involves comments that take personal anecdotal evidence and applies it to all remote work.
I do agree with losing social aspects. That being said, it's helped me realize that I should focus on being social OUTSIDE of work, rather than relying on work to be social.
That entirely depends on type of work. We do 1-2 days on site a week and it works well, we can get all of the management and coordination done then then just code away in peace without interruption. But that's programming, some jobs are less dependent on communication, some are more.
In person is the best way for professional meeting attendees to appear to be contributing while simultaneously wasting the time of the people who actually get things done.
Ah yes, these companies 100% want to reduce remote work due to productivity issues and not because they want to exert power over there employees. Because, as we all know, there's absolutely no way to measure productivity than by counting how many hours they spend at a physical location.
Employers should be required to pay for employees' entire commuting costs. That would make them think extra about how much they really need people on-site.
Changes in terms of employment, like going from WFH to mandatory in-office, makes employees eligible to collect unemployment should they choose to quit. It's one of the few reasons you can collect unemployment after voluntarily quitting.
Such a move can backfire, and more people can quit than you planned on laying off, and that can make your UI liabilities larger than they would have been with just a layoff.
This is the part you are overthinking: "Wouldn't it make the most sense..."
It would makes sense to hire a CEO. It would make sense to plan a layoff so you don't have to beg key people to return, etc. Musk frames this as making mistakes while working fast.
In this case it will push more people to leave. There is probably intent, if not exactly thought and planning behind this because Really Bad Things have not happened yet.
An indication that might change is that the CISO, security chief, and privacy chief resigned together, possibly with advice of counsel re the two FTC consent decrees.
It's funny how people will argue "never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" to excuse an institution or individual they like, but here people are bending over backwards to justify Musk's behaviour at Twitter as the performance of an evil genius playing a game that we're too subtle to understand, rather than those of a bully fool who is burning his life down thanks, apparently, to a crippling social media addiction and an inability to get over his ex.
It's funny how people will argue "never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" ...
... but here people are bending over backwards to justify Musk's behaviour ...
My issue with arguments like these is that these are collective opinions held by different segments of people, not some nebulous singular person whose opinion can be safely discarded because of contradictory statements.
Maybe you don’t remember the 80s but this is how pretty much every hostile takeover went down. Leveraged buyout > massive layoffs and restructuring > change in business model and the next thing we’ll likely see is some form of selling off assets or divisions, not sure what those would be in Twitter’s case but it won’t be a surprise if they come up with something.
I do, in fact, remember the 80s. And the point of asset stripping in that era was that the targets were generally companies with good fundamentals in parts, which had either merged or grown in ways that resulted in those good components propping up losing components, which was what allowed the asset strippers to make their money via the process described. The successful asset strippers also had generally done a lot of analysis before they made their aquisition.
What detailed analysis did Musk do? A bunch of DMs with Jason Calcinis pulling numbers out of his arse? What's the core profitable business that Twitter has that is encumbered by unprofitable components?
If I wanted to look at a case for an asset stripping target in social media, I'd probably look at something more like Facebook, where there's a case that unrolling their rats' nest of aquisitions like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Oculus could result in some valuable spin-offs: for example, if WhatsApp went back to a stripped-down standalone company with a small fee it would probably be quite profitable, as it had been before being Facebooked. But Twitter is twitter. That's it.
The only thing I see with this is an echo of when this site's owners sacked Musk for fucking up PayPal with deranged, incoherent edicts. The difference is that no-one can sack Musk to save Twitter from him.
Yes, a lot of people remember the asset stripping wave in the 1980s, but not the merger wave of the 1960s. At that time, it was fashionable to assume that the core expertise of "management" could be transferred to pretty much any field, and so you had these bizarre conglomerations of businesses. It turned out that "management" wasn't so transferable, resulting in one big company having a few profitable ventures that were subsidizing unprofitable ventures, and the 1980s saw a lot of those conglomerates split apart (and they probably took it too far in the other direction).
At some point, we need a history of post-war corporate capitalism, because it sure seems like it is driven by one fad piled atop another fad.
There were a lot of awful LBOs, but Elon may take the cake. Even the worst LBOs had a business case, even if in terms of asset stripping, outsourcing, channel stuffing, and other aggressive financial engineering.
When Elon bought it Twitter had no free cash flow, existing long term debt, no assets to sell, etc. It's an enormous LBO with strange characteristics done by a guy with no LBO experience, advised by Jason Calacanis and David Sacks.
Most of the people judging Musk are unaccomplished 20-somethings with massive inferiority complexes, or mercurial line workers who loved Musk until he publicly rejected the nonsense of their precious political cult, I mean party.
> Or maybe he's just a guy that believes in free speech…
Lol, that’s some good comedy. He’s already gone on a ban run of people mocking him. He didn’t even make a month before showing his true colors on this talking point.
I don’t know how anyone could possibly still believe something like that at this point. The past two weeks have just been one argument after another against every point you just made.
> Or maybe he's just a guy that believes in free speech and wants to change Twitter for the better
How many times does this need to debunked? Elon Musk has a long and storied history, with direct evidence, of attacking and taking punitive, perceived or actual, action on anyone that has even mildly disagreed with him. He even tweeted, several times I might add, "Chomsky sucks" just because Chomsky said a few mild things that disagreed with Musk.
> which includes making it not hemorrhage money
Why does he even care enough about it? Oh yea, Twitter is a source of people disagreeing with him. Further, he overnight added billions of dollars of debt to Twitter.
You are giving Musk too much credit. He’s a classic control freak and micromanager, and right now he’s trying to run twitter like 6 person start-up that running low on funds.
Truth is he probably wanted to eliminate even more staff than he did. It seems like he wants to get the smallest possible team that can keep the core product of twitter running, platform for posting small content blocks.
He fired teams that he didn't believe were core to to that strategy and removed WFH. What he is left with, theoretically, is a hardcore group of people dedicated to the cause and willing to put with anything he might do.
This this this. Musk isn't trying to win a popularity contest. He's trying to narrow staff down to that 10% that can do 80% and build back from there. A very cutthroat capitalist approach, but was anyone expecting anything else from the guy who ordered TSLA employees back into factories during covid?
But it s not a neutral decision. It is likely you are left with the employees who are willing to tolerate a worse lifestyle for the paycheck, and you are letting go employees who are smart enough to prefer to have more control of their lives.
I guess expecting an employee to do actual work could ruin some ones lifestyle. I've been in a couple of companies now where only a few people "work" and the rest do "other stuff", I would have been happy in both those for someone like Musk to take over.
Musk is his own worst enemy and can be a douche a lot of the time but he doesn't deserve this toxic personal shit for trying to sort out the mess. Also as I remember once he saw past the facade of twitter he tried to back out and it was the twitter board of management that insisted he buy.
> I guess expecting an employee to do actual work could ruin some ones lifestyle. I've been in a couple of companies now where only a few people "work" and the rest do "other stuff", I would have been happy in both those for someone like Musk to take over.
I can sympathise with this, but that's if anything anticorrelated with coming into the office - the people who work the least are those who make the most effort at being seen.
> I guess expecting an employee to do actual work could ruin some ones lifestyle. I've been in a couple of companies now where only a few people "work" and the rest do "other stuff", I would have been happy in both those for someone like Musk to take over.
What makes you think Musk successfully selected the best people to stay? How could he even, in that short amount of time? That Twitter had to bring fired people back because it turned out that they were essential after all, indicates the opposite.
> Also as I remember once he saw past the facade of twitter he tried to back out and it was the twitter board of management that insisted he buy.
You remember wrong. It was Musk who insisted he wanted to buy, offered a ridiculously high price, and waived due diligence. The board didn't want to sell, initially resisted, but had to agree to Musk's high offer because they represent the shareholders and have to act in their best interest.
Only after the deal was done did Musk want to back out. That's not how it works. There's plenty of opportunity to due diligence and some serious thinking before you sign a big deal like that. Smart business people, or even normal business people actually, take advantage of that. Musk didn't, and he has only himself to blame.
A long standing maneuver that companies have is the "your job is now in Houston" when you live in New York. This has an interesting side effect of basically removing anyone from your company who is old enough to have a family with kids in school, wife working etc. Basically it "legally" removes the older more expensive employees. RTO will remove people also like you said, but I wonder what demographic?
Moving a person's office of employment outside of what would be considered a reasonable commute is treated as a constructive dismissal in the U.S. It is generally legal, because is treated as a normal termination by the employer (basically: the employee's "current" job is being terminated and the employer is offering them a "new" job in a new location).
This means, among other things, that the employee qualifies for unemployment, the employer's unemployment insurance account will get dinged, etc.
My understanding (I am not a lawyer, talk to one if you think you're subject to a situation like this) is that constructive dismissal is NOT legal, and that the whole reason this is a legal term is that this is one of the categories of job separation that falls under "wrongful termination" in most states, even those that are otherwise under an "at-will" employment regime.
In the particular case of Twitter, they announced in 2020 that they would allow "permanent" remote work, and reiterated this policy at least as late as March of this year [1]. If I'm correctly informed, the change in this policy was announced in an e-mail that was sent out on Wednesday, and was to be effective on Thursday, the following day.
It would seem to me that this is about as straightforward and well-documented a constructive dismissal fact pattern as you could conceive.
Constructive dismissal as a legal concept is relevant for purposes of determining whether the employee voluntary separated (i.e., quit) or was terminated by the company. This then determines the legal rights/obligations of the parties, including for example eligibility for unemployment, severance, etc.
Constructive dismissal is treated as a termination, meaning involuntary on the employee's behalf. Whether the constructive dismissal is legal depends on whether a termination in the same circumstances would be legal. Terminations are generally legal, so constructive dismissals are generally legal...
I agree that in this case the Twitter WFO policy is constructive dismissal. And elsewhere I have said this would fall under the WARN Act because it's clearly part of the mass terminations already announced early this week.
Ah, I see the error of my ways now. The post to which I was responding was indeed correct and this is not, per se, an illegal tactic if the worker did not belong to an otherwise protected class. Twitter just owes them the same legal benefits as if they had been laid off.
I stand corrected; thanks for setting me straight.
"constructive dismissal" is an action an employer takes which the employee can treat as equivalent to being laid off. Being laid off comes with various benefits, like eligibility for unemployment, and is included in specific laws, like IIRC in California there has to be a notice period before laying off X people in the same month. "Constructive dismissal" just means cutting everybody's salary in half, reducing hours, etc counts as you being laid off if you choose to leave at that time, rather than you resigning. Resigning does not come with unemployment or those other protections.
Here's CA's stance, and consider that CA is probably going to be the most protective state in the US when it comes to these things. Other states with decent labor protection mostly copied our laws.
The TL;DR is that it's just equivalent to getting fired. If you can prove you got shuffled out the door via constructive dismissal for reasons it's illegal to fire people for, then it's illegal. If at-will would've applied anyway, it's just a jerk move. Mostly it means you still get unemployment and can still sue for wrongful termination, even though you technically resigned.
What I suspect might be more of an issue, at least in CA, is that our at-will law has a "good faith" clause that basically implies you can't fire someone for a reason that would broadly be considered unethical in the context of an employer-employee business relationship. The classic example is canning someone just before they get their commissions purely to save yourself of the cost of paying them. My guess is that's one reason why Facebook, for example, is giving all their employees the mid-November vest even if they got fired first.
Constructively dismissing someone out the door probably takes away a lot of argument that you were acting in good faith.
If they promised these people that they could work remote and they invested in property then get forced to move, I actually wonder if it could open up the company to promissory estoppel (i.e., I had a financial loss based on a reasonable promise you broke, and now I want to recover).
The times I've heard about that cause in the past were exactly for situations where you moved for a job, then the job was rescinded. At the very least, that angle probably wouldn't look great in court during a wrongful termination suit.
(IANAL either, but since I work in CA I try to stay reasonably informed of the laws that affect me.)
We’re one of the few states with both implied-contract and bad-faith codified as explicit exceptions to at-will, and we’re significantly more likely to resolve in favor of the employee than in most states because we actually mean them.
The only question is whether naysayers (usually management or people parroting what management said) convince employees that we’re strictly at-will and have no options if terminated, when we are not and often most certainly do.
Do you think the corporate expense of going through motions of PIPs for a month—and risking quiet quitting or even disgruntled employee retaliation in the meantime—would be a thing if they didn’t have to cover their own butts or risk a lawsuit they’d actually conceivably lose?
In states without these protections they generally just fire you. And I’m not even going to get into the protected class aspect where CA has many nuances, and “no reason” becomes awfully tricky to defend if challenged by the vast majority of workers who do fall within one.
So yes, realistically an employer needs a reason to safely fire you in CA.
That’s almost always quietly recognized and accommodated at our level via either a reason or a significant payoff out the door in exchange for a waiver of liability. We can sue the crap out of them and quite feasibly win if they don’t.
It’s only at the lowest level jobs where this gets completely ignored. That’s largely because employers are confident the min-wage folks aren’t going to sue them, same reason poor people get illegal leases around here that never get challenged.
Second, I never actually said we had special protection in my original post.
I said we had (among) the best protections, and that we provide the model for most other protective laws of this type in the USA. And I said it in the context that we were the high water mark for protection and even then the OP’s conjecture wouldn’t necessarily fall under it.
Think that’s all easily verifiable on your part. Not sure what else you think you’re disputing there.
If you view every employee as interchangeable this makes sense. Clearly that isn't the case.
What ends up happening when you do things like this (ie to accelerate natural attrition) is the best people leave first. So you haven't really solved the problem. You may have made it worse.
Yes but he may be optimizing for the younger, unmarried with no kids employees he can manage like he wants. Remove remote work and this filters out the types that are less likely to put up with his demands and managerial style, expectations, etc.
why? everyone has PTO, and nobody is required to do all-nighters. If they want to, they can just go on vacation, wait it out and pick up severance when they get the chop.
From a Machiavellian (? I think) perspective, better to do the layoffs first and flood the job market with people before making other unpopular decisions that may drive people away. No idea if that was the plan but it makes sense.
(Even if the number cut doesn't amount to anything market moving, they probably share a lot of the same network, and it will definitely looks like a flood of job seekers in most twitter employees bubbles, and those of their immediate networks)
Hard to say! Because, look. Suppose you begin not with layoffs but with the announcement "everyone back in the office for 40h/wk", knowing that people will leave. At that point, you don't get to choose who will leave, and it won't necessarily be the less productive fraction of the employees.
To my understanding, he's only laid off teams that he doesn't think are important so far. I know everyone is talking about 50% layoffs, but from what I can see that hasn't actually happened yet, it's only confirmed in the sense that it will happen.
I'm happy to be proven wrong but I just don't see anything saying that, only teams that have been reduced by ~15% and other teams which have hardly been reduced at all
I know I’m stating the very obvious but this and the layoffs feel quite adversarial.
The vibe I get from Musk is that he doesn’t care about much more than the numbers and believes that a hard dictatorship is warranted in this situation.
The sudden one sided decisions backed by ultimatums give me the impression of lack of respect for his employees and downright abuse.
I don’t see how such a relationship can nurture a positive company culture or retain top talent.
Given that the best people might find new jobs faster than the worst, you might drive away the better half of your human resources. With the 'fire-first' approach, you have more control over who should leave (e.g. hiring managers).
I don't like it either, but I think that is part of the rational behind it.
> Wouldn't it make the most sense to announce those decisions before making layoffs?
no. layoff from the bottom first. then push out more people as needed. bottom performers have fewer options and, on average, will be willing to put up with more than top performers
The layoffs and departures on their own are by my count possibly getting close to saving the company a billion $USD a year. That's the projected cost of the debt obligations he took on buying the company. EZPZ.
Great plan. Now you got rid of all the people with options and you've kept all the deadweight. Many companies do exactly this with voluntary redundancies!
Jason: Back of the envelope... Twitter revenue per employee: $5B rev / 8k employees = $625K rev per employee in 2021 Google revenue per employee: $257B rev2/ 135K employee2= $1.9M per employee in 2021 Apple revenue per employee: $365B rev / 154k employees= $2.37M per employee in fiscal 2021
Jason: Twitter revenue per employee if 3k instead of 8k: $5B rev/ 3k employees= $1.66m rev per employee in 2021 (more industry standard)
Elon: ["emphasized" above]
Elon: Insane potential for improvement
Jason: <Attachment-image/gif-lMG_2241.GIF>
Jason: Day zero
Jason: Sharpen your blades boys
Jason: 2 day a week Office requirement= 20% voluntary
departures
Twitter employees: “we’re going to vote to unionize”
When you have nothing left to lose, why wouldn’t you? It brings the federal government in to provide support, on their dime no less. Worst case is everyone leaves, the NLRB finds against Musk, and he has to give folks their jobs back while Twitter is burning.
“The strongest steel is forged in the fires of a dumpster.”
Steel is forged in a fire regardless. Forged steel hardens with cycles of annealing and stress. Which is exactly what layoffs are. Cycles of heating and cooling. Lol
Increased work hours, forced relocation to one of the most expensive metros in the the world, and threat of imminent job loss probably make that yearly compensation less attractive in reality than it is on paper.
Oh, probably. But it's a great argument not to unionize, especially so because the employees are supposedly very valuable and will not have trouble finding a new company that will pay similar salaries and give them permanent WFH. Unions are for the masses, not the elite.
When end of year hiring freezes and recession jitter layoffs end I don’t think well paid twitter employees will have much trouble finding better employment elsewhere.
Why do that as opposed to leaving and competing against him if they have a better idea of how to operate a social media site? His naysayers are convinced he's going to destroy it anyway.
This is not how you win in a rigged system against a billionaire who weaponizes his wealth against everyone who does not take a knee and flouts the law whenever they see fit.
The path to success is voting for decency over power, so I suppose we’ll agree to disagree. To unionize costs Twitter folks only their time and effort. The tools exists, just have to use them. This is what a hacker would do, isn’t it? Use the tools available instead of being goaded into some other mechanisms out of “pride”?
Tech workers are the new factory workers. I’m unsure why you’re advocating so hard for tolerating abuse from the extremely wealthy (cult of personality?), but that is your right. Abuse need not be tolerated when labor regulations provide you leverage against it.
That it's cushy (it is!) does not change that it's not a capital position.
Your average tech worker makes company owners orders of magnitude more than your average factory worker, and are paid what they are because they can demand it. Business owners would pay less if they could. Why shouldn't tech workers, like any other worker, try to maximize their own lot in turn?
Let's compare the daily grind of a factory worker to that of an engineer at a place like Twitter (tech worker is really broad):
FACTORY WORKER:
- Gets up early, leaves late
- Performs work that is rote down to a T
- Works extremely hard, physically
- On their feet for large parts of the day
- Must join (and pay to be in) a union for benefits and such
- Extremely fungable
- Paid at or around the US median
TWITTER ENGINEER
- Gets up early...if they want to. Gets out late...if they want to.
- Or they just pull up before your team's standup and peace out at 3pm
- Work on extremely creative tasks b/c software is creative; so much so that some have really cool blogs where they talk about the 0.01% elite engineering shit they do
- Work is extremely demanding mentally while you sit in >$1000 chairs and type on >$1000 standing desks
- Need the standing desk and occasional walk to force themselves to be mobile
- No union, but amazing benefits (see laid off Tweeps getting three months of pay)
- Generally not very fungable
- Paid several times above the US median, and that's before we consider their equity
Why are you trying to minimize this? I presume it is acceptable behavior as long as they are making more than you are?
Your fellow citizens do not deserve that kind of treatment, no human does.
If I compensate you accordingly, are you willing to accept sub-human treatment and an environment of constant fear and stress with no sense of accomplishment? Especially in the case of an eccentric billionaire playing financial mechanics with a vanity project?
If its OK because they make all the monies, I imagine it will be OK when it is your neighbors, the Blacks, Jews, LGBTQ+, Asians, dudes name Sally and your Mom's "Aunt Sylvie" from the Home who has all those amazing candies from Eastern Europe?
This is a shit-poor example of Capitalism, and scheming like this over a ** Br3ndN@me™ is the kind of other-over-there-shit that leads to unrest and aquatic tea parties.
Just base, craven, and completely unnecessary in all regards. I cannot imagine an eventuality that is worth the harm he's already caused.
Taking this risk at the absolute worst possible time is already f*cking up Tesla and SolarCity. Regardless of their scam-iness, having real impact.
A computer is not the means of production for Twitter. Twitter, the company, is in the business of producing ad impressions for the advertiser. They use Twitter, the platform to do that, so that's their means of production. A computer is just the tool to build and maintain the platform, not directly to produce value. (If Twitter were an IT consulting company, the computer would be a means of production for them.)
As an engineer I may not know how to run a better social media product. My skill in developing software doesn’t necessarily translate into successful business operator. But I sort of agree, if you’re top talent at twitter it’s time to leave.
If employees managed to organize productivity and profits at every enterprise on earth remotely, you’re probably not right they can’t organize a union unless it’s in person. I’ll point out productivity declines with RTO and everyone acted like they didn’t understand why productivity declined.
All I can say is I’m excited to hire the best employees at twitter and let them work the way they work best.
yeah, we see all the time how class consciousness has developed on twitter: a thoroughly false, utterly counterproductive class consciousness.
it's not about being able to communicate, it's about being able to see yourself as a member of a class, with the same difficulties as the others, for the same reason, and with the ability to change things through collective action. so communist memes on the discord doesn't cut it.
just talking about things online isn't going to put anyone in the frame of mind to be willing to take a risk for anyone, and there is risk in trying to get a union started.
just talking online means you never reach people that aren't sure about forming or joining a union, but that could be convinced.
or to respond to a snarky quip with a snarky quip:
> Do you think maybe people, who work on computers at a computerized social communication company, have some way to communicate?
i guess that's why tech is overwhelmingly unionized.
Tech has been working out of offices since the beginning. Your argument that remote work prevents that beggars the actual reality of history. I will also bet you $20 most of the unionizing going on now is conducted online.
there's really something to be said for a group of people literally working together. for instance, before you get the ball rolling you'd like to have an idea of the level of interest and commitment of your fellow workers. your private slack will be filled with people that want a union, this gives you no idea who may not want a union at all, or, more importantly, who's on the fence. you can't make a pitch to those people on your slack, because they have better things to do with their time. but if you're all at work anyway...
>Sharpen your blades boys
2022-04-15 17:22:59 ( CDT )
>2 day a week Office requirement = 20 % voluntary departures
---
These people really don't understand the branding of Apple vs Twitter:
>Back of the envelope ... Twitter revenue per employee : $ 5B rev / 8k employees = $ 625K rev per employee in 2021 Google revenue per employee : $ 257B rev / 135K employee = $ 1.9M per employee in 2021 Apple revenue per employee : $ 365B rev / 154k employees = $ 2.37M per employee in fiscal 2021
2022-04-15 17:08:07 ( CDT )
>Twitter revenue per employee if 3k instead of 8k : $ 5B rev / 3k employees = $ 1.66m rev per employee in 2021 ( more industry standard )
---
hard to tell if this is sarcasm?!
>I will be universally beloved , since it is so easy to please everyone on twitter
2022-04-23 21:04:30 ( CDT )
>It feels like everyone wants the same exact thing , and they will be patient and understanding of any changes ... Twitter Stans are a reasonable , good faith bunch
2022-04-23 21:06:51 ( CDT )
>These dipshits spent a years on twitter blue to give people exactly .... Nothing they want !
---
The sycophantism is over 9k:
> Morgan Stanley and Jared think you are using our friendship not in a good way
2022-05-12 19:31:12 ( CDT )
>This makes it seem like I'm desperate .
2022-05-12 19:31:17 ( CDT )
>Please stop
2022-05-12 19:31:48 ( CDT )
>Only ever want to support you .
2022-05-12 19:37:49 ( CDT )
>Clearly you're not desperate - you have the worlds greatest investors voting in support of a deal you already have covered . you're overfunded . will quietly cancel it ... And to be clear , I'm not out actively soliciting folks . These are our exiting LPs not rondos . Sorry for any trouble
2022-05-12 19:55:14 ( CDT )
>Morgan Stanley and Jared are very upset
2022-05-12 19:55:55 ( CDT )
>Ugh
2022-05-12 19:58:44 ( CDT )
>SPVs are how everyone is doing there deals now ... Luke loved to SPVS etc
2022-05-12 19:59:13 ( CDT )
>Just trying to support you ... obviously . I reached out to Jared and sort it out .
2022-05-12 20:00:53 ( CDT )
>* moved
2022-05-12 20:01:54 ( CDT )
>Yes , I had to ask him to stop .
2022-05-12 20:06:45 ( CDT )
>Liked " Just trying to support you ... obviously . I reached out to Jared and sort it out . "
2022-05-12 22:49:00 ( CDT )
>Cleaned it up with Jared
2022-05-12 22:49:12 ( CDT )
>Liked " Cleaned it up with Jared "
2022-05-12 22:49:58 ( CDT )
>I get where he is coming from .... Candidly , This deal has just captures the worlds imagination in an unimaginable way . It's bonkers ....
2022-05-12 22:51:42 ( CDT )
>And you know I'm ride or die brother - I'd jump on a grande for you
2022-05-12 22:51:49 ( CDT )
>Loved " And you know I'm ride or die brother - I'd jump on a grande for you "
>This is a scan/OCR of Exhibits H and J from the Twitter v. Musk case, with some of the conversations de-interleaved and of course converted from a fuzzy scan to text to make for easier reading.
It is may be glib, but Musk decided to close a $10s of billions deal he wanted to avoid a week before litigation because he thought he could flip Twitter for less loss than a settlement and whatever damage discovery and depositions would do.
That level of thoughtlessness is how you immediately find your equity investment under water. "WTF is wrong with you, Elon?" is a reasonable question to be asking, but evidently nobody does.
Everything he is doing is done in quiet corporate ways all the time. Why is his way so celebrity like? It’s almost like he wants people to know. You can’t see that?
No one walks in with a fucking a sink to a company dude lol.
In this case that is not what has happened. Rather, brands saw Musk's plans as non-brand-safe and refused to pre-book ads for all of 2023. That's not walking away for a month, that's walking away for a year at a minimum.
Could you elaborate on what conclusion we're meant to draw by this being Musk's personality? It doesn't inform whether what is doing is good or bad, megalomaniacal or not, etc. The list of people doing things that are "just their personality" include Gandhi, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Mother Teresa, MLK, and Hitler.
> He wants to show he can spend that kind of money[...]
Reminder: he expressly did not want to spend that kind of money but was forced to after facing a near-certain defeat in Delaware court. I wasn't expecting the events to be mythologized beyond recognition within weeks.
If you're going to correct someone, you'd likely want to do it right: he did not want to spend that kind of money after having agreed to do so in a legally binding way. Mark of a business genius who is definitely not impulsive and driven by ego.
> If you're going to correct someone, you'd likely want to do it right
The way you phrased it prepared me for a rebuttal, but you seem to agree that my comment was factual, but disagree with my temporal anchoring?
Signing the purchase agreement is a background to my point[1], and incidentally further strengthens my point: when he signed the agreement, it wasn't apparent that this was setting money on fire until after the bottom fell out of the stock market - which is when Musk started hinting at buyers remorse. None of which points to Musk wasting money just to show that he can (as gp was hinting); this is the mythologizing I am against - making it seem like he's playing 9D chess rather than someone with terrible risk management flailing and throwing stuff onto the walls to see what sticks.
1. One has to start somewhere, otherwise you'll have to go back to the big bang: you chose to start at the time Musk signed purchase agreement, but skipped over his rejecting the board seat, or secretly purchasing 9% of Twitter shares before that. However, this doesn't mean you are "not doing it right" in framing your correction-to-a-correction.
Musk was forced to buy Twitter for one reason and for one reason only: because he himself signed the agreement to do so. He offered that kind of money. At no point was there anyone else forcing Musk to buy, or forcing him to skip due diligence. That's all on Musk and on Musk only.
While he has so much money that he can lose billions and I don't see it actually affecting his quality of life... it will presumably affect his ability to raise billions like this again in investments or loans, which seems to be something he really enjoys doing and his ability to do it seems to be part his self-regard. It doesn't seem likely to me that he intends to destroy twitter and lose all the invested money.
However... he does seem to be really really bad at running a company, which does seem a bit inexplicable when he's run several companies succesfully before.
This is like saying in 1941 Stalin signed the non-aggression pact because he wanted Hitler to destroy Russia. Capable narcissists are in it for the glory. It's only toxic narcissists, who are not good at anything, that like to destroy.
To be clear, this video isn't real and Matt Shaver is "Just a dude who loves YouTube trying to make people laugh". https://www.youtube.com/c/mattshaver
Satire is not believable; this was. So whatever it was it was poorly done. Unless you were already familiar with the dude you would have no idea he was joking. He even put THIS IS REAL in front of the image.
No, you're obviously wrong. Firing people first lets one get rid of the underperformes, while announcing the unpopular decisions first gets rid of the overperformers.
I think you have it backwards. This is how you accomplish a 75% reduction while only having to lay off (and pay severance for) 50%! Musk again playing 4d chess.
No, you have it backwards. If you wanted 75% reduction while only having to lay off 50%, you make the unpopular decision _first_, and then the lay offs.
Indeed, that means you only have to pay 25% while achieving a 75% reduction. Though it's hard to believe there's a game plan here.
However, I have a suspicion that there is a certain type of person with low self esteem and high intelligence that will respond very well to being treated this badly.
Forcing people who were told they can work fully remote in their employment agreement to work in the office is treated as a constructive dismissal in the U.S.
As this constructive dismissal is clearly part of the mass layoffs, they would also be subject to the 60 days notice under the WARN Act (or 60 days pay to waive notice).
One of Twitter's lawyers literally stated in a company-wide communication this morning that Twitter employees have the right to work from home, regardless of what Elon said in his email.
Elon announced the policy with the intent to be able to fire employees who refused to come in to the office. However, because WFH is part of employee contracts, enforcing a WFO policy would constitute a constructive dismissal if actually enforced by Twitter. Meaning, not for cause, severance likely required under WARN Act, etc.
Then why did Twitter's top lawyers just quit? You're being optimistic in expecting Twitter's legal team were even told about this plan in advance, considering HR wasn't.
I think you misunderstand me - I want him to finish his big rocket and start doing wonderful stuff with it, I think his ill conceived twitter adventure is tilting at windmills that must be taking his eyes of the real prize
I am split on the remote work thing from a productivity / creativity perspective.
I do think there are times when I'm less productivity working from home compared to the office. I also think as a team we're less creative. Some of the best stuff I've done in my career has come out of casual conversations with my team about the stuff we're building. I've noticed I don't think about what I'm building as much when working remote, I'm just building it.
That said, I don't think 100% office is good either. That tends to just burn me out and I know other people I work with say the same thing. I think I'm at my best when it's 2-3 days in the office and the rest working from home.
40 hours in the office is really extreme these days. And any potential benefit of having employees working together in an office 24/7 is going to be negated by their dissatisfaction. Were I working at Twitter I'd probably be looking for a new job after this announcement. Not so much for the remote work decision either, but just the general lack of respect for how the employees prefer to work. This lack of flexibility probably means Musk won't just stop at remote work but he'll want keep track of your productivity, when you arriving in the morning, how long you take for lunch, etc. Working for these kinds of people in my experience is a living hell.
IMHO the ideal situation would be for people to work in their own offices, with doors that closed, and short commutes. Easy to work distraction-free alone, easy to have group meetings and random chats.
But real estate costs have made this approach untenable, so something has to give.
I don't know how much commercial real estate costs, but in the region around Twitter's HQ it's about $5-$6k for a 1000 square foot apartment
Assuming it's the same price per square foot for commercial space, that's less than $1000 a month for a 100 square foot office for each employee. Considering these employees are making more than 20x that, if offices could improve their productivity, it seems like it'd be well worthwhile
But since the cost of building those offices will be reflected in this quarter's earnings and destroy some executive bonuses, while the benefits won't be reflected in earnings for at least a full quarter and possibly longer, building individual workspaces is impossible.
Yeah, but Silicon Valley tech companies are already pulling in $2M per employee per year.. if spending 0.5% of that on better offices increases that revenue by 10%, you can probably bet that they'll want to do it
Presumably the higher ups legitimately believe that the open office plans are better for the company, which fits with how insistent most of them are to get butts back in seats now despite almost everyone hating the commute and the office life
I don't understand this argument. How is online chat not easy? With slack, I can fire off a question to any coworker instantly. I don't have to physically relocate myself to wherever they are in the office to ask it. And they can answer when it is appropriate for them, rather then be disturbed by my incursion into their space. If it's something that requires a conversation, then we schedule time to have a video chat or instantly transition to realtime video if convenient for both of us.
And how are group meetings not easy online? Online we can see / hear each other in near real time, we can type on the same document an see each other's edits in near real time, we can draw...I mean...What are people doing during group meetings that are difficult without physical presence?
> But real estate costs have made this approach untenable, so something has to give.
I need a citation here. Big tech was so large and profitable the last decade that thinking it’s real estate costs that led them to open office spaces and not a flawed ideology re: work and collaboration.
I assume the larger portion of what's "untenable" is "short commutes"; spending multiple hours of unpaid personal time in a car per day just driving to and from work so that you can have the place you sleep be affordable is a huge downside of a lot of in-person jobs that used to be taken as more of a default pre-pandemic, before so many places showed "yeah we could let you work from home but we just don't want to".
The downsides of an open floor plan can be at least partially countered by headphones, but there's much less that you can do on an individual level to make up for having that much of your personal time locked up in pure transit.
Remote work has changed a lot, but construction in the places where the big tech companies are headquarters is highly constrained. It’s not like they all could immediately triple the size of their campuses again. Tech companies did build large new campuses at enormous cost, but mostly development crowded out other development. Everyone is bidding for the same land and labor.
Reasonably, one company could give everyone an office but there’s no way everyone could do it at once.
The fact is, it was only "100% remote" being forced into existence by the pandemic that is allowing us to even have the debate. Outside of tech almost nowhere allowed remote before.
Musk represents the old guard who liked making people suffer these horrible commutes and office environments just to make senior mgmt feel important.
As a result, I think it's important to defend 100% remote as a pro-employee position, and then look to optional onsite as a way to mitigate potential issues such as isolation, young folks with roomates etc.
I agree that there are pros and cons to remote work, and that it should be possible to have a frank discussion about where the balance lies.
However, that is sadly irrelevant to this news item, as Musk isn't banning remote work because of any logical consideration of its merits. He's banning remote work because he's an authoritarian micromanager who believes that workers are to be treated like cattle.
> In conversations with 35 current and former Tesla employees, CEO Elon Musk is described as a polarizing figure who inspires but micromanages to an extreme.
HN is full of strong comments like this. A lot worse has been said about many tech people on here (Larry Ellison comes to mind).
Part of the cost of being a public figure and a multibillionaire is that people will talk about you without the same collegial tone that they'd use with their peers.
No, that's why we have labor laws. Being a billionaire doesn't make you a king.
Every company is spending "their own money" to pay employees. It doesn't matter if there are a thousand shareholders or just one. There is still a corporate structure and formal employee relationships. They are employees, not serfs, and they deserve the respect that entails.
Yes, I’m sure a narcissistic egomaniac would never condone or encourage such behaviour, and there’s no bootlicker out there who’d do it for brownie points. Completely unheard of.
Why is it so hard to believe that Musk may kind of be a jerk? Why do you have to deflect and find reasons to throw out evidence, especially when there are piles and piles of it?
Er no. There are both social and legal norms around employment. I’m not saying he’s breaking any laws here, but companies are a certain scale aren’t just the playthings of the boss they exist at the convenience and for the benefit for society at large (ie they are granted the privilege of being a company). That means there are constraints on corporate behaviour.
That doesn't make him immune from criticism or being described as authoritarian. A negative view on an employer may not have an immediate impact but medium to long term it can make hiring and retaining difficult, which can drive up costs.
Just because certain scummy behavior is legal doesn't make it ethical or a good business decision. Given what I have seen of his behavior I want absolutely nothing to do with Elon and his companies, either as a customer or employee, and am sure many others feel the same.
I assume this is a reference to the lawsuits accusing Tesla of racial discrimination, including calling an area staffed with Black workers "The Plantation"
First of all, that isn't the word that racist, slave-owning, plantation-owning population would use. If you are going to make a reference to our sad history in the United States of chattel slavery, use the accurate word. It doesn't do anyone a service to water down the absolute dehumanization the enslaved experienced at the hands of their "owners" (I quote that word to show disdain for the concept of humans owning humans, not to minimize the fact of ownership).
Secondly, you have some gall to compare a CEO setting policies that are well within the confines of labor laws with human slavery. Beyond the absurdity of your comparison, don't forget that Twitter employees literally have the right to walk away. That is the antithesis of slavery.
You are doing your own argument a massive disservice by making such absurd accusations. Instead of arguing on the merits of remote vs. in-person work, you invite an argument on your analogies. This is the same as calling anyone you disagree with politically a Nazi. Not only does it debase the absolute evil practiced by actual Nazis, it ends any chance of effective debate.
I didn't take the comment you are responding to in that way at all (comparing Musk's actions to that of a slave-owner). I believed the OP was reacting to the "it's Musk's money he can treat his employees as he likes" — by way of an analogy that you thought too extreme.
(To be sure, if OP had used the "N-word" I am quite sure there would be much more condemnation though that would have unfortunately then entirely missed the point.)
> I believed the OP was reacting to the "it's Musk's money he can treat his employees as he likes" — by way of an analogy that you thought too extreme.
That is exactly the problem. The analogy was that Musk akin to a plantation owner, and his prerogative vis-à-vis twitter employees (by virtue of being CEO, a position he gained through a takeover with his "money") is akin to the rights plantation owners practiced vis-à-vis slaves on the plantation. This is exactly what the person I replied to implied.
The problem I had was never with whether a CEO has a right to set policies like banning employees from remote work. The problem is that the analogy directly compared employees to slaves. The former have the right to walk away, the latter never did (without risking death). No matter what the antecedent is (CEOs vs. plantation owners) the subsequent is a false likeness (slave vs. employee).
And I agree that using the "n-word" would have probably been flagged immediately. And if it wasn't, it would be the focus of the comment and not the content. My argument is that functionally this is a distinction without a difference. Saying "Negros" may have insulated the poster from the immediate flagging, the thesis of their argument was equally as flawed independent of the words used. Elon Musk is not a slave-owner[1], Twitter employees are not slaves. No amount of hedging could make that analogy accurate.
[1]
Whether the Musk family benefited from de facto slavery within the emerald mining business is a different argument. One that should be discussed, but in the context of exploitation of labor in third-world countries. Furthermore, as others have pointed out in this thread, the treatment of workers in China building Tesla models could be more justifiably argued to be a form of modern-day slavery, as the worker has far less agency to actually quit and still survive. Neither of these points were mentioned in this specific thread, and neither would have much bearing on whether Twitter employees are akin to slaves.
Yeah, sure. Because society and culture does not change and evolve. It's standing still like its 1905 when predatory capitalism was all the rage and people was still angry for loosing all their literal slaves.
At this scale those are not just his "own" money otherwise we are going to have another Nero and Caligula moments again in the future.
During a keynote speech on May 10, Elon Musk commended Tesla factory workers in China for working under conditions that break labor laws in many parts of the world — including those in China, as The Guardian pointed out. The high praise from Elon went out to workers who are being pushed to meet production goals in the middle of pandemic lockdowns, which have been ongoing at the Gigafactory in Shanghai since April. The Tesla CEO went on to compare Chinese workers with their American counterparts, who Musk says lack work ethic he considers impressive and vital for EV companies to succeed.
"There’s just a lot of super talented and hardworking people in China that strongly believe in manufacturing. And they won’t just be burning the midnight oil. They’ll be burning the 3am oil. So they won’t even leave the factory type of thing. Whereas in America, people are trying to avoid going to work at all."
Going by what Musk says, it sure sounds like what they say is true: nobody wants to work anymore. That is, except for workers in China, where conditions enabling Tesla to meet production goals during lockdowns have less to do with burning oil past midnight, and more to do with China’s extreme work culture. Meaning Musk isn’t really praising hardworking people so much as a disregard for labor rules.
During the lockdowns, workers at the Gigafactory reportedly worked 12-hour shifts, six days a week and slept on the floor. Again, that’s not only during recent lockdowns. This is actually common enough to be nicknamed “996.” That’s shorthand for work shifts going from 9am to 9pm, six days a week.
Jerry Pournelle once wrote that "unregulated capitalism will eventually end with human meat sold in market places, and slavery." Seems like Musk and his ultra-libertarian ilk are heading down that same path.
If you knew anything about Pournelle (his books are good, especially his collaborations with Niven), you'd realize he'd be the last to espouse communism. This is someone who arguably came up with the SDI during the Reagan administration.
No, he's advocating for effective, efficient (and limited) government regulation.
I come from the soviet block and I like to see when westerners keep flagging my post for laughing out communist advocates ( they are growing as you see ). My country ( Poland ) was an example for this unregulated capitalism transformation in 90s and I can say, I am glad somebody has tried it. Regarding regulations please see mifid 2 regulation and see how efficient and concise it is ( tousands of pages ). So to all westerners please come to eastern Europe and see these "efficient regulations" - they never are
I don't see how you can so confidently connect labor issues in a Gigafactory to his beliefs surrounding the efficacy of remote work. You still have not addressed this part of your claim:
> He's banning remote work because he's an authoritarian micromanager
You don't know why he's banning remote work, and you're guessing that its the most inflammatory reason you can come up with. You do not know.
We know he's banning remote work, and we know he's an authoritarian micromanager (because he brags about that). What is added to the conversation by quibbling over the precise causative relationship between those two facts?
Really, the idea that there isn't a connection is the less likely option. I think it's on you to prove that, not on others to disprove it. "When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras."
And the fact that Twitter employees aren't all near an office. If you live in Minneapolis, you're not exactly going to be happy that you have to go into the office (closest one is 6+ hours away in Chicago). It's not even a choice to go into the office or not at that point - it's an ultimatum of move immediately for a job where everything is on fire or be fired!
> I've noticed I don't think about what I'm building as much when working remote, I'm just building it.
I'm the complete opposite haha, I do much better deep thinking at home. This doesn't invalidate your point, nor am I trying to. More just saying, we all work differently, and all of our styles are equally valid. Hybrid WFH is great :D
I'm beginning to think that collective distributed satellite offices is going to be big. Like WeWork but for companies to house their local staff and far less culty. Would help if they had standing desks, folding treadmills, three screens and everything else for a superb dev experience that is a bit of a pain to set up at home.
That's your choice. I would love to be within 15 minutes walk of my office, but I can't realistically afford it, so the choice of a longer commute is made for me.
I know most studies show remote work improves productivity. I have the opposite experience even though I need to take one hour to commute one way. Our office is 80% empty on average. I think this has greatly hurt the interaction between people, increased friction and slowed down project progress. I am sure some people are more efficient at home, but there might be a silent majority, who enjoy doing less work remotely and never voice themselves (or even say the opposite).
In most places it seems to be the opposite from what I gather from my clients. Small majority of people prefer to go into the office. Especially those with kids. And they are vocal about it.
I don't have kids, so for me productivity is higher at home. However, we're running a hybrid setup at my place of work because it indeed seems to give you the best of both worlds.
Anything more than 0% office implies a huge sea change from 0%.
To go from zero to one on this, your company now needs to lease space, even if part-time. Your employees are now bound geographically.
At zero, things are dramatically simpler and easier. The only hard thing is - middle management has nowhere to hide with work from home. Performance has to be monitored accurately now, versus the straightforward bums-in-seats-looking-busy-for-eight-hours method.
The problem with hybrid is you're still bound geographically. My work insists on being hybrid (my job has no reason for me to be in the office) and it increases my cost of living by at least 50%, not to mention I'll never be able to be a home owner.
My take is probably a bit more hot and less to do with anything provable. I think the real reason for "return to work" is to justify high salaries. If everyone dispersed across the United States then people in the highest markets would get significant drops in pay. It's no secret that subsidizing extremely high housing costs has the benefit of earning those people more than the average worker doing the same work over the same period of time.
Productivity is just corporate speak for, "do what I say when I say it".
It's not like your income is scaled to the housing costs though. I just checked craigslist for Los angeles and Columbus, Ohio. 1 bedroom average in LA is $2000 and change, Columbus its $1000. For a year in the average 1 bedroom, you are only paying $12k more or so for the unit in LA. Other costs are about the same, the same MSRP for consumer goods, about the same grocery bill (certain food is honestly very cheap in LA due to its year round availability), about the same $10 pints of beers and $12 entrees at your typical late 20s and up drinking/eating establishment.
Most engineer salaries however are substantially higher on the west coast than in the midwest, much higher than a $12k pay bump that would have covered the difference in housing costs for average 1 bedrooms between these markets.
I don't think its so much that engineers on the west coast pay a lot more in cost of living and therefore have to get a higher salary to put food on the table the same as they do out east. I think its simply that engineers who happen to be on the west coast are tapped into an excellent network of job opportunities and tend to be highly trained, and for companies to get at this network for its talent themselves, they need to pay these inflated west coast rates to get into the door. This is just what the prices of this market have come to be, and they must have gotten to such a point through other factors than the paltry in comparison difference in cost of living.
> Most engineer salaries however are substantially higher on the west coast than in the midwest,
In northern CA this holds true and even moreso in Seattle. In southern california (notably because you mention Los Angeles), this is not true. There are high paying jobs in SoCal, but they are much scarcer than the talent pool. While there are more opportunities in SoCal than other parts of the west coast, they are lower paying and worse conditions overall that are closer to midwest counterparts. This view is borne of 40 years of experience in SoCal (and everyone I worked with). Moving to Seattle, I instantly made 30% more AND rent was cheaper.
FWIW average rents in seattle are about $1600 a month for 1 bedrooms on craigslist right now, so you'd only be saving $7200 a year living in Columbus Ohio. I know salary data online is what it is, but from zippia.com at least average SWE salary is $75k in Columbus, and $115k in seattle, so even with the cost of living difference of $7k factored in, there is a huge bump in pay for this job market of engineers versus the market in Columbus, OH.
Southern California and Seattle are greater metropolitan areas, that coincide with job markets (the job markets are the comparison I drew). You don't rent IN Seattle proper. That's silly, when Renton gets you 2br or Kent gets you 3br. It's like saying "Los Angeles" when your rental options are cheapest in Downy or Anaheim.
I live in the midwest, in a house that's appraised around $350K. Every time I visit family on the West coast, I look at similar house prices, and they're all at least 3x or 4x. No way could I afford that; and I sure wouldn't get a huge salary bump for relocating.
At the end of the day median prices of mortgages follow median salaries seen in the area, and not everyone who buys a west coast house goes broke from it otherwise prices would decrease. Maybe your line of work isn't so lucrative on the west coast, but for many the bump in salary is more than enough to cover cost of living. Then factor in other benefits that might be locally specific, like noncompetes being illegal in california so you can leave a business to start your own immediately, or your property taxes being what they were assessed at when you bought the property despite market gains, or a stronger social safety net that comes from a state government that generates budgetary surpluses, and things might look even better over time.
Rest of the world has largely gone back to office to work now, even if it is part time.
I feel the U.S. is the last man standing.
For knowledge workers, WAH works well for self motivated, high performing individuals, in a high functioning work environment. You know, the HN people.
My take is, we'll lose competitive edge over time if we insist on WAH for the mass.
I’m definitely at the point where I’m getting less productive from home, but the question is when is that drop in productivity offset by the time wasted commuting? If my office was just down the street I’d be there every day.
This comment really strikes a chord with me. Some days, I’m way more productive, others not so much.
What I do love is eliminating the commute time. That is time I’ve been able to utilize in other ways that really contribute to my mental well being.
Walking the kids to school (instead of driving), walking the dog, exercise, catch up on chores or errands, etc.
That is probably my favorite aspect of working from home.
I do miss those serendipitous interactions with coworkers. And Zoom fatigue is real. (I’m just waiting for the day when Zoom alerts your manager that the Zoom window is not the active window on your machine)
Wouldn't you experience in-person meeting fatigue sooner than zoom fatigue? What is it about sitting in the comfort of your own home having a conversation that is worse than sitting in an office having a conversation?
> I am split on the remote work thing from a productivity / creativity perspective
Even if productivity was down at home vs at the office aren't we already way too productive anyways ?
Living in the office would also be more productive, and working 10 hours per day, banning weekends, &c.
At the end of the day you have to ask yourself if you're here to grind for 45 years to pay the lifestyle of eccentrics like Musk or to live life ? If it's ok to lose 10% of productivity while regaining hours of your life ?
I secretly agree with you. I think the ideal situation is to accommodate both sets of needs. Personally I prefer 100% remote but if someone wants hybrid then that's fine too.
I say secretly because usually I'm a strict remote advocate because I acknowledge that executives really would like everyone to be back in the office and I'd rather kill myself than do that.
So, he fires thousands of them while hob-knobbing with other billionaires on the other side of the country.
And his first company-wide communication is rescinding previous WFH policies without much reason.
What an absolute knob.
Edit to add... He demanded a company-wide all-hands on one hours notice, then appeared 15 minute late. I hope every employee worth their salary walks, Twitter implodes, and Musk loses much of his fortune and all of his cachet. What a narcissistic asshole.
It's an interesting look from someone claiming to believe that climate change is one of the biggest threats to humanity. Better get those expensive developers working from the office again so they keep buying expensive electric cars...
Isn't the Hyperloop regularly derided by those in the environmental community for distracting from more useful/environmentally sustainable transit solutions. Tesla also bifurcated the charger ports on the market, which has slowed adoption of EV chargers by businesses. Definitely a more complicated relationship than a surface level analysis would imply
Let's not pretend his goal was to sell more cars; that's ridiculous.
But to your point, he's always seemed to have this philosophy that climate mitigation doesn't have to be a compromise. In his vision of the future we do all the things we do now and more, but we do them better.
I saw a stat recently that an electric car removes about as much emissions as a meter of road adds.
Electric cars are the most overblown response to climate change. They will help in a myopic way when comparing directly to combustion cars over several years (electric cars only start to save emissions somewhere between them being driven 6-24 months into their ownership), but I doubt it's much more than that and even possibly a net increase in emissions in terms of furthering the dominance of the car.
Elon Musk doesn't care about anything other than his ego.
I think there are many many good reasons for electric cars. Climate change is quite far down the list though.
That said, today I went into the office in central London for the first time in a while and was kind of shocked. While crossing the road to get a burrito I was consciously keeping track of the electric cars which went past. It felt like every other car. Then I got on the electric bus back to the train station and passed the drop off point for what must of been close to a hundred Lime electric bikes. There is a palpable change and I for one think it's exciting.
It's just a shame Elon is such a, ahem, character.
Electric cars are good if you actually need a car, but we currently use cars in far more situations than really need them. Shifting away from cars where they aren't needed will be far more effective than replacing gas cars with electric.
I don't see why those are mutually exclusive. Replacing ICE cars with electric and using other forms of transportation when it is appropriate both are important. I actually think the rise in electric personal transportation (bikes, scooters and weird balancing contraptions etc) could be a bigger game changer than electric cars especially within cities.
I think the notion of a CEO doing all the things their workers do purely out of solidarity to be shallow and condescending. Obviously his job is different from theirs and he is going to have a different set of rules. And I doubt any of them would want to put in the number of hours he puts in. He's clearly a workaholic.
Showing up late to an all-hands meeting of thousands of employees is wasting thousands of hours of peoples' time. I don't care how important you think his time is that's not going to add up to a rational choice
My point is, gestures like "you're coming into the office, so I'm coming into the office" are simultaneously empty and counterproductive. His job involves travel, period. And besides, he owns the place.
While thousands were losing their jobs, he was a social event in NYC. Not working, at least not by most definitions of the word.
I don’t expect my CEO to do everything I do. I do expect her to be present and actively communicating with staff during a massive layoff. I do expect her to respect the time of thousands of employees by being timely to meetings she called. I do expect to hear about my job status from a living person, not a batch email sent to my PERSONAL email address.
"On Wednesday, three top Twitter executives responsible for security, privacy and compliance also resigned, according to two people familiar with the matter and internal documents seen by The Times.
The departing executives include Lea Kissner, Twitter's chief information security officer; Damien Kieran, its chief privacy officer; and Marianne Fogarty, its chief compliance officer. Their resignations came a day ahead of a deadline for Twitter to submit a compliance report to the Federal Trade Commission, which is overseeing privacy practices at the company as part of a 2011 settlement.
Twitter has typically reviewed its products for privacy problems before rolling them out to users, to avoid additional fines from the F.T.C. and remain in compliance with the settlement. But because of a rapid pace of product development under Mr. Musk, engineers could be forced to "self-certify" so that their projects meet privacy requirements, one employee wrote in an internal message seen by The Times.
"Elon has shown that he cares only about recouping the losses he's incurring as a result of failing to get out of his binding obligation to buy Twitter," the employee wrote. The changes to Twitter's F.T.C. reviews could result in heavy fines and put people working for the company at risk, the person warned."
This may be the beginning of the end for "social media" because the constantly buried truths are coming to the surface. For example, 100% advertising and 0% journalism as a "business model", web user privacy, "tech" malfeasance, and the myth of "free".
Noncommercial web users are not ready to pay fees to use websites. Not all web use is commercial, nor can all web use be commercialised.
Noncommercial web use is real. However the web as imagined by "tech" companies, i.e., massive data harvesting websites that produce no content, where all web usage is surveilled and all data collected is purported to have commercial value, may be more fantasy than reality.
> The agency said that it was “tracking the developments at Twitter with deep concern” and that it was prepared to take action to ensure the company was complying with a settlement known as a consent order, which requires Twitter to comply with certain privacy and security requirements because of allegations of past data misuse.
> Twitter was first put under a consent order in 2011 and it agreed to a new order earlier this year. If the FTC finds Twitter is not complying with that order, it could fine the company hundreds of millions of dollars, potentially damaging the company’s already precarious financial state.
> ... The new decree required Twitter to start enhanced privacy and security programs, which were to be audited by a third party. Under that decree, Twitter is required to conduct a privacy assessment of any new products it launches.
> ... The meltdown of the security leadership is especially fraught because an FTC audit was expected by January, according to two people familiar with the schedule. One said that Kissner and other executives had been hiring, despite a company-wide freeze, in a frantic effort to meet compliance rules before then.
The timing of this is the content - not the ending of remote work issue. It's using the news cycle and a hot button issue (end remote work) to bury the regulatory liability of the headline of the 3 chief complaince officers resignation the day before a FTC complaince filing.
Yeah this is Musk 101. My favorite one was the day before a massive whistleblower article came out about Tesla he literally released a Tesla Cyberwhistle. "BLOW THE WHISTLE" he said. Afterwards all searches for Tesla whistleblower were articles about this tiny piece of metal he put up for sale in his shop. Genius.
it's almost like the headline that was buried about Twitter and Facebook colluding with Biden's DHS to "police disinformation", where social media companies were shills for government propaganda
> the director of the Election Security Initiative at CISA, recommended the use of third-party information-sharing nonprofits as a “clearing house for information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”
Everytime a new Commanding Officer (CO) showed up when I was in the Navy we tried to bet which type it was:
1) The kind who investigated the goings-on in the ship, interviewed the officers and chiefs, and learned how the ship was being run, then made small changes over time to optimize the operations based on what they learned. Sometimes big changes in one specific area, if it was required (like fixing the ship's crypto key material protocols, if they are super fucked up).
2) The kind who came in and ran roughshod over the whole ship, made a bunch of big changes and policy decisions, and generally acted like they owned the place in order to fulfill a pre-concieved vision they had of how things should be.
With 1, we were happy because there are always improvements to an org, but the best people to know those improvements are those who know the org. These commanders always resulted in a better command overall by the end of their tenure, bar none.
With 2, we were sad, because suddenly mistakes were being made everywhere in order to try and fit into the "vision", and thus reduced morale due to the massive changes and the constant failures. I saw 2 of these and both failed miserably and brought the command down lower than it should/could have been. One of those was on a great ship that performed so flawlessly that we were always sent on the most important assignments, and after I left I learned the ship fell into disrepair and could no longer even get underway, due to mismanagement. That guy came in and basically made me decide to get an early re-assignment and 3 of my friends on that ship left the Navy completely because of him.
I wonder if you've read Turn the Ship Around [1]? It's one of my favorite leadership books and tells the true story of the Navy captain who was put in the awkward position of running a submarine class that he was not familiar with.
He adapted to the situation by leaning on the expertise of the crew in a way that was very different than the normal command-and-control style of leadership. It sounds like what you describe in type 1.
Yea, the Navy has basically fostered a shit culture that turned the leadership into MBA-style bullshit artists today. Leadership isn't taken seriously, just promotions and personal gain. Only those who kiss ass can make it in today's Navy.
If more leaders like this guy who wrote this book were sent to the top levels, it would be an improvement. Instead, you notice he's writing books for a living now.
FWIW they teach 1 in MBA schools, if MBAs are doing 2 it's despite their education, not because of it.
Also most top tier MBA programs are an excuse to get wildly drunk basically daily and make a bunch of powerful friends, so it's very possible most people who go don't learn a damn thing.
A major problem is that life in the Navy sucks too much compared to the civilian world, so that most of the competent Naval Officers leave, and you end up with a pretty small pool of competent leaders. It’s a super weird dynamic where junior officers are on average more competent than mid-career officers.
As for why life sucks so much, leadership has let there be too much to do with too few people, and inflexible systems.
>Yea, the Navy has basically fostered a shit culture that turned the leadership into MBA-style bullshit artists today. Leadership isn't taken seriously, just promotions and personal gain. Only those who kiss ass can make it in today's Navy.
This is a disease of all peacetime militaries. The Army suffers the same problem. They spend an entire career LARPing in camouflage, and think that somehow means they know anything at all about warfare or leadership.
When I read about Lockheed’s stealth ship, I assumed people would be excited about them.
Because they were run by such a small crew, nobody wanted to command them because the number of people under your command mattered for rank advancement.
When we began looking at farms, the advice we got over and over again was to live with it through a few seasons before making any changes. See how the water flows in the winter months, see what dries out in the summer. Learn what the wildlife get up to, where the best views are.
It's something I think about to this day. As we've made progress restoring and transforming our place, we're constantly informed by those observations — and it's really easy to see how many of the initial ideas would've been premature or lacking context.
Good advice about the seasons. Sounds like "Chesterton's Fence":
The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to [the fence] and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
Wait, each ship works completely different from the other ships, there are no established generic procedures, the crew just figures out how they want to do encryption?
When you transfer onto another ship, do you need a long onboarding as well, does each ship have its own culture? How do they coordinate?
> Wait, each ship works completely different from the other ships, there are no established generic procedures, the crew just figures out how they want to do encryption?
There's some commonality, but it's like a fork of other ships. When a new ship is stood up and built, the pre-comissioning crew will write the SOPs for the new ship. Most of the time, you crib it from an old ship and make changes you think are useful, like a fork. There are some standards from up high, especially encryption stuff, but things can be run with some discretion.
Crypto was probably a bad example, since no decent Navy crypto tech would deviate from the proper procedures, even in the face of the CO asking for it. Kinda like how once the CO asked me to use more ordnance for training than I was alloted, and I said "no" and he said "yes" and I said "if you do this, I will put in writing that I told you not to and you did it anyways and I also won't operate the system to check out the ordnance, so we'll have an imbalance" and he said "ok".
> When you transfer onto another ship, do you need a long onboarding as well,
Not long, but a bit, yes. Much like starting a new job. For some jobs, you shadow the current position holder for a good while.
> does each ship have its own culture?
Yes, undoubtedly.
> How do they coordinate?
Generally via SIPRchat, radio, flag signals, etc.
But seriously, we have some standards for operations that make the different ships able to inter-operate easily. You also have groups of ships under commanders who do a bit more to coalesce those ships into a unit.
The ships are so big, expensive, and slow to build that each one varies by request of the Navy and necessity (suppliers change, shipyards are different, parts are substituted, timelines cut optional components, etc).
Military aircraft carriers are going to operate in a manner completely different from boats carrying skipping containers, if we're going with this analogy. The number of social media companies Musk had any experience running prior to buying Twitter is 0.
You are assuming that he is optimizing for employee happiness. I am not associating a value judgement to whether that is the right/wrong move in Twitter's context.
I wish that we, as a culture, stopped harping over what Elon Musk might do to Twitter next.
It does not matter. This will take some time to play out. I hope Twitter employees land on their feet. That is pretty much the only thing that matters. I don't have a lot of reasons to think that they won't barring some exceptions.
I bet a lot of people actually experience Schadenfreude at seeing these social media empires being toppled.
The point was not employee happiness, but an attitude that completely ignores that the employees might know a thing or two about how to run the place. And plenty of employees are willing to put up with subpar pay and otherwise boring work if they feel valued for the stewardship and experience.
Actual happiness was not the point. In the Navy, the CO doesn't have to care about employee happiness, anyways, while Musk sort of does. 'Happiness' was a rhetorical device I used there.
Elon's the #1 type there. He's been shown to be talking to a lot of people at Twitter to get a good understanding of how the product and company works and removing people as he finds it being unrelated to the future success of the company.
> this seems to be a significant problem to your CO analogy.
So let me ask you… how does a ship’s commanding officer not have more skin in the game? A rich person loses their second home or yacht when things go south… a person on a ship can hit the brig or lose their life.
You’d be surprised at how much you can fuck up a ship as a CO without life-changing consequences. Unless there’s gross negligence a CO is almost certainly not even going to get discharged even if their actions lead to death of a sailor.
They’ll stop being CO and will never be promoted, but will finish out their Navy career in a job where they can’t hurt anyone, and will have almost no impact once they retire and go into civilian life.
They’re not going to do time in the brig unless there’s willful misconduct.
A commander doesn’t have to go overboard due to the nature of their work. That’s no different than a CEO who happened to have a heart attack while being CEO.
Lookup James Po Ho Cheung or Sid Agrawal if you want examples of CEOs straight up murdered for their roles.
Of course it’s different. The very nature of a soldier’s job involves death. I don’t understand what you mean by “a CO doesn’t have to go overboard”, I provided an example of just that happening. Anyone on a ship has a nonzero risk of going overboard. Elon Musk has 0 risk of being swept into the sea from his desk.
Every human with a heart has some risk of heart attack. It’s silly to compare that risk to a soldier’s risk of death.
And any CEO that fires someone has a risk of being attacked by that disgruntled former employee.
This is exactly why I said
> software CEO that died in the course of their duty specifically due to the nature of their work
So that example fails the test.
The example of James Po Ho Cheung is more interesting. Now that I think about it, since software can operate in so many different domains, it’s valid that some of those can be dangerous, such as gambling in his case.
> Of course it’s different. The very nature of a soldier’s job involves death.
Absolutely not as the CO of a ship. You are orders of magnitude safer on one of those ships than working as a roofer or a farmer.
> don’t understand what you mean by “a CO doesn’t have to go overboard”, I provided an example of just that happening.
You provided an example of someone going overboard on a ship, but nothing a CO does makes them more susceptible to going over than any other person on the ship. Being a CO is not higher risk than taking a fucking Carnival cruise.
> Every human with a heart has some risk of heart attack. It’s silly to compare that risk to a soldier’s risk of death.
Given that “heart attack” is probably the most likely way a high level officer in the US military would die, I think not.
> Elon Musk has 0 risk of being swept into the sea from his desk.
Not quite. San Francisco has some pretty gnarly long tail risks from earthquakes. He’s also now in charge of one of the biggest propaganda tools in the history of humanity. The Saudi’s have wacked reporters for far less.
I think you’ve lost track of the context here and are just trying to refute every sentence in isolation, but I see no coherent refutation of the main idea.
There will be plenty of devs desperate for work as large companies cuts a significant portion of the work.
Bottomline, the last time tech truly saw a recession and slow-down was in 2001. So, the entire dev cohort has never seen economic conditions that they are about to face.
Even high performers at Meta, Coinbase, Netflix will have to navigate this.
There are two choices in front of them
a) work at Twitter and other startups which requires 60+ hours of work. High workload / High Reward
or
b) Join services firm like IBM, TCS and have work-life balance but do menial tasks with steady but medium pay.
Elon Musk will have no trouble hiring them.
Most devs are completely out of touch about the economic reality. Now they have to work hard like the rest of other industries.
> a) work at Twitter and other startups which requires 60+ hours of work. High workload / High Reward
Twitter is not a startup, and my understanding is startups are only "high reward" if your bet pays off (e.g. you got in early enough AND the startup was successful enough).
> Most devs are completely out of touch about the economic reality. Now they have to work hard like the rest of other industries.
Your a/b binary choice is out of touch in its own way.
This is exactly what I mean by 99% HN dev cohort completely out of touch with reality.
Twitter is absolutely a startup. They are trying to
a) find product market fit with a new vision
b) Have negative cash-flow, so everyone has to workhard to reduce burn rate.
c) Will have new fresh equity issued them with high upside rewards.
d) Will have a liquidity event in a couple of years (IPO)
> Twitter is absolutely a startup. They are trying to a) find product market fit with a new vision b) Have negative cash-flow, so everyone has to workhard to reduce burn rate. c) Will have new fresh equity issued them with high upside rewards. d) Will have a liquidity event in a couple of years (IPO)
That sounds like a very idiosyncratic definition of a "startup" that would match all kinds of poorly performing companies no one would label a "startup." I think being new, small, and chasing orders-of-magnitude upside from that small start are pretty key to the conventional definition, neither of which apply to Twitter anymore.
I can give you many examples of unicorns that weren’t firing people one week after a takeover by a billionaire who doesn’t understand how account verification works.
Musk was firing useless departments (DEI, Human Rights, Ethics, Communications) -- Mostly rent-seeking roles that has no place in startups.
Musk also fired Engineers who weren't productive in the past two months. Musk has enough software expertise to see through people who bullshit and people who know their shit.
That's why the best Car Designer, the best rocket engineer, the best AI expert were all working for Tesla/SpaceX.
Is Musk clueless about Social Media? absolutely.
Do you think he isn't spending every waking second to figure out the nuances and deliver something amazing in 2-3 years?
This is where HN/Reddit/Blind/Media are clueless about Musk. They look at current state of Musk and mock him (they mocked him for his rocket dream, his electric car dream, they mocked his tents)
True to form and cluelessness, they are currently mocking his lack of expertise in creator economy and other social aspects of social media.
Let's try 2 years from now. Musk is a fast learner and has always pivoted when data shows him where he is wrong.
He will make plenty of mistakes and clueless media will be there to highlight that because there is an audience of clueless people who are thirsty for Elon Musk thrashing articles to feel good about themselves.
At the end of the day, Twitter will be successful, Elon will be a Trillionaire (from all his ventures) and there will be salty HN/Redditers who will still be mocking him in 2030 because he probably would be doing some stupid thing in some new industry
There's a third option of joining a small, lean, bootstrapped company with good work-life balance, which tend to thrive when the market isn't as frothy.
The big difference between 2001 and now is that high compensation at top jobs enables greater savings.
Most people in 2001 had to find work quickly to keep surviving. Mid-career high performers from Meta, Twitter, Netflix, etc have millions in savings and assets.
Those people could sit out a few years if they wanted, or even just retire early if they were happy with the $60-100k/year income from interest/capital gains at a consevative withdrawl rate.
Most of these people still choose to work today because they have well paying jobs which they enjoy. High performers gonna perform, etc. But, if the only option was toxic jobs combined with low pay many would simply opt-out.
Many in this dev cohort have been extremely lucky and have the privilege to take a stand. 2022 isn't really a great time to be an asshole captialist banking on qualified employees having no other options.
Fresh graduates and early career individuals are a possibility. But, you still need experienced devs to mentor them and maintain the large complex systems/infrastructure that fresh hires can't yet handle without more experience. Attracting and retaining this senior talent is the hard part.
Yes, The Tech Rich people aren't the right people to work for Twitter / Elon Musk anyway. Now, it's mostly self-selecting people of believing in the mission/elon and people looking for hungry or success.
Every industry works like this. It's only out-of-touch techies who enjoyed unprecedented rewards/hard-work ratio that need to adjust their lifestyle and expectations
The labor market is still incredibly tight for engineers. Even these current layoffs have targeted non tech departments for the majority of their cuts, if they included engineering at all. Companies still want to build and there’s not enough hands.
From everyone I’m in contact with it’s a terrible time to be in sales, marketing, or hr, and the engineers are mostly bitching about no raises this year
This is an out of touch comment, not understanding the supply / demand context.
It's not only about layoffs, but not enough absorbing capacity for freshly printed Tech graduates the universities are churning out at the rate expecting previous level of hiring.
Most HN guys demanding work-life balance have seen nothing yet.
This is a great time for Startups and Startup-like firms like Twitter to hire and require 60+ hours workload. There will be fresh graduates from Stanford, MIT, Berkeley who have no choice but to put pressure on existing coasters on various companies
You can keep claiming it’s out of touch but that doesn’t make it real. There is still a heavy demand for software engineers. It’s not as great as it was a year ago but it’s not so dire companies can’t now start demanding no work life balance.
He just held an all hands where he said he doesn't know how long a run rate Twitter has, Twitter may lose billions next year, and bankruptcy isn't out of the question, so it sounds like it's possible he may have trouble hiring anyone.
You can’t realistically argue that twitter will have as easy a time hiring as SpaceX and Tesla. They might have the same shitty working conditions, but without the risk of the company going under in a year or two. Plus everyone already there knew what they were signing up for when they joined, but at twitter you should expect a 50-75%+ employee churn over the next year. You don’t join twitter today unless you treat it like a short term contracting job.
There is always a fresh supply of extremely bright engineers from Stanford/MIT/Berkeley and thousands of universities who will have trouble finding jobs in a hiring freeze environment and wouldn't mind working for a startup like Twitter (driven by mission and large upside with equity if successful).
See, I’ve been wondering this, so you think that he’s driving all the advertisers and employees away to start fresh, with advertisers and employees who are loyal? Do you think the subscription service will be enough to make up the lost revenue or, how do you think he’ll earn the billion in interest payments he needs, sell Tesla stock?
Here’s the thing: I never said he had issues hiring anyone. I simply said you might argue Twitter is not entirely his even though he owns it.
That’s where all your startup analogies (which I find interesting!) break: Twitter is a “turn around” case. Musk had never to deal with such. He always build up companies from the ground. That’s very very different to acquiring a large company with an existing culture.
Now I’m not saying it cannot work. Maybe it does. But you can’t argue he’s done it before.
Whether or not they literally own the place is aside from the posters point about new leaders coming in and automatically upending everything without taking the time to actually listen to people and learn what actually is and isn't working. But yeah, it's an ironic choice of words.
The difference here is the ship is not running smoothly at all according to the new commander. It is a change in course and I think it's pretty obvious Elon wants to get rid of the people who won't be on board with the new plan. This change is one more opportunity for those dissidents to leave and for those that stay to build a better team.
Your entire reasoning behind your comment indicates you don't understand this point I'm making about leadership. You're talking about a "new plan" as if we all agreed that Twitter was doing so badly that it needed a 180. You use "dissidents" and "better team" as if it's a fact that things are so bad and the team is so inept that Elon could do nothing but burn the place to the ground and make a phoenix from the ashes.
My point was that the organization/ship is more than it's current head, it's a massive organism and if you make systemic changes that affect a sick or even healthy organism massively you tend to just destroy/kill it rather than improve it. The best way to fix/improve something so large and supposedly unhealthy as Twitter is by small or medium steps that are well-thought-out, over time.
You seem to be basing this on the idea of a ship full of decent and willing sailors who had a common cause. I'm sure even those good type-1 captains you mention would still get rid of malingerers or enemy sympathizers.
Elon's got activist employees who're trying to bring him down personally and entire useless product divisions so the best thing to do is cut out the expensive rot - nothing ruins morale like having hostile and counterproductive teammates dragging you down.
The part of the company takes takes tweets, stores tweets, and displays tweets seems to be working fairly well. The rest is on the rocks or was headed for them full steam.
> I'm sure even those good type-1 captains you mention would still get rid of malingerers
No, they'd try and figure out the motivation of the malignerer, or lack thereof, first. We had one guy who was a great tech, but then for a few months he showed up drunk to watch and was lazy. Found out his wife left him with the kids, to another state. The officer's mess arranged with some of the enlisted senior crew to invite the guy to family events every week, dinner and stuff, and helped him get back that family feeling with the ship, so he had something to work for.
> or enemy sympathizers.
I doubt anyone in the Navy I met was a spy for an enemy. I also doubt someone at Twitter is rooting for TikTok and working against Twitter in that direction.
>Elon's got activist employees who're trying to bring him down personally
Not trying to be confrontational, but whenever I see comments like this, I think that people really need to read up on narcissistic personality disorder. The "I'm being personally attacked" tactic is glaringly apparent. It's super common in cults too when the cult leader starts losing control of things (since they commonly have narcissism as well). People with NPD are completely incapable of comprehending that they may actually be at fault in any way and absolutely have to interpret failure as being due to conspiracies against them
God how can I downvote this. Did you even read what the OP said? So in this case the "dissidents" are people that appreciate incremental change, like their opinions to be valued in their respective field of expertise, and possibly appreciate being able to work from home?
Thank goodness COs can operate entire ships by themselves, otherwise they'd probably need some tact and grace to get the ship to its destination safely.
The only thing that ever happens on these scenarios, are that the skilled folks who are concerned about losing their jobs will move and Twitter will be left with the dregs who stay because they can't get a new job elsewhere.
Yeah but at least from the outside, to continue the metaphor, this seems like a CO taking over a struggling ship and deciding to just blow up all the ammunition in place. The ship needs to do something new, and this is something new, but it seems like it's just sinking faster now.
He had to take out a giant loan to afford the purchase (debt financing), which twitter needs to pay about $1B a year to service. Twitter wasn't getting anywhere near that in profit.
Twitter had like two profitable quarters in its existence and now on top of the usual operating costs they have to be profitable enough for 1 billion/year debt repayment.
If I'm being very generous, I'd give Twitter 6 more months.
A better analogy is Twitter is a sick and dying patient and drastic measures are needed to be taken to save it. Whether or not you agree with those measures, well you don't have $44b on the line. Of all of Elon's businesses, this one is probably the most in his wheelhouse. He's a web guy after all.
He is not a web guy, but he is a Twitter power user, thus sees problems and limitations in the platform. But then: his usage and experience probably is far from representative for most users.
I mean, those $12B annual debt service payments didn't exist before. Seems clear that Twitter was struggling in many ways, but things seemed to be accelerating post acquisition.
Difference is you served (or are serving) during peacetime. This is wartime..
Twitter is in a shit load of trouble and unlike Meta & Snap which are crashing like a shitcoin.. Elon bought Twitter at 2x-3x what its actually worth.
Unlike the past decade, where these companies had easy access to funny money during a tech bull market.. now we are entering a uuge recession.. Twitter (or any company for that matter) which doesn't go into wartime mode is gonna get rekt
The Navy doesn't differentiate between wartime and peacetime for training or operations, generally. The difference would lie in what type of ordnance we used (real during wartime, inert during peace) and the measures we operated under at sea (we'd emit less signals and dog the hatches).
Also, in wartime, it's actually even more important that a new CO didn't upset the delicate balance or change procedures, because you need to rely on your skills and drills during wartime even more! Changing things just makes it harder to do your job and during wartime that would be deadly.
Also, you don't know where or when I served, so don't make assumptions.
I meant no disrespect, just an educated guess since there has been no major war after WWII..
I'm mainly talking about the difference in strategy/posture during wartime vs peacetime.. Just look at whats happening in Ukraine rn, Russia changing commanders to go full scorched earth.
To save a company like Twitter, this is exactly the kind of thing u need to do. Private equity does this all the time.
Seeing someone who served in the Navy being told that their peacetime service is very different from the war that Twitter is currently experiencing is... I'm not even sure how to react to that. Lots of execs like to stretch those military metaphors -- they're all in the trenches, all hands on deck, take no prisoners and all that -- but I think you may have stretched this one way past its breaking point.
You're twisting my words. Peacetime is different to wartime is a general statement that has nothing to do with his service.
Military metaphors are common in business for a reason. Modern business management inherited a lot of the military after WW2. To this day, you'll see people with Special Ops history consulting businesses (Echelon Front)
its is in signigicantly better shape. Ops cost have basically halved whilst growth metrics are breaking records. Revnue down because of commie backlash but thats been replaced by blue subscriber revenue in real time..
still tho, that 2x-3x multiple is a huuge gap to close and the company is still far from getting out its troubles. Troubles which btw existed wayyy before Elon or the recessions.
You google Twitter financials and metrics over the past years, its been grossly mismanaged..
Interesting strategic window: You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats". Maybe this is a signal twitter isn't going to innovate, develop, and maybe even operate, internally, at least going forward.
You need code for a new feature? Buy a startup that already wrote it. You need to keep something running? Contract out instead of employees.
Very few companies have a full time plumber or carpenter or electrician on staff (except for obvious obscure exceptions of course). He might be planning bigger changes than people seem to think.
What fundamentally does twitter do? Sell ads by moving data around using enormous first mover advantage of account numbers. And that needs a huge employee count why exactly? I am not asking that it did, or it did in the early days of the technology, or what the competitors do.
All industries, after the heavy employment phase, move into a value extraction phase. He seems to be betting on the heavy employment phase being over for tweeting. Honestly the only question is timing, is he just right or too early?
Maybe tweeting is now like railroads or heavy industry, no longer employs entire neighborhoods or even cities. Maybe SV is about to become the new Detroit.
While I don't agree with the way Elon has been making this move, it's sure looking like he's trying to clear the place out so he can establish a new culture. These policy changes are likely to scare mobile, top-performers off to other companies. This likely clears out a lot of internal dissent and heal digging to make room for new "top performers".
I wouldn't be shocked if we see new "top talent" hires in 3 to 6 months then _actual_ new innovation in 6 to 12 months.
Why would any competent engineer sign up to work in the environment Musk has created? I’ve seen no upside to employees offered, only brutal management and benefit reduction with a promise of hard work for less.
Musk attracts engineers by selling a vision. Reusable rockets to make humanity an interstellar species. Electric vehicles to free humanity from fossil fuels. Humanoid robots. Neuralink. And on it goes.
For Twitter, the vision Musk is selling is that "it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence". [1]
That might not be your cup of tea, or you might believe Musk is too petulant a leader to bring that vision to fruition. But it is an aspiration that will make some people excited and willing to put in the hard work Musk is demanding.
>For Twitter, the vision Musk is selling is that "it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence".
Unless you make fun of the owner, that gets you banned ASAP.
Also, I don't think most people associate a massive increase in hate speech and harassment with a healthy town square. Threatening paying customers who show any reticence is an "interesting" way to grow a business. It's early still, but this has basically been the vision pitch so far.
> For Twitter, the vision Musk is selling is that "it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence". [1]
Musk seems like one of the people least capable on earth of having a debate in a healthy manner.
> a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner
Musk says a lot of things, some serious and others 100% trolling, and we have a hard time knowing how serious he is for any of them. Even as he’s addressing the main customers of his company, given his past and present behavior, we can’t take your quote at face value and assume any of it is meaningful (he’s saying that while reducing the moderation staff…)
My definition of “competent engineer” includes reading between the lines and making an effort to understand what is actually required for a job to be done. I don’t see any competent engineer joining on publicly shared empty promises.
But that's not remotely as inspiring a vision as the others. Nor is it new, or is he presenting Twitter or himself as the best parties to accomplish this. People who care about this vision are running their own forums and fediverse servers.
>Why would any competent engineer sign up to work in the environment Musk has created?
same reason people worked for id software or other companies with grueling cultures. Because working with people who are excited about what they do and who are fiercely loyal is great. It's not even really about Musk, it's what has always drawn people to hard work.
For Tesla or SpaceX, it's obvious what the payoff for the burnout is. You get to pull off things that have never been done before, which missions that matter to humanity.
With Twitter...? So, maybe they copy TikTok and Youtube and some crypto payments system. Who cares?
Why would it be any different from his other companies? I wouldn't apply, but if some people are willing to work at Tesla, surely some are also willing to work at Musk-Twitter?
Because Twitter isn’t building space ships or changing transportation, and the expected culture and benefits of a software media company vs manufacturing company are very different.
> What has Twitter innovated on in the past decade?
They basically stole clubhouses’ thunder with spaces and tbh clubhouse has lost a lot of it’s shine.
Now did Twitter actually innovate? I would say not really but they did reimplement the wheel and so far seems to be working for them. I’d say the execution still counts as being innovative.
Clubhouse lost its shine on its own. It simply didn’t scale on a social level and became a cesspool of crypto scams and conspiracy theorists looking for marks.
Both things can be true at the same time. I dropped of CH because the synchronicity was too much for me. But apparently other people still use Twitter spaces.
They launched the predecessor to the current hottest social media app but killed it before it could gain any popularity. So that’s a new way to shoot yourself in the foot.
That is kind of the opposite of innovating, no? The idea that the company is depending on prior innovation? Unless you are saying the updates contain innovation.
Twitter does content moderation. That's your primary product when you're a billion dollar advertising company with a content farm of 300M people - your product is that the Ford ad you just sold is not going to sit above or below an (actual no-foolin' not just political-pejorative) neo-nazi.
> an (actual no-foolin' not just political-pejorative) neo-nazi
Could you give me an example from the USA?
> your product is that the ad you just sold is not going to sit [near]
The evolution of personalized feeds makes this less important. It's not Ford gracing a page in NeoNazi's Monthly magazine with their ad, it's your nazi-laden feed that happens to get a truck ad in passing.
> Twitter does content moderation.
Not well. And not usefully. They tended to block speech they don't like and leave worse from their friends. Blocking scams, bots, and actual harm seems to take a backseat to political stunts.
To be useful it will need to be transparent and configurable, and so far Twitter has focused on making it hidden and based on their views, not the users' views.
> It's not Ford gracing a page in NeoNazi's Monthly magazine with their ad, it's your nazi-laden feed that happens to get a truck ad in passing.
Do you think that makes Ford feel better or worse, as a brand that’s mostly tried to avoid Nazi connections over the last 70-odd years?
> They tended to block speech they don't like and leave worse from their friends.
Two points here:
First, I think you’d be shocked at how many people are super OK with blocking the speech Twitter blocked, and indeed prefer it. As a corporate money-making entity, Twitter is concerned about maximizing its user base, and if blocking the neo-nazi means 3 other people stay on the platform, by golly that’s the move Twitter Inc the business will make. It turns out speech is sometimes zero-sun or worse: one person’s instance of free speech makes another person feel like their life is in danger.
Second, Twitter’s customer is not you, nor the public, nor democracy. Twitter’s customer is Ford, and if you’ve noticed from advertising generally in this country lately, most brands have decided that embracing things like LGBTQ rights and immigration, at least at a surface level, are better for their global brand than not, so Twitter’s content moderation strategy will reflect that. Most of the people complaining about Twitter’s content moderation strategy were already mad at Cheerios for running ads celebrating gay marriage, so it‘s hard to say they’ve really missed the mark here.
Again, Twitter is an advertising company whose supply is “users”, and they need the maximal supply of palatable (read: users without paired lightning bolts in their bio) users for their customers, Advertisers. That’s what the platform is, that’s what their business is, and that’s who they’re moderating content for.
> Do you think that makes Ford feel better or worse
Vastly better. Because it's not a choice they made but a choice the user made. Someone reading a nazi blog won't be upset and someone not reading about nazis won't see the ad run concurrently. You'd have to go looking to create this problem situation and then screenshot it for evidence because it wouldn't show up for normal people using the system.
> I think you’d be shocked at how many people are super OK with blocking the speech Twitter blocked, and indeed prefer it
I think most people would be happy that nazis and child-abuse photos would be blocked, but that most people don't know Twitter seemed to put more time into political censorship. If was easier for a feminist to get banned from twitter for saying women need sex-based spaces than for the accounts sending death threats to the feminist for saying it. Child-sex abuse materials and accounts trading them remained for months, if not years.
> if you’ve noticed from advertising generally in this country lately, most brands have decided that embracing things
Not most by far. Some brands have decided to play very virtue-forward, most just made sure they cut out unintentional offense. No need to show your truck driven to a Redskins game when you could show it to a Huskies game.
>> To be useful it will need to be transparent and configurable, and so far Twitter has focused on making it hidden and based on their views, not the users' views
> Advertisers. that’s who they’re moderating content for
No, they didn't block the Hunter Biden laptop story because of advertiser pressure. They've been mixing their own personal views with what the advertisers supposedly want.
Besides, what I'm talking about would serve advertisers just as well as now. I'm not saying Twitter shouldn't moderate, just that users and advertisers would both be better served with a configurable categorizing system where they (and you if you choose, or with a public blocklist) can assign scores based on nazi words and dogwhistles, etc, and users can choose to block that content or not.
Advertisers would end up with better categorized posts because Twitter and the users would be collaborating on this, not at odds like now, and they could block more effectively; not just on whatever Twitter considers ad-worthy today but with their own list of never-show keywords as well. And users would finally end up with something trustworthy because instead of "bad content" being deleted it would simply be hidden - shadow banned - and available to be audited.
Why call it 1950s style when it was most common mode of operation up to 2019? Elon already insisted Tesla engineers work on-site, so this move isn't too surprising. What leaves me puzzled is why would anyone decide to work there. Where's the carrot?
I guess the pay is the carrot. As long as they pay well for the requirements, there will be plenty people to take it. And if the job market deteriorates, they might not even need to pay that well...
Also the mission. If I didn't have a great gig right now, I would absolutely join Twitter, just for the opportunity to add new features and prove that the old Twitter was sorely underperforming and that Twitter can be a force for free speech, which I believe in an absolute right.
Elon's companies aren't known to pay particularly well. I got an offer at one of his companies that was such an insane lowball it was hard to take seriously.
>Interesting strategic window: You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats". Maybe this is a signal twitter isn't going to innovate, develop, and maybe even operate, internally, at least going forward.
Companies like twitter don't innovate, and never had. They're based on very simple ideas and features and network effects. They got big because it was a catchy idea ("be a smartass with one-liners and gossip with famous people"), but there's no innovation beyond that. Nothing that needs any big brain or creative genius anyway. Same for Facebook, Instagram, and so on. It's all about getting the VC money and traction, the innovation is 1% of the whole thing, if that.
> You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats"
This seems to be pulled from thin air. Nobody would have murmured it 3 years ago. You really think the whole world changed that much in the past 3 years that you can lay down such a superlative?
(Internet) companies mad-hired because they thought COVID permanently accelerated the demand shift to online from brick-and-mortar. It turned out it wasn't a new baseline after all.
Reading generously, I would say you could interpret that statement more like: "Now that we know it is possible to innovate with an asynchronous workforce, and most people want to work that way, it will be extremely difficult for us to gather the same quality of individuals in one place to innovate if we decide we need their butts to be in seats."
Personally I haven't seen much innovation in the past decade or so, you have to go back to before the VC's and pals figured out how to game equity compensation with their Hollywood accounting for any real innovation (in the consumer space, other areas like medicine and space exploration have had some big leaps).
A person in 2012 could blow the mind of someone in 2002 with the phone he has in his pocket. A 2012 person would yawn at a 2022 phone and ask how they are meant to plug their headphones in.
>What fundamentally does twitter do? Sell ads by moving data around using enormous first mover advantage of account numbers. And that needs a huge employee count why exactly? I am not asking that it did, or it did in the early days of the technology, or what the competitors do.
The issue with this question is that you make big assumptions to how the work should be. Sure to you and I maybe it takes 1 person to unscrew a lightbulb, but that's given our assumptions about the nature of the lightbulb and the whole job and where it takes place.
Maybe twitter built themselves such a lightbulb that its 50 feet up high, and now you need to hire two people to change the lightbulb, one up on the ladder 50 feet up and one on the bottom. Maybe sometimes the latter falls, and historically the ladder holder doesn't want to admit liability. Now you need a third witness to make sure the ladder holder isn't murdering the light bulb changer (seems contrived but e.g. jobs working with children are like this where you need two adults in the room)l. If the light bulb is made from hazardous materials maybe you need a safety officer signing off on your process so insurance companies actually cover you for the high risk of murder in this line of work. Now we are at four people to change the lightbulb and you'd be a fool to remove any of them based on all the context I've given. Oh and you need to fill these positions for three shifts, so twelve people on payroll to ensure you are covered for lightbulbs around the clock.
Its easy to add fat to a process, sometimes its very justified fat, and hard to cut it out after the fact without damaging a lot of other things you might not be accounting for at first glance. Thats why people are giving Musk a huge side eye here, because he couldn't have possibly accounted for everything already. Most people who make sweeping changes to orgs successfully start off by taking a lot of time to study how the org works, and not changing much of anything that would taint your observational study before its concluded.
the guy spent 44 billion dollars. He has the freedom to run it straight into the ground and terminate every employee, if he choses. That's what FU money buys.
> Maybe this is a signal twitter isn't going to innovate, develop, and maybe even operate, internally, at least going forward.
It seems clear to me that Musk believes Twitter is dysfunctional and inefficient. His top priority is to make it efficient. From this perspective, as the right people and a culture of intensity are set up, Twitter will be unburdened to move and innovate.
The open question is how quickly can he pivot the culture. Nobody is better positioned than the CEO of a private company.
>It seems clear to me that Musk believes Twitter is dysfunctional and inefficient. His top priority is to make it efficient.
Is it though?
Musk also thought twitter had a bot problem, right up until it became apparent that saying so wouldn't get him out of the Twitter acquisition.
I think the only thing that's clear is that Musk has a Twitter attention addiction, and buying Twitter was the world's wealthiest man buying his favorite toy to play with.
That is basically the opposite. Being ordered by your boss to go pull an all-nighter at his other company for no additional pay, as opposed to voluntarily taking an additional job along with the associated salary because you were bored and felt like it.
"Other times, two Tesla employees told CNBC, Tesla workers are pressured to help with projects at his other companies for no additional pay because it’s good for their careers, or because the work is seen as helping with a related party transaction or project."
He is simply doing what he believes is in the shareholders' best interests.
If you bought a company, especially a failing company, it wouldn't be business as usual: you would immediately set policies that make the most sense for your shareholders and increase profits.
And, Musk has a reputation to be a very hard 24x7 worker but also one not bound by a timezone, let alone geographic location, but again it's a lot easier for him to note dedication etc based on who actually shows up to work. This might be an undeserved reputation, but he is clearly "on" texting and tweeting at all hours day-and-night, and he's running multiple successful companies simultaneously, so either he's awesome at delegation or he's working very hard (or both).
(of course, he has other shareholders, but he is clearly the majority shareholder and the one who is completely in control of the board, and thus has the greatest legal responsibility to keep twitter solvent and return value to himself and the other investors.)
Twitter doesn't have shareholders. But Tesla and SpaceX does.
And not sure how happy they are with Musk and employees not being fully committed to adding value to their investments. Especially given that both companies have serious competition that is increasingly in quality and aggressiveness as each day passes.
On a sidenote, any manager who measures dedication by number of physical hours at the office is either inexperienced or incompetent.
All private corporations in the U.S. have shareholders. (LLC's have members, which are similar.)
The executive team and board of those private corporations have a fiduciary duty to the corporation that they will take actions to increase their investment.
Twitter has at least one major shareholder, Elon Musk, which is why I jokingly wrote "the shareholder" singularly. He also seems to have other institutional shareholders, but it's unclear if he just personally owes the money or if they have taken a collateral interest in Twitter itself. (The latter seems more likely)
Thus, Elon Musk has a fiduciary obligation to his shareholder(s), even if it was just him (it's not).
Like it or not, he is taking steps to reduce the drag on Twitter's finances because he doesn't have a lot of choice.
After burning hundreds of millions of dollars for years, he's got to cut the fat quickly or the company will become insolvent.
Executives at tech companies tend to live very different lives from the people doing the work. Exceptionalism is typically baked into their understanding of the world.
Not allowing remote work is still allowed, but I don’t think it’s far away from being socially unacceptable. Being legally unacceptable is just one step beyond that.
So what do you suggest? Them have the pay, and also set the rules? What else do you suggest? Work on the things they want, and not on what they are told?
Whatever you tell about the fact that it is employees are actually the ones who make twitter work, they aren't there the only ones on the planet who can do this job. If current employees don't want to work from office, then, maybe, some others might be willing.
Like all monopolies and cartels, they do far more harm than good. If Twitter workers unionized, I'd suggest firing them all and hired new ones. Maybe in a country where unions are prohibited.
Unions aren't monopolies they are collective bargaining. The monopoly on power you are advocating is for a single owner of a company to set all the rules.
So you do view Twitter as a car, which can have an owner. What are the employees then in your scenario?
Musk offers no value to Twitter having purchased it, the value lies in the people working on it.
No need to buy the company, anyone can always start a new one, it's very affordable, just a few hundred bucks. Then you can set whatever rules you want for yourself and your employees.
I hope our leaders are measuring the right things. It's discouraging to read how Mayers came to her decision to ban remote work.
> She said the decision stemmed from her first few months at Yahoo, when she was spending a couple of hours every day in the cafeteria talking to any employee who wanted to chat.
Selection bias.
> Mayer decided on the ban after spending months frustrated at how empty Yahoo parking lots were and consulting Yahoo’s VPN logs to see if remote employees were checking in enough.
Confirmation bias.
Both clear examples of cognitive bias: reading into easily accessible data as a proxy for relevant valid data and using it to justify decisions.
During pandemic there was published paper (in nature?) that collected and analyzed thousands of employee data and arrived at same conclusion. It’s hard to stay disciplined when working remotely, apparently. However, I don’t think remote-only startups suffers from same issue. Moving traditional office employee to remote suddenly would be problematic unless there was a proper training for setting up home office, meeting etiquette, setting up cultural expectations etc.
Why would anyone work for this douche? Even if you make a lot of money, you aren't going to get your time back later. There's no reward for killing yourself to appease a rich workaholic. The only prize you win is burning out or getting laid off.
Really feel bad for anyone who went out and bought a house in another place or made life decisions based on this policy which is likely a lot of people. This is really showing that you don’t respect or care about your employees which is par for the course for musk. However i think what he is forgetting is that Twitter isn’t some amazing challenge to solve like self driving or rockets. I think you will see a very understaffed twitter in the future.
I could imagine putting up with a lot of shit from Elon if I believed I was building a better future for humanity in the process, but it's hard to see how a social network is accomplishing that
Yep you get away with a lot of shitty leadership and tough conditions if you can get everyone to buy in to the mission. Hard to see how you could convince anyone that twitter is worth fighting for now.
> Really feel bad for anyone who went out and bought a house in another place or made life decisions based on this policy which is likely a lot of people.
I don't. The usual recommendation for buying a house is if you're going to stay there for 5+ years. Job hopping in the valley every 3 years is pretty common. Committing to the remote work lifestyle with an expensive home when it's not clear how long WFH will be an option is a risky move.
> Committing to the remote work lifestyle with an expensive home when it's not clear how long WFH will be an option is a risky move.
I mean buying a house based on a program labeled “permanent” seems pretty low risk to me (especially if you’re in a position making a salary where you can buy a house).
Who could predict that a billionaire would decide to piss in their own cereal and fuck up that plan in the process?
You don’t have to be in a bad position for this to become a stressful situation. A little empathy goes a long way. Im sure most of the engineers will be fine however even if you have money in the bank and are fine for years without a job the sudden shock of being thrown into a crap economic environment or being forced to move isn’t fun.
My dad was in the military and I didn’t have a choice but to move every few years when i was growing up. Even with a guaranteed job it’s an extremely stressful situation for a family to be put in.
Sure everything has a risk. I have a remote contract currently that they could decide they want a centralized office and will let me go if I don’t move. That risk should be seen as fairly low when the C suit has committed to it and if it does change it sucks. I would still feel bad for those people.
Im not sure if you are trying to say that because risk is involved we shouldn’t empathize?
Yeah that is the real question. If musk can sell this to the employees and turn twitter into a tesla/spacex culture i would honestly never bet against him again. I would also be curious to read about how he was able to do that.
Updated to "work-from-anywhere in the building" now. With half of the staff gone you can claim any empty desk or office in sight, I hear the CISO and chief compliance officer's spots are open!
In the US at least, even if you're categorized as remote, the company can almost certainly pull you back to an office and fire you if you won’t. It probably wouldn't be considered as "for cause" (IANAL) but a company can pretty much unilaterally change work conditions, responsibilities, etc. so long as no labor laws are violated.
> over the next few days, the absolute top priority is finding and suspending any verified bots/trolls/spam.
Would it improve the situation to simply require a CAPTCHA once per day per non-subscriber to tweet? I would think it would greatly increase the cost to operate a troll farm, but have minimal impact on real users (setting aside accessibility and third-party clients a moment). If it causes attrition because some people decide it's not worth two seconds of clicking fire hydrants to voice their thought, nothing of value was lost.
> some people decide it's not worth two seconds of clicking fire hydrants
My reaction when I get the fire hydrants/traffic lights/whatever thing is to not bother and close the site. It's not because I can't spare two seconds, but because from past experience I know that whenever I get this it's an unending captcha hell.
It seems that these days the only time you're given a captcha is when some AI somewhere already decided that you're a bad actor and won't let you to the site, no matter how diligently you keep clicking page after pages of challenges.
Right? The reward for identifying all the traffic lights is that you get to identify all the boats, then all the stop signs. Wait, what were you trying to do again?
I can't see a reason they would become more successful if there is less competition. It's not like they are not sending spam if someone else has spammed a target recently lol.
I spent less than a dollar one day to automate solving some stupid government website form that i was scraping data from. I have no experience in that but it was pretty easy and captchas are close to worthless for any bad actor with even half a brain
You’d need to do this TO the subscribers because the problem he’s trying to address is that now there’s a bunch of fake people with a “verified” status who are running scams on people or polluting news (like Fake Verified Labron James trade news going wild before realizing, wait, it’s a fake).
So then the downside is that you start bouncing people because is a checkmark worth getting captchas? Or maybe you put captchas on everyone so that the experience blows for everyone, and pray it helps?
Or maybe you just don’t conflate paying $8 with being “verified”, unless you’re gonna, yknow, verify something.
"We've dispatched a Tesla Model 3 to your current browser's location. To verify you are not a robot you must drive it for one hour and achieve a better Safety Score than the built-in autopilot is capable of achieving."
I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's looking for.
Let's say Elon had set aside a budget to hire some of the best developers he's ever worked with or heard of, and lets give them an imaginary salary of 1.5 million total comp per year, at about 10 devs for easy math. And let's say another 500k for bennies. So our operating expense for top dev talent comes out to 20 million a year. You can have an elite tier dev team, for 20 million a year that could easily build a twitter. He could've tried to interview ex-Twitter and get feedback on technical debt, pain points, problems to have fixed in the newly architect-ed model.
So then you need users. Elon has 115 million followers on Twitter. He'd get users no matter what he built, so he's solved that problem too. You're correct that he wouldn't have the existing Twitter user base, but if he built a better product that is more modern and cut out some of the dead-weight features, wouldn't this option still be significantly cheaper than acquiring a company for $44 billion who only deals in software? At least apple makes products, as does amazon and at least amazon is a distribution behemoth. I struggle to see the 44 billion in value for what appears to be a relatively mundane application.
In my mind I don't see anyone even spending on the order of 1 billion to build a better Twitter from scratch.
> I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's looking for.
It'd be even cheaper if he had the sense to not play chicken with Twitter's board only to get called on his bluff. Nothing about how he's handled Twitter thus far suggests that he ever took his offer to buy them seriously. He was showboating from the beginning and screwed up, and thousands of people are paying the price.
We'll probably never know, but I'd love to hear the story of how exactly he thought it would be a good idea to blindly sign the binding paperwork for the purchase without doing any serious due diligence. Either his lawyers were begging him not to or they're as dumb as he is.
This. First and foremost, Twitter's product was never its software but its users, and people who remark cynically about this in every other instance ("If you're not paying for the product, you're the product.") seem to have forgotten the maxim when blinded by politics or celebrities. There are plenty of start-up Twitter/FB clones, like Tribel and Gab, but none of them have a large userbase. Twitter's is big and international, despite whatever demographic quirks it may have. Musk bought Twitter for its userbase.
Musk has already said that he more or less intends to turn Twitter into a global WeChat, an all-in-one app that does payment, micro-apps, social media, video, etc. The steps he's taken already, even in the short period he's owned Twitter, point to that. He's already integrating payments by getting people to pay $8 for a blue check, which means payment validation of identity; there's a way to turn your Twitter avatar into an NFT, but only if you attach your crypto wallet—logical next steps are to turn Twitter into a payment platform, get people to order food over it, verify identity and attach online identities to financial records, develop a financial/speech surveillance system, and pretty soon you have WeChat 2.0 but with the NSA lurking in the shadows instead of China's equivalent. He can't get to that point without existing users.
But why did he fight so hard to back out? I just can't understand why someone with a grand vision for Twitter puts in an offer in April and spends the next 6 months and millions on lawyers fighting to get out of the deal.
Except that maybe, just maybe, users won't stay if Twitter suddenly is not Twitter anymore but some kind of WeChat.
Users are what gives it value, but users are here for the app, not for the brand. That's what Metasbook seems to have forgotten when making Instagram look like TikTok. If people want TikTok, they will go to TikTok, not to Instagram.
Back when the Boring Company was new, although I thought it was weird even then, I had enough trust in his business vision to be motivated to guess how it might fit.
Best I got was, experience with tunnel boring machines would be really useful for Marian and Lunar colonies.
Now though? Well, now I think it was always merely the billionaire equivalent of me picking up Blender, modelling half a spaceship before I get bored, quit, and forget I even have Blender installed for another six months.
I mean, I don't think the dumb tunnel under vegas is good evidence of not being a brilliant engineer. He obviously has a very deep understanding of engineering type shit as well as engineering management[0][1]. He's got engineer brain! Engineer brain can make you do a lot of really stupid shit even if you're a great engineer.
That being said I absolutely don't think he's playing 10D chess, he's got a few big Ws and it's gone to his head in a disastrous way. He can be a brilliant engineer/engineering manager and a total fucking idiot at the same time.
To be honest the thing that worries me most about the dumb Las Vegas tunnel, is not that he had a bad idea. I have bad ideas all the time too. But my bad ideas don't turn into dumb tunnels because I have limited resources (he doesn't) and because I have feedback from the harsh reality.
The dumb tunnel makes me think Elon Musk is fully insulated from reality. Nobody around him dared to tell him the tunnel was dumb. And or he didn't listened.
Fast forward today where he decides on a whim that every engineer must stop working remotely and must instead work like crazy to satisfy his ego. And here again the feedback from reality seems minimal on him.
I think and I hope that the good engineers at Twitter are making plans to leave this terrible boss ASAP.
I suspect it's all about his process and he doesn't really have a grand plan but a general strategy. He is really good in few things and as a result he thrives in precarious situations. IMHO, he really believes in Twitters potential in he is trying to find the solution to dig himself out of the pit he jumped in.
Notice how He re-discovers everything that people were saying about running a social media? I think His hands on micromanager approach is good for finding a solution through iteration. Of course, if a solution exists.
It is like going back to the basics and look at the situation with a fresh eye and understand why something doesn't work, create a solution and try again if the solution doesn't work.
> Notice how He re-discovers everything that people were saying about running a social media? I think His hands on micromanager approach is good for finding a solution through iteration.
This works well in a startup whose business position is a kind of blank slate and you have lots of VC money compared to you run rate, but when your existing business relies on established trust in the market, uninformed blind rapid iteration that harms brand position and existing relationships adds additional problem while you are exploring the solution space for the preexisting problem.
The Boring company is how he will build tunnel networks on mars, which has no magnetosphere. I thought everyone knew all his efforts were oriented towards colonizing mars. Why electric cars? There is plenty of lithium on mars but no oil. Etc.
Personally I prefer to have a boss that lives on planet Earth
So if I worked at Twitter and was not on the list of people he thought he needed to fire after reviewing swiftly millions of lines of code, I would make plans to leave ASAP
Then why did he fight for months and months and ostensibly spend millions in legal fees to back out of the deal? I just can't square that with him truly wanting the platform. If he wanted it from the beginning, the acquisition would've been completed in what, May? He made the offer in April.
I may be missing something, but would it have been that hard to fail to get financing and get out of it, since it was a bad deal that others shouldn't want to finance, if he had started working on failing to get financing before he... succefully lined up financing?
I guess it would have been a hit to his ego if he had failed to get financing... it'll probably be a bigger one to drive twitter into the ground and throw away his and others billions.
The whole thing is very bizarre from the start to now.
If you look at the timeline, he made an unsolicited offer with no details, the twitter BoD instituted a poison pill, then he lined up all the financing and made a second ("final") offer with very specific details about the funding (including commitment letters for the loans), then he negotiated to buy it with no due diligence, etc. Morgan Stanley, etc, already agreed to loan the money back in April. At the time, the big banks did want to finance it!
Why did he not do any due diligence before buying? It's not like he had FOMO he was going to miss out. That's the part I don't understand in all of this.
No idea, but he seems like the kind of guy whose ego can't suffer from the embarrassment of being called out. It wouldn't surprise me at all if he did all this just because he was incapable of losing face for acting like an idiot. Joke's on him though.
To save money at the time he drove a van for a carpool service (he could use it for free as a result). A lot of the guys on his van were in tech.
When the first rounds of layoffs hit, guys would get on at the end of the day and they would talk about their severance. The first question in response to “I got laid off” was “What’s your severance?”
At one point deep into 2002, he remembered a change. Now guys were getting on the van with all their stuff in a box. He played the game, even though he wasn’t in tech, and asked one of the guys with a box, “What’s your severance?”
No, there's a $1B fee under extremely limited circumstances. There is no written agreement on how to handle any other circumstance (hence the court case).
> Either Twitter or Parent may terminate the Merger Agreement if, among certain other circumstances, (1) the Merger has not been consummated on or before October 24, 2022, which date will be extended for six months if the closing conditions related to applicable antitrust and foreign investment clearances and the absence of any applicable law or order making illegal or prohibiting the Merger have not been satisfied as of such date; or (2) Twitter’s stockholders fail to adopt the Merger Agreement. Twitter may terminate the Merger Agreement in certain additional limited circumstances, including to allow Twitter to enter into a definitive agreement for a competing acquisition proposal that constitutes a Superior Proposal (as defined in the Merger Agreement). Parent may terminate the Merger Agreement in certain additional limited circumstances, including prior to the adoption of the Merger Agreement by Twitter’s stockholders if the Board recommends that Twitter’s stockholders vote against the adoption of the Merger Agreement or in favor of any competing acquisition proposal.
> ...
> Upon termination of the Merger Agreement under other specified limited circumstances, Parent will be required to pay Twitter a termination fee of $1.0 billion. Specifically, this termination fee is payable by Parent to Twitter if the Merger Agreement is terminated by Twitter because (1) the conditions to Parent’s and Acquisition Sub’s obligations to consummate the Merger are satisfied and the Parent fails to consummate the Merger as required pursuant to, and in the circumstances specified in, the Merger Agreement; or (2) Parent or Acquisition Sub’s breaches of its representations, warranties or covenants in a manner that would cause the related closing conditions to not be satisfied. Mr. Musk has provided Twitter with a limited guarantee in favor of Twitter (the “Limited Guarantee”). The Limited Guarantee guarantees, among other things, the payment of the termination fee payable by Parent to Twitter, subject to the conditions set forth in the Limited Guarantee. [1]
Tbh I thought that was the entire play. $1 billion is way cheaper than $44 and whatever he just sold of Tesla to keep Twitter afloat.
Jack hyping Elon as twitter’s great hope and such I almost expected this was some subtle game to get that $1 billion to Twitter
Now I can’t help but wonder if Jack was tweeting such praise to goad Elons ego into it. But in hindsight I’m probably giving these guys too much credit
Story I read in one of the tweets from his old friend was that he has surrounded himself with too many yes man who work overtime to boost his ego. I can imagine he casually mentioning idea of buying Twitter and all the yes men praising him for his brilliance. No one did due diligence to figure out that he would need to sell $4B of his TSLA stock just to avoid bankruptcy after spending $44B.
Allot of how Elon handled the layoffs from what's public doesn't sound ideal. But also idk how many of those people would've had a job at twitter for much longer anyway. We get a post in HN every other day at the moment of x company laying of 1000 of people.
Twitter was almost certain to see layoffs had Musk not bought it, but they’d have been slower, more considered, less harmful, and probably smaller because the company didn’t have a ludicrous leveraged buyout $1bn annual debt bill.
The way things are going now there’s an increasingly real possibility that Twitter may not exist in a few months, putting the jobs of the other 3000 or so employees at risk too. Not to mention all the people who used Twitter to make a living.
The destruction of lives and so much value for one man’s ego is astounding.
Getting kicked out of the App Store could put the company in a death spiral, but I still have a really hard time seeing how that leads to the company ceasing to exist within a few months.
I think you're getting hung up on the technical difference between Twitter continuing to exist in any recognisable form and continuing to exist as a shell of a company with neither revenue nor staff. I see them as functionally the same.
A few weeks ago I didn't think this sort of outcome was possible, I thought Musk might muddle a bit and cause a long term decline, but nothing so sudden. Now, with the FTC consent decree potentially breached, advertisers running for the hills, Musk himself saying the company is close to bankruptcy, the resignation of virtually all key top staff including their head of Trust & Safety, and the departure of so many SREs that it will cause stability issues, there's a perfect storm developing that'll have mutually reinforcing effects. Social networks don't always die slowly, sometimes they collapse as Hemingway described: Slowly, then all at once.
The death knell would be if Twitter is kicked off one or both of the App Stores, but I think long before that the company will become completely unsustainable financially. I expect Musk to successively lay off more and more staff to try to stay ahead of that, making things worse.
They are seeing a massive advertiser exodus, have apparently created potential new FTC/DOJ issues regarding the existing privacy consent decree with their desire to push-down responsibilty to facilitate velocity, are seeing policy churn that undermines trust, and their big revenue ideas are becoming a for-pay social network and payment processor with that trust deficit.
When you are this rich, stuff like this doesn’t matter. Even if he lost all the 40 Bn USD means he’ll still be the richest person on earth, that’s how much money he has. To keep with the poker analogy, his “bluff” involved only 40 poker chips, but he has 200 after the fact, while his “opponents” have 1 or 2 each.
But in the end, money will always end up in his hands no matter what he does. When you are this rich, you’ll always end up making money.
You are neglecting to consider the other fundamental needs of a filthy rich person like an Elon Musk, two that are of greater priority than sheer wealth even, name and fame.
Your theory is the one that seems most plausible to me. Pushed into a decision he thought he could back out of and now trying to fix it the best way he sees fit.
Anybody can build a twitter at a tiny fraction of the cost of Twitter. The problem is always user acquisition. It's extraodinarily difficult to get a vast segment of the userbase to switch to your platform. Even getting a tiny handful would cost vast sums of money. Think about it. If it could be done, it would be done and we'd see a largely segmented social media landscape with hundreds of twitter clones. It's not the case.
Isn't one exception to this the case when you control both the old and new platform, and can technically just migrate what content possible and just replace the old one with new? It technically does not even have to be "new" platform, it could be presented as "twitter redesign".
Twitter has 450M monthly active users. Elon bought it for $44bn. With ~$5bn in operating expenses, that gives you an absolutely insane CAC of $90 to play with.
Didn't know that about the comp at his companies. Kind of crazy considering the risk to human life associated with many of his companies. Would've expected them to pay top tier.
I think for an insane comp and equity in a new company led by Elon, lots of people would consider leaving. Network affects are real and is probably a top 10 world individual as far as the power of his network is concerned. Having a ton of YC press is way different than being Elon.
Even still he could pay people to use his application. Pay businesses $20 a month for a verified business account. Pay individual users $10-100 a month based on activity and engagement. Does it scale? Absolutely not but I still think it'd end up cheaper than $44 billion.
Top comment on app.net shutdown notice on HN ( Jan2017):
> "So to recap, Twitter exploded onto the scene in 2007, the "fail whale" appeared a lot, developers made all sorts of wonderful programs hooked into Twitter, the fail whale disappeared, Twitter started to destroy the app ecosystem, App.net launched to great fanfare in response to Twitter's knuckleheaded anti-developer stance, Britney Spears and Justin Bieber arrived and knocked all the nerds out of the top spots on Twitterholic, Donald Trump came and bludgeoned everyone with his bombastic prose, and now App.net is shutting down. And after all this, Twitter still does not have a viable business model."
I don't think you even need top dev talent to build Twitter now. Maybe you did back when it started, but it's not something a team of experienced, competent, 'regular' engineers couldn't build and more successfully than 'top' talent.
Let us start with engineering team A and and an equally talented engineering team B. If team B had the luck to work on a successful product due to a successful market, we call them talented. If A flamed out due to unpredictable reasons (that their market turned out to be shit), we lambast the lack of ability of team A.
But technical talent is definitely not overrated - because there are too many examples where talented teams have built unicorn multi-billion $ businesses.
I guess there's that.. but at a rate of 2 million a year, if someone was under-performing I'd imagine Elon would quickly be able to cycle in and out. And if the whole thing fails after 1-2 years, it's still not even half a billion spent. Compared to the titanic Twitter sinking.
The problem with your proposal is that Elons Twitter followers do not equal a profitable market. He needs Twitter’s brand and established user base to bootstrap whatever X is (something payment related probably). If it were just a bunch of his fans it wouldn’t have the penetration needed to loop more people in.
I'd argue his followers are his greatest chance at profit. Many people despise him and have been closing their twitter accounts. So despite it still being twitter brand and established users, they don't like Elon so they don't want to support the platform.
So let's say we're being generous and say Elon has 10M hardcore followers.
So $44B/10M = $4.4k per follower on Twitter. If he can sell each of those a Tesla it might be fine.
I'm beginning to hear the term "Muskmobile" bandied about in not a good way though. Consumer Reports is reporting a ton of reliability problems as Tesla scales up [1]. And Ford/GM is not far behind in their electric offerings either.
Elon reported on Nov 7 that Twitter usage was at an all time high. Do you believe that is dishonest? Or do you believe this uptick will be short-lived?
> I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's looking for.
Two things to counter that idea:
1. Social apps aren't about features, they're about the network effect and the user base. Rebuilding that of Twitter at this stage would have been very hard.
2. Even assuming that was possible, the time it would take to rebuild something like it means guaranteed failure.
> And let's say another 500k for bennies. So our operating expense for top dev talent comes out to 20 million a year. You can have an elite tier dev team, for 20 million a year that could easily build a twitter. He could've tried to interview ex-Twitter and get feedback on technical debt, pain points, problems to have fixed in the newly architect-ed model.
No, you won't. There's a lot more to running a social media site than just building it. You can't just build and ship.
Either it is a paid service, or it runs on ads. For the former, good luck amassing any substantial amount of users.
For the latter, well, evidence shows that brand security is important and advertisers don't want their brands displayed along the endless stream of n-words, racism, and homophobia enabled by free-speech absolutionists like Elon. So with such a cesspool, why would anyone in their right mind join? Without users, you can not run an ad-based social network either.
Now that I covered the bare minimum; this is a great read on why you can't just build and ship, if it was easy, twitter wouldn't have been unprofitable for years, and all other twitter clones with free speech wouldn't have failed.
Alright. Even if you double it to 40 million to hire the elite tier dev team, ops, and sre. They could definitely build, ship, and maintain. Yes, he'd be losing money at 40 million a year just on salaries, but I'd imagine they could build something pretty amazing at that rate.
Advertisers have already pulled out of Twitter and Elon is talking about publicly shaming them. How is his current reality any better than starting fresh. He could've invested in building technology from scratch to handle hate speech and removing bad apples.
> Advertisers have already pulled out of Twitter and Elon is talking about publicly shaming them.
Either Elon is delusional, or he is posturing. Either way, he is in no position to demand anything [1,2]. In [1], Elon was told by industry leaders what the issues with his approach are, and then Elon blocked one of them. Elon claims that activists are pushing advertisers but according to industry leaders, that is not true [1].
> Elon, Great chat yesterday, As you heard overwhelmingly from senior advertisers on the call, the issue concerning us all is content moderation and its impact on BRAND SAFETY/SUITABILITY. You say you’re committed to moderation, but you just laid off 75% of the moderation team!
> Advertisers are not being manipulated by activist groups, they are being compelled by established principles around the types of companies they can do business with. These principles include an assessment of the platforms commitment to brand safety and suitability.
So really; free-speech absolution does not work. Read the post I linked to.
> He could've invested in building technology from scratch to handle hate speech and removing bad apples.
Probably no. Read the post in the comment above.
Handling hatespeech from an operational perspective is one thing, and from a technical perspective e.g. identifying and categorizing it is a whole different thing.
Elon has already gone back to his free-speech absolutionism [3].
His tweets:
> Twitter will not allow anyone who was de-platformed for violating Twitter rules back on platform until we have a clear process for doing so, which will take at least a few more weeks
> Talked to civil society leaders @JGreenblattADL
, @YaelEisenstat
, @rashadrobinson
, @JGo4Justice
, @normanlschen
, @DerrickNAACP
, @TheBushCenter
Ken Hersch & @SindyBenavides
about how Twitter will continue to combat hate & harassment & enforce its election integrity policies
As for this one:
> How is his current reality any better than starting fresh.
He has users, for now. This means that he doesn't need to spend money on growth.
Most people underestimate two things, IMHO. One is obvious: the cost of convincing everyone that Muskitter is the place to go.
The second one? You could NOT build a twitter equivalent for a billion dollars. I'd be happy to take bets.
Corollary to number two: building it means actually two things: one, building it, and two, having a team that can start from the moment of finished building it, and continue developing and bug fixing and supporting the platform from T+1 onwards.
This is a pretty naive take on how hard it is to build a application that relies on any kind of network effect, activation, and retention, not to mention a complex ad platform that needs CS/Sales to even get it off the ground.
It would be even cheaper to just buy the political influence he is trying to wield by directly funding politicians like his buddy Peter Thiel. Corrupting the GOP is surprisingly inexpensive for the value you receive in return.
That money would get you a very robust prototype, but getting to scale requires building a lot of random other features that most users aren't aware of, plus being around long enough with half-decent community management to acquire users.
Companies like Twitter don't get big for no reason. Yes, there's obviously some bloat, but a lot of it's just random 'non-core' features that still need to get done.
> So then you need users. Elon has 115 million followers on Twitter. He'd get users no matter what he built, so he's solved that problem too
No. He got that number of followers because he is on Twitter. He would not get the same number of followers on some other social media platoform. Trump had 20 times as many followers on Twitter than he has on Truth Social. And those Truth Social users are less valuable.
Engineers like to think that the engineering is the important part of platforms. It's not. The engineering can be easily replicated. The valuable part of platforms is the users. You buy the platforms to buy the users.
I’m just guessing, but maybe Elon really loves Twitter. Building a new platform wouldn’t allow him to rescue the thing he loves. Seems more like an emotional decision than a logical one.
Does "whatever it wants" include making contractual promises and then breaking them? Because I wasn't aware private companies had the right to rescind contracts at will.
No such thing as a contract in an at-will employment setting. The company can fire you at any time. They can amend your employment terms at any time. You can quit at any time.
Regardless of the merits of remote/office or what this announcement would mean at a normal company, it sounds like it must be pure chaos at Twitter right now.
Is this a running meme, where whenever people like Musk or Trump do something silly, someone comes along and spins it to something positive and then says "smart"? I've seen this happen several times and I wonder if I'm just out of the loop.
There is a lot I love about the Elon Twitter saga. Scoping it to this issue (remote work):
1. We all know that "butts in seats" is a form of psychological control. Yes, there can be benefits to physical proximity. For software engineers, there can be benefit for collaboration, team-building and teaching. You can do this remotely but it's more difficult. However, for a lot of jobs however there is absolutely zero benefit to the employee.
2. This should remind people that your relationship with your employer is fundamentally adversarial. Remote work, despite it saving tech companies in particular, a lot of money for office space, onsite perks, equipment and so on, sold it to you as a "benefit". It started out of necessity in the pandemic. More recently it became a compeititve necessary to draw and retain talent in a tight labor market. In an era of mass layoffs in tech that advantage is no longer needed so companies can revert to their natural state of seeking control and not offering benefits they don't have to;
3. Elon is a very old school American (ironic, considering he's South African) boss who very much rules out of fear and for whom loyalty only flows in one direction: up (to him). He is not Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne. He's just another annoying, cringey, incredibly privileged fail-son. I'm honestly glad more people are realizing this as this is not the man to deify;
4. Morale among the remaining Twitter staff must be (I would guess) incredibly bad right now. Rather than extending these people an olive branch, the Bataan death march of reshaping Twitter into Musk's soulless image continues without respite, casulaties be damned; and
5. For many this will be there first downturn market as you could easily have been in the workforce for the last 12 years without ever experiencing it. You may have bought into the idea, particularly if you're an engineer or other highly specialized position, bought into the idea that tech companies are different and/or that you aren't expendable or replaceable. None of this is true. Unfortunately, people (Americans in particular) use such rationalizations to argue against any form of labor organization as being unnecessary or that somehow they'll all be dragged down to the "average" by collective bargaining. Such ideas are just highly effective propaganda.
This whole thing is SGI syndrome. The tight knit teams that were either let go or quit Twitter will go and found the next equivalent Nvidia or Adobe. Elon is making the classic Valley blunder of trying to make a company something it's not, in this case x.com. See also AOL, Yahoo!, and Tumber.
If Elon turns brings Vine back from the dead, I might have to eat my shoe however.
Born with an emerald spoon in his mouth, it's no surprise that Musk has no empathy with the common worker.
On top of his ridiculous level of wealth, he has an absurdly large ego to go with it, and an army of turd-polishers ready to laud everything he does. This guy is too big-headed to fail.
Ah yes. Little is known about apartheid-era SA but the one thing we all know is that when you were fired, they paid you for 2 months and provided healthcare.
It feels like remote work is a distraction here.. it's more like Musk realizes he bought a company that was in a lot more trouble than anyone out in the public can understand and he's scrambling for anything.
Everyone is all worried about what this means for remote work at other companies when it might not mean anything at all since the other companies don't have the same circumstances as Twitter.
Also we're all defensive cause we're attached to remote work.
It's weird how people are trying to divine his actions. He's been against remote work at every point. He tried to keep the Tesla offices open when the Covid Lockdowns were starting.
This seems to be the popular view, everyone has been irrationally cheering for Twitter for 10+ years now but it ignores twitter's long term financial results as we head into an economic contraction.
That's the whole thing.. Musk made his stupid public decision to buy Twitter before the economic winds shifted. By the time it closed things had changed. He harmed Twitter by the way the whole thing dragged out, but Twitter was damaged goods anyway and has become more damaged by the economic winds in addition to Musk.
Twitter was betting the farm that investors would continue to ignore the bottom line and money would continue to be easy and valuations would continue to be decoupled from results.
At this point we have enough evidence to conclude that absolutely nothing Musk does is a "calculated move". If this drives people to quit it's merely a fringe benefit (benefit strictly from Musk's perspective) - this is his normal impulsive micromanaging controlling self.
Unlikely. A more calculated move would be to first remove remote work, then reduce headcount to the level you want. The other way not only are they paying larger severance, but also aren't sure what number of people they end up with and what teams will disappear completely.
It probably is, but it's kind of risky if you end up pissing off employees who are key to your operations and top performers. Those folks can easily find work elsewhere. You end up with the people who can't easily move elsewhere.
Does Musk value developers? Considering his "code review" the first week, and how poorly FSD at Tesla functions, (I know it's an extremely difficult, if not insurmountable problem) I think he has a very simplistic idea of how to both evaluate and motivate developers.
Probably. But you might not want to work at a place where this is at the whim of a manager. Or where your non rock star colleagues are treated like shit.
It's pretty obvious that Musk is willfully (or ignorantly) forcing people out of the company in order to pre-filter before layoffs.
If you're at Twitter and can get a job elsewhere, don't panic. Save up, apply elsewhere, quiet-quit but DO NOT QUIT. Make them fire you or lay you off. MAKE them payout the severance! Don't let Musk toss you out for free.
Most states don't require any severance. The WARN act creates de facto 60 days, but if you can keep it below the threshold or show that the firing was with cause (like if you quiet quit), it won't even count against that.
You know that “quiet quitting” just means doing the absolute requirements of your job and nothing more above and beyond right? What cause could you use? “Employee only works exact amount of hours as required in employment contract and completes average number of tasks per day” is absolutely not a just cause.
Remote work is about the only thing where I very much disagree with Musk. I get it for engineering physical things. But not for web software. In that area, remote works much better than in-office, at least for me.
I agree, but I think either full on-site or fully remote are both leagues better than partially remote. Partially remote is far worse than either - because now all the in-person tactics exclude the remote folks, and all the remote work tactics are an unnecessary burden to the in-office folks. An all-remote team of heads-down engineers is 99% as good as in-person, if not better, because now all the communication has been written down and recorded.
That would be really cool, but probably still a while before that actually works on a large scale. Let alone before the Tesla robot actually works. I am less optimistic about the time it takes to develop it.
I have no particular idea how long it will take or how much such a robot will end up costing. I can see the use case, but I've only ever done hardware as an amateur, never professionally.
According to leaked email on CNBC, Musk said that Twitter needs 50% of its revenue to be subscriptions in order to surivive:
> That is why the priority over the past ten days has been to develop and launch Twitter Blue Verified subscriptions (huge props to the team!). Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn. We need roughly half of our revenue to be subscription.
Is that even remotely feasible? Based on the commentary I've seen, Twitter Blue is going to be a drop in the bucket compared to their total revenue.
> According to leaked email on CNBC, Musk said that Twitter needs 50% of its revenue to be subscriptions in order to surivive [...] Is that even remotely feasible?
Yes, Musk can plausibly drive off enough advertisers to get advertising revenue down to parity with subscription revenue.
Revenue of $5bn. Let’s say that you burn half of it down, so you’re making $2.5bn with ads, and $2.5bn with subscriptions. If there 200M DAU, then that means you want to make $12.5/year, per user, for subscriptions.
I don’t see how that would be possible, even under the most wildly optimistic scenarios.
Q2 revenue was $1.18B on 237.8M mDAU. If they want $590M (50%) in subscription revenue, that's 24.5M subscriptons @ $24 per quarter. So they'd need to convert about 10% of the reported mDAU to subscribers?
I don't think what he's proposing is to replace any ad revenue -- he's trying to grow revenue and take a company currently in the red into the black. I think he means to keep all the ad revenue, and then add that much again in subscription revenue. So: 20%, I guess? Or even more to make up for advertiser attrition? Which seems like... a ton.
not likely, subscriptions are very mature on YouTube and still only make up a tiny percentage of revenue. MKBHD did a good video breaking this down across other social networks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1qsF0WQy8c
I think it could only possibly work if "subscriptions" were not directly to twitter, but to other twitter subscribers. Premium follows to content creators, charities, individual journalists, or politicians. Where you get some "club only" content and interaction. And Twitter takes a piece off the top
Just to service the debt that Musk loaded them with as part of the purchase, they're going to have to add a billion a year. They had 5 billion in revenue last year. So that would be three billion a year in subscriptions.
Given that Twitter had about half a billion users hat's six dollars per user in subscriptions to see six dollars worth of surveillance capitalism per year. Does that seem likely?
Saying and repeating Twitter is going down doesn't actually make it go down. It's an internet hivemind narrative. I'm looking forward to some actual data.
He's been embarrassing himself for a minute already but the answer isn't definitely no.
What I realized is he saw contraction in demand at Tesla and wanted a public pretense to sell some without triggering a panic. He had all the Tesla projections long before his tweet about feeling "super bad" about the economy. This deal turned funny money into feeling like a club promoter.
What do you mean about selling some? He didn't get anything out for himself by effectively putting them up for Twitter collateral. He's effectively setting them on fire and causing panic.
He'd cause less panic by saying "I need to sell some because I wanted to buy a small country".
This can’t not result in some hidden maintenance or security problems.
Half of the people left and the other half has been told to brace for difficult times, it doesn’t sound like good conditions for smooth continuous operation.
Revenue-wise I think a fake checkmarked Nintendo being up with a photo of mario doing the middle finger for hours does a lot, and spells not great stuff. My understanding is that advertisers aren't even locking in contracts for next year or similar.
I bet advertisers LOVE this situation. They probably weren't excited about how centralized systems are, which robs them of some of their say and power in the ecosystem. This is an opportunity for them to show what control and influence they have and basically a warning to others not to toy with their demands.
Twitter has already been having reliability issues for weeks or more, that's not going to get better if you lay off a bunch of your ops and sweng personnel
It's amazing how many techies seem to be unable to understand this as if there was still infinite VC money and cash raising via stock sale for every company that can't figure out how to make money.
If we get a general tech correction as part of this downturn things are going to be very different for companies that have been burning money for years.
Yeah but if they want to do anything more than struggle to fight fires 24/7 they need at least average people, and management that trusts them, and buy in for the work needed to make a robust system.
Have you any idea what it takes simply to maintain a machine such as twitter, let alone make even minor alterations? There was a recent telling interview by someone who used to work there who thought it wouldn't be long until the whole thing collapses on its own because there were huge teams dedicated to simply keeping the thing running.
A billion users, each tweeting once an hour with 140 characters. That's 38.147 Megabytes/s. My laptop could handle that raw volume. Increase it by an order of magnitude for all the network nonsense and it can still run on my 4 year old desktop.
Twitter is not some hypertech company, it shouldn't need more than a hundred engineers to run. I imagine that's the bet Musk is making too.
What a terribly dishonest and overly-simplistic way of modeling of a distributed system much less a simple web service.
found the engineer who, in their own words, “couldn’t code their way out of paper bag.”
In the same vein, look at how Plenty of Fish has a huge customer base, and runs on very skimpy hardware. Back in 2006 it had 45M visitors a month, served up over 1B page views a month, all running off three database servers and two load balanced webservers. Guess how many employees? One, Markus Frind[1].
Twitter has about 10x that monthly visitor number just in mDAU. And pof has scaled 100x! (To 100 employees — that seems pretty insane relative the traffic they have going by this weird metric of “amount of data served should roughly equal the number of employees by some ratio”). Comparison also seems a bit lacking given the difference in magnitude also the engineering problems involved (e.g. moderation, botting etc.) Guessing also that creating a dating site is not an exercise in needing a lot of skilled engineering work given it’s been a solved set of problems since the late 90s. Hey Verizon has 132,000 employees — I guess they should only need a fraction of that right since consumer cellular has 2,400?
It’s pretty laughable you believe your own “math.”
I guess even serving an actual front end doesn’t factor into your calculations. Hey go build something and you might find out what it actually takes to build/maintain a system of any real consequence instead of doing leet code exercises and smelling your own brain farts.
It also leads to more mistakes and cutting corners (usually hidden), so in the long term as they accumulate this will bite him in the ass when a particularly bad one gets out in the wild unnoticed.
And I thought this guy had a high IQ, clearly he's not that bright after all.
No I guess not.
His rants on social media have cost him in the past.
I believe he may have psychopathic tendencies because he appears to be attempting to project his own work ethic (long hours etc) onto staff but cannot emphasize with them, or understand they aren't him/have his circumstances/have his ability.
His goals are great and have certainly pushed our tech boundaries into near science fiction, but he really doesn't have the social and people skills, which is ironic given he's bought Twitter.
If there was one thing I could tell him, it's that he should engage his brain before his mouth, a little (benevolent) social manipulation to get what he wants will be more successful before he barks orders for long hours or sacks people at short notice.
Carrot before the stick.
- Boeing laughed at SpaceX and their proposed rocket re-use and cheap(er) space flight. Now Boeing is the no.3 supplier to NASA, SpaceX at 2 and playing catch up.
- Self driving cars were not an industry until Tesla pushed it, it is still the pioneer in this respect as no other car make has the same level of self driving features. How cool is a car that drives to you on button click? :)
- No other US company has announced humanoid robots aside from Boston Dynamics, which are not for the general public.
- Tesla has pushed for secondary industries such battery invovation and solar roof tiles (not regular panels on roofs). This in itself is not new but is a future green environment goal.
- The Boring company goals may be a pipe dream (har har) but the intent is there to provide hyper transportation, akin to 50s trashy comic ideals.
- How many non governmental industries can offer Ukraine help with something like Starlink? Can't be many... (honestly don't know but initially seems altruistic).
> - Self driving cars were not an industry until Tesla pushed it, it is still the pioneer in this respect as no other car make has the same level of self driving features. How cool is a car that drives to you on button click? :)
Tesla was founded in 2003, and self driving wasn't a thing to think about back then.
I'm afraid you have drunk the kool aid. Self-driving cars are an idea as old as the car itself, and many companies are much further along than Tesla who are stuck on their "no LIDAR" stance when LIDAR is rapidly becoming cheaper and more available. Almost ironic from the company that bet on lithium batteries for cars.
The robots are a demo gag (much like the smart summon, or the cybertruck, or the semi, or ..).
The "solar tiles" are a fire hazard and the Tesla solar business a total shambles, which makes sense since it was just a nepotistic bailout of Solarcity.
Hyperloop is dead and so is the Boring company.
> - The Boring company goals may be a pipe dream (har har) but the intent is there to provide hyper transportation, akin to 50s trashy comic ideals.
It's worth noting that what they're pushing is not tunneling technology but a particular mass transit system that is essentially a repackaging of personal rapid transit (PRT). Although, unlike the PRT system constructed 50 years ago and every other PRT system built since, Musk's version requires human drivers (as it relies on unmodified Tesla vehicles which are not self-driving).
It's fun to read about this stuff in the news and comment on it here and on Twitter but the reality couldn't be more different. If you're qualified enough to be in the running to work at Twitter, you likely have many options available to you (employment wise). None of those people are trying to go work at Twitter because there's just too much BS flying around over there.
If this keeps up the only way Twitter is going to be able to attract talent IMO is by offering massive comp packages, because that's the only way you're going to get people that aren't die hard Twitter/Elon Musk fans to want to come there.
All tech companies have been hiring bottom of the barrel engineers who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. This is just a realignment where where knowing how to put the lego pieces together isn't enough any more.
I've got to imagine that some of their revenue losses in advertising are due to the fact that various companies/brands simply don't want to be associated with Musk in the slightest. If he was serious about ad revenue, he'd also be serious about Twitter's branding.
Note that I'm not saying there are no Musk fans in the world - there are. But he is divisive, which is a trait not beneficial when trying to strengthen your brand.
Many technical parts of the company had 80% layoffs last week. The people who quit or quiet quit over this senseless RTO mandate will push the company into an unrecoverable brain drain, if they're not already there.
According to the email, Musk expects subscriptions to make up to 50% of revenue. Assuming that Twitter’s revenue is around $5bn, and the subscription is at $8/month that’s some 26M subscriptions, or 5,7% of its users. I don’t think that a number so high is achievable, unless they pull a rabbit out of their hat.
Another way to achieve Musk's target would be to drop ad revenue numbers precipitously until it is equal to subscriptions - a process that may well be under way.
You're making the assumption that annualized revenue hasn't already dropped precipitously due to a loss in advertising dollars, and the bar for subscriptions to reach 50% is rapidly lowering.
Must be in office. Must work at least 40 hours per week. Eliminated days of rest. As if twitter's problems are caused by "employees not working enough".
This kinda thing is great for the "remote work at all hours" is the erzats demon keeping software companies alive. If it is, we'll likely see some downtime, lots of typical E company results (burned out software folks, higher turnover than is industry standard, and much lower pay since Elon doesn't negotiate at silicon valley salary expectations at any of his companies...
If in 2 years Twitter isn't significantly smaller (think 1500 people) and significantly cheaper to run I'd be surprised.
If in 2 years twitter isn't the worst place to work in the valley I'd also be surprised.
Twitter is going to not exist in 2 years. The financials make no sense, and we already have influencers making fun of subscribers. Subscribing is not only going to create a dichotomy that drives away "economy-of-scale" users but it's going to quickly gain a reputation of being "lame."
(I am on the older side on here probably)
Having come from a difficult background, worked some really
Shitty jobs and served in the army before I got a degree
and started in tech I have been a bit shocked and a bit amused
at the endless stream of less than average developers
running around demanding to be treated like kings.
An extreme example of demanded privilege.
There has been royalty for IT and slavery for the rest.
Look at how Amazon treats their factory / wearhouse workers.
They dont treat the IT staff better because they are such great people.
Once developers become easy to replace (should that happen) then
the whip will make much more of an impression on the deposed royalty.
Or we just have some layoffs, and we have a lot of comapnies hiring still and it just continues just a little less fluffing I
I have to admit if I was an executive and I watched one of those "day in the life of" tiktoks from twitter employees that show them spending maybe 20% of their day doing work and the other 80% enjoying company amenities I might be considering tightening things up as well.
Wait, so you have an employee that can get all their work done using 20% of their working hours and then spend the rest of their day ensuring they don't burn out and you want to become adversarial to that employee?
Because clearly they are getting stuff done if they can post that video and not get fired. Otherwise, you have a low performer slacking off which is its own, completely separate issue from the video itself.
It's like that quote from The Office where Michael says Jim is a lazy worker because it takes Jim 20 minutes to complete a project that would take Michael hours to complete. Seems like you're saying you want your least efficient employees and can't be bothered to understand the working habits of your most efficient employees.
Or maybe, just maybe, using time as a sole metric isn't the best way to evaluate employee effectiveness or efficiency.
B) no one is paying that close attention to their performance in the first place or the metrics for performance themselves are setup in such a way that can be gamified and are therefore meaningless.
C) there really isn't enough work to justify a FTE for it.
My hunch is that its a combination of these two.
I've worked long enough to know that the mean time for work completion (assuming C is not the predominant factor) is more than 20% of your work week.
I am not missing those options at all. It's just that the video is not the issue nor the way time can be spent at the company. If your metrics for evaluating performance is wrong that should be addressed before becoming adversarial to your employees based on a flawed perception.
And if there isn't enough work to justify a FTE, then again your metrics are bad. The forecast was not accurate enough. And the only way to know if that's true or not is to fix the formula, do the math again, and figure out the truth.
In both scenarios the employee isn't necessarily the problem, or even a problem at all.
And if we take a step back and evaluate the source material, it's a TikTok video. It's meant to be content. Do we even know if the employee is really only working 20% of the time? We aren't getting a 16 hour live stream here, it's short form content. The truth of the matter is heavily obscured.
It just seems like a bad idea to me to base you're business decisions around a TikTok video, especially when it's one that is adversarial to your employees. Instead, spend the time to understand the reality. Like we might find that the employee is actually working 90% of their workday. And then suddenly you're making decisions that never need to be made in the first place.
> I've worked long enough to know that the mean time for work completion (assuming C is not the predominant factor) is more than 20% of your work week.
Depends heavily on function. Plenty of roles are somewhat peaks and valleys of backlogged work. There might be times where some employees really can get their work done using 20% of their day, but then at a different stage they would need to use way more than 20%.
Yeah, I’m not a twitter exec but presumably would be making decisions off of more than just a TikTok video. I don’t think any of your argument is counter to mine.
It doesn’t take a genius to observe that there may be some fat to cut.
I mean I agree, there is probably fat to cut. But the premise was that if you were an exec and saw that video you'd then consider tightening up the amenities. And if you're basing that decision on a TikTok video that seems a bit short sighted to me.
If you're tightening up the available amenities that should be based on totally different data that has nothing to do with a social media post.
This is just more straw-manning. The video either leaves an impression on you or it doesn't. It's really not possible to have a meaningful argument about the actions inferred from an ambiguous statement like "I might be considering tightening things up".
The video struck me as particularly brash given the current economic climate.
'20% of the day doing work and 80% enjoying company amenities' is ridiculous hyperbole. even if a hypothetical employee is doing that, putting them in the office clearly isn't enough to fix it since they supposedly put a tiktok video up saying 'i don't do my job' and they weren't fired
If we were watching the same videos, they showed themselves getting lunch, getting coffee, going to the gym, and hanging out on the roof. None of these videos suggested that these activities totaled anywhere close to 6 hours in a day.
>Musk expects subscriptions to make up to 50% of revenue
I've seen a lot of people calculating how many subscriptions would be required to hit this number as of today, but they're all forgetting to factor in Apple's and/or Google's cut.
People are talking about mass layoff in Twitter. But remember that,Steve Jobs did the same thing 25 years ago (after he rejoined Apple). Steve has fired 4000 people right way to reduce the expenses and hired people needed for his mission.
It was a smaller fraction of workers (30%) and was the third layoff in the past year, with the previous two happening before Jobs had even rejoined the company (and he wouldn't become CEO for 6 more months, though likely he was shadow CEO only 4 months later).
It's the fastest way to purposefully destroy whatever culture has formed (arguably poorly if the company is in its present state), and then can quickly rehire based on new, arguably better, direction; risky bet IMHO to bet against Elon with his track record of making at least more good decisions than bad ones, so far, with Tesla, SpaceX, etc.
Strangely enough I think this is the first objectively bad decision he has made since owning Twitter. The others are questionable for sure but this is a good way to lose your best engineers to companies that will respect them.
I think blindly firing employees with low code counts is an objectively bad decision that ignores a lot of nuance and likely lost a lot of great engineers to companies that will respect them.
The idea that all lines of code are equal (in difficulty) is so absurd as to (in my memory) have been never discussed on HN before. Everyone here knows it. How could Elon not?
I actually have no strong opinions about whether remote work must be allowed or not... but presumably this is going to result in more people leaving, right? Presumably he knows this, right? (Maybe he's even counting on it?).
I guess this is an interesting experiment in how much staff turnover you can have at a tech company like Twitter and still do fine.
I personally would not expect it to go well. Losing everyone who knows how things work and starting over from scratch with all new employees in as short a time period as possible, or even doing your best to approach that asymptote... that can't be a good idea, can it?
The job climate is such, with lots of SV layoffs, that this requirement will probably work now where it wouldn't have worked six months ago (engs would have jumped from Twitter to another SV co)
A lot of Twitter employees live nowhere near SV, or even an office. The only way to interpret this is that Musk either wants to force more people to leave, or doesn't realize that they're going to leave as a result of this move.
It's an employers market right now. With 11k laid off from Meta, and thousands more across tech, Twitter will have no issue finding staff if it needs them (assuming this decision causes even more to leave).
I'm not convinced that Twitter actually needs more than 1k staff though. 100 infrastructure engineers, 600 platform engineers, and 300 support staff should be all it takes to run a lean ship doing what Twitter does.
Good. Remote work is on it's way out across the industry. It causes people to not perform very well and causes slacking off (I know this of myself from personal experience). It also makes it harder for newer people to learn things and makes it feel less like you are a team and more like you're a bunch of independent people with no connection to the company.
Employee: Why is our leadership trying to increase attrition rate if we’re already understaffed and barely able to keep things running?
Musk: I’m not trying to increase attrition, but I think we are not understaffed. I think we are overstaffed. That is my opinion, which you’re welcome to disagree with.
Here's a cool and perhaps unforeseen hypothetical turn-of-events: 100% of Twitter's staff give their resignation letter on Friday, and don't show up to work. Leadership wakes up to a collapsing platform, a 44 billion USD bill to pay, with no one to keep the lights on or answer the PagerDuty alerts. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes?
No time for silly "knowledge transfers", or "onboarding new team members". You just wake up to learn everybody left and you're left with nothing.
Half of them were already fired (more will probably follow), and the rest will be messed with for months (if not years) to come (as is evident by the email being discussed here). Having nothing to lose...
370k software engineer jobs listed on linkedin right now. So each person laid off from these companies gets to choose between 10 open roles at other companies. And that's just what's listed on linkedin; most jobs aren't.
There aren't 370k jobs paying FAANG or near-FAANG compensation and benefits. Probably about 10% of that is paying anywhere near what Twitter employees are used to getting.
I'm making close to the low end of an entry level software engineer at Twitter according to levels.fyi, and I'm making above average for senior software engineers in my region, based on recruiter/job posting salary ranges and posted salaries on these websites. Haven't gotten a regional recruiter offering anything competitive in the past year since I started this job.
Also the unlisted jobs paying anywhere near Twitter level compensation is probably close to 0%, so no need to add them to the mix.
Sounds like something i would love to do. Musk, the peepole farmer, would be in for a treat. But those who wish to fill in their social voids with onsite work wouldn't be game.
Don't typical contracts for people like Twitter's staff in the US come with timing requirements on quitting? As in, you can't really quit "on the day", you have to leave proper notice and so on?
I understand that in practice once someone says "I quit!" there might be little interest from the employer to keep them around, but in a scenario like you outline I would be very afraid of legal ramifications.
Just a thought, I don't really have an opinion here, Twitter is pretty "meh" in my view. I of course hope it ends well for the employees!
No. Off the top of my head, my understanding is that the vast majority of full time jobs in the US are at-will employment which means there is no required notice period. It’s considered a best practice to give two weeks or more but that’s a social contract and not enforceable in any way. In the past, when employee reference checks were a real thing, that two weeks might buy you a better reference, but even that has been stripped away now with references handled by HR and only confirming dates of employment and conditions of termination (this is to avoid lawsuits I think).
According to this: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/10/23451198/twitter-ftc-elo... a twitter lawyer has told employees that their contracts specify they are a remote first workplace, so it's unclear if Elon has the actual right to force anyone to return to the office.
In at-will states like California he doesn't really need the "right" to fire anyone (assuming he isn't firing them for any protected class reasons). I doubt the majority of Twitter employees (in the US anyway) have any sort of individual employment contract which specifies anything different than the typical at-will employment.
I suspect though that if he does fire people for refusing to return to the office that given the circumstances (twitter very openly being a 'remote first' workplace for years) that states would view that as a constructive dismissal and at the very least those fired would be eligible for unemployment benefits despite being fired "for cause".
Are there any restrictions on timing your quitting so that it damages your employer as much as possible?
Like, I don't know, a senior sale person quitting 2 minutes into a meeting to sign a massive contract, the company lawyer quitting 5 minutes before representing the company in a trial, or somesuch.
California is an 'at-will' work state, which means you can both be fired at-will or you can leave a company at-will with zero notice (it goes both ways).
I know, because I've done it (left, that is, with only notice given the day-of). Unless this has changed in the years since I've left CA/the US.
> Don't typical contracts for people like Twitter's staff in the US come with timing requirements on quitting? As in, you can't really quit "on the day", you have to leave proper notice and so on?
No. The vast majority of tech jobs are “at-will” on both sides: either party can terminate the relationship at any moment.
I thought Elon was making it the literal hell to work at twitter and firing everyone left and right just to appease investors, but he delisted TWTR stock from NYSE? now I'm confused.
Seems like you'd end remote work before firing everybody, because now you have no idea if you're going to be able to keep the people you thought you could.
A legal contract is only as good as someone's ability to enforce it. Otherwise the idea that it's some kind of a bond and companies or people should or do just 'the right thing' is not unfortunately reality.
I would not say he has any more or less respect for legal contracts than any other 'typical' company or business person (from my experience).
The couple people I knew with remote work in their contracts actually want to be let go at this point, wasn't saying it was a gotcha — but they'll need to renegotiate or be terminated.
So, this is just to get rid of more people without having to lay them off. Coaching out people is not very 2022. Will cost Twitter more than it is worth for sure.
> subscriptions account for half of Twitter’s revenue
A lofty ambition indeed. Getting $5billion out of twitter users or an anual subscription of $15 out of 100% of the users sounds like hard work. However, if you drop the avertising revenue to $350 million you can do the WhatsApp $1 a year model.
YouTube and Twitter are, at least currently, very different services. Even if it's the same, the fact is that this $8 needs to not only supplement existing ad revenue but replace it, which makes the financial challenges worse than if it were merely $8 for perks.
why would anyone want to work for this asshole? It's not like the employees are well paid compared to other companies. If I wanted to get fisted, I'd just go to amazon and get a bigger check for it
well now he can get buy-in from other companies wanting to flex their muscles and try to get employees to not work in a distributed fashion ...
(maybe a repeat though in this number of comments)
Definitely check with Twitter employees before assuming that. On the one hand yeah, maybe. On the other, if I was depressed with how off-course my company had gotten, watching someone come in and clean house / shake things up would be very exciting.
Layoffs are always morale-killers. Twitter isn't particularly special in this regard, and if Twitter found a way to lay off 50% within 3 days to a boost of morale to the remaining workforce that would be finally be the one truly innovative accomplishment its done, lol.
The podcast Hard Fork interviewed (with disguised voices) 2 current twitter employees (both had been there a long time). The GP is right, it's a terrible environment.
I survived two rounds of layoffs before I jumped ship.
The work environment was just wasn’t pleasant after the first round.
Actually I can’t imagine a scenario where I’d be happy people got let go. (Even I felt kinda bad when “annoying talk politics everyday real loud for at least 30 minutes while everyone is working hard guy” got let go)..
Unless Musk is giving existing workers a ton of ISOs I don’t see why they should care at all how Twitter does at this point. A worker being excited about a shakeup entailing significantly less freedom, and significantly more work, stress and instability has got to have a bad case of brain worms.
Even the biggest Musk fanboy at Twitter isn't immune to the morale hit from a doubling or trebling of their workload because their team was cut in half from layoffs. What consolation is the company "getting back on course" if you've got to work 70+ hour weeks for the next several months. No time off, sleeping at your desk, never seeing family, and certainly no holiday time off. At the end you now work for a Musk company so your compensation will lag the SV mean.
I feel bad for anyone in that position that feels happy. That's just a really sad Stockholm syndrome at that point.
Over summer, tech companies were offering wheelbarrows full of cash to potential employees. Love him or hate him, once he started f'ing around at twitter, why would anyone have stayed?
Unless you really desperately wanted to be in the presence of the man himself, and maybe thought he was going to buy you a horse in exchange for something
It's been 2 weeks since he officially bought it, but working at twitter (and even as an outsider just reading the news), you see the writing on the wall. There were tons of reports of planned layoffs, and the changes that Elon wanted to see in the company. None of what he is doing is surprising, least of all to Twitter employees.
Companies have always known that employees will put up with abysmal conditions to some level. The stress, effort, insecurity, and fear of finding a new job has always had an extreme value to most people.
Layoffs started over the summer. Hiring freezes had been implemented.
I'm sure many twitter employees thought he would drag his feet or the deal would fall through, and they'd have at least a year+ of time before he comes in.
The key to understanding Musk is that he truly believes that he will be the most powerful person in the world (see https://web.archive.org/web/20200725103243/https://www.nytim... for his friend's take) and that he is utterly shameless and will do whatever he thinks is best in service of that destiny.
One cannot take anything that he says at face value. He is a repeated and proven liar (fully self driving cars in 6 months!). When he says he wants more free speech on twitter, I think it's fair to assume the opposite. Whatever the true Elon may be, his public persona has become that of a megalomaniacal bully, not unlike the ousted troll in chief. Whether this is cynical or authentic, I want no part of any organization with him at the top.
My personal theory is that he bought twitter specifically to make it his private megaphone. Owning the platform will prevent him from being turned off ala Trump. It also will allow him to silence his critics. He won't outright ban them, but by removing content moderation, he will allow those who criticize him to be harassed by his human army of troll bots until the platform becomes so toxic that they all leave.
The bankers love this because twitter is also the platform where the most people are directly criticizing corporate capitalism and challenging its bedrock assumptions. They win no matter what Musk does. In silencing his critics, he will also be silencing their critics. If driving them off of twitter somehow is good for business, then they get a return on their investment. If instead it kills the platform, they can just write off their losses on their taxes. The financiers are very unlikely to actually lose any money on the deal, but the silencing of their own critics would almost certainly be worth $40B to them anyway.
Now that the deal has closed, twitter is in a liminal state between life and death. Its demise has been pretty much written into the terms of the acquisition.
One question that I'd pose to everyone is do you want to live in a world in which Elon Musk is the most powerful person? Do you really believe in his vision? Is it a positive vision for the world or a dystopian one? Does it reflect the worst of us or the best of us?
Stupid people with money can look like they are clever because the layer of people immediately underneath them actually wields the clue stick.
Stupid people with no money look stupid because they can't afford the layer of clever people underneath them.
Clever people are either abstracting the liability via stupid person in the layer above them or don't need that kind of shit in their lives and are just getting on with designing and building products with the other clever people around them.
Edit: I'd just like to note that I am recognising the work that Tesla and SpaceX engineers and staff do which the PR baboon up the top somehow gets credit for every time.
It would be a remarkable bit of luck that Elon stumbled into both Tesla and SpaceX, took on the role of lead rocket designer at spaceX, built both companies into unlikely leaders in their industry with powerful people trying to crush them all the way, while being a total idiot.
A similar but more charitable theory is that Elon is very good at leading a company to build actual hardware that has to solve hard physics problems. At twitter the primary challenge is managing people, and he is autistic and has no idea how to do this. He has no idea how normal people experience or use twitter, no idea how his tweets are felt by people, no idea how his employees feel about him etc.
all of these are things that don't matter when building a rocket or a car, while understanding people and politics is the ONLY thing that matters at twitter.
> It would be a remarkable bit of luck that Elon stumbled into both Tesla and SpaceX, took on the role of lead rocket designer at spaceX
If Elon can understand even half of how "his" rockets work I'd eat my hat. I'm not talking about in layman's terms, I'm talking about the actual science that goes into it. Same deal with car design. I'll give Elon props for having a vision and pushing it forward but let's not say ridiculous things like "lead rocket designer at spaceX". That's like thinking Tim Cook could write a line of Swift if his life depended on it or that Zuck knows more than a surface level of how FB's tech works. I don't exactly begrudge them for that (I won't get into profit sharing, or the lack there of at most companies) but let's not pretend that Elon is himself coming up with revolutionary ideas. Putting his money behind this is laudable, at some level, but he didn't invent these things any more than Steve Jobs "invented" the iPhone.
We here on HN should know better than most how "worthless" an idea is on it's own. It's about execution. And Elon gets props for his execution (in this case hiring people who did the real work) but he shouldn't get all the credit for the work of the actual engineers.
> If Elon can understand even half of how "his" rockets work I'd eat my hat.
Bon appétit!
> When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn't come just from hanging out with people.
Robert Zubrin - aerospace engineer
> Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years.
Fair enough, I stand corrected. I guess I expected more from someone who is actually an engineer. Like to be smart enough to see WFH isn't some evil thing (and if instead it's a move to get people to leave on their own then he is just an asshole, I mean he is a well established asshole/troll, it would just further cement that legacy).
Hat's off (ha!) for your admission. When encountering the same scenario on Reddit, people there invariably just double down in the face of undeniable facts. A donation to the EFF is more than enough. I was actually going to just let you off the hook based on your honest response and strengthening my faith in HN:)
As for WFH, for some perspective, Apple, Google (and others) asked their employees to come back to the office this year. Is management there stupid too? I think a more nuanced view is there are significant pros and cons to WFH and Musk decided that the cons outweigh in this case.
> Apple, Google (and others) asks their employees to come back to the office this year. Is management there stupid too?
I do and I've consistently voiced that opinion no matter the CEO/company. I don't think they think it is stupid, I know they have their reasons. I disagree with their reasons, I think there is more at play than only logical thinking on this point (real estate, asses in chair, etc), and I think it's shortsighted. WFH is an amazing perk and while I get not everyone wants it there are a large number of people who do and to cut off that entire group is incredibly short-sighted.
It's fine though, I'll never work for any of those companies, I have zero desire to do so, I much prefer smaller companies that understand WFH. Though I'd make 1 exception I think, for Apple, to gut and replace App Store Connect/The Developer Portal or at least have better feedback/errors/displaying the current state (which is a common complaint I have with Apple when their software needs to talk to server, the feedback is always lackluster or non-existent). Those websites look broken and/or are confusing/vague way too often. At least the Google Play dev console is so busy and incoherent that you'd not notice most issues. Though props to the Google Play devs for making apk/aab upload/release errors as confusing as possible in most cases :chefs-kiss:
I don't think he's trying to prove a point or play 3D chess.
I think it's much simpler. He's basing his decision on his beliefs about and experience with in-office vs WFH. He believes in-office is more productive.
I would postulate the belief in-office is more productive is somewhat akin to 3d chess. AFAIK the data is mixed and I've seen some data that suggests WFH is more productive (but the jury certainly still seems TBD on this debate)
Apple at least has always been bizarre about work conditions and anti-WFH, so that seems expected.
It seems optimistic to think that Musk made a careful decision based on nuanced factors that just happened to have exactly the same outcome as every other company he owns.
It's not an intelligence thing (yes, he's not a genius but that's not to say he's not very intelligent and has some deep technical knowledge in some areas) - I think the thing is that Musk has generally demonstrated poor judgement and low ethics in many areas (think Solar City acquisition, tweets leading to SEC legal action, Thai cave diver slur, some of the cryptocurrency stuff, now this whole Twitter thing, etc.).
People expect intelligence to lead to good judgement but I'm more and more convinced that (assuming a decent baseline of intelligence) they're fairly separate and unconnected things.
Having worked with a lot of intelligent engineers (mostly EE) I would suggest that they are no more capable of making rational business decisions than anyone else.
The only thing I really took from the experience is to learn from other people’s mistakes because it hurts less than learning from your own.
My take home is that you should use a proper decision analysis framework for issues like this to test your own biases, reasonings and criteria. Sometimes your conclusion is not what you expected. Much pain saved.
Rest assured, it's very confusing to see him act so stupidly with this twitter event. I have difficulties wrapping my head around the spacex-smart vs twitter-fool contrast. I guess he doesn't use the same part of his brain on these two topics.. i'm sure he was sharper because tesla/spacex were hardscience dreams of his, whereas twitter is just "i've succeeded twice, let's just handwave that thing"
> He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
This seems like a weird thing to highlight, to me. Like, I don’t know anything about rockets, but we all know a bit about CPU design here, right? If someone said that Tim Cook really knew his stuff and wanted answers about the M1 that got down the the fundamental laws of physics, we’d probably say — well, that’s pretty stupid, right?
You’d have to talk about thing like pipeline stages, decoder width, memory bandwidth, branch prediction — obviously these parts have to follow the fundamental laws of physics but that isn’t really the interesting part. Fundamental physical limits aren’t the bottleneck yet.
Maybe rockets science is just much easier but that seems surprising to me, given the expression.
"This seems like a weird thing to highlight, to me."
Classic NASA. Read Gene Kranz's "Failure is not an option".
In rocketry you're usually up against physical limits. You need materials near the limits of physical strength and temperature resistance. You need fuels near the limits of energy density. And still you're launching with a payload to destination that's maybe 5% of the mass, if you're lucky. Which is why rocketry has to obsess on weight reduction.
If fuels were 2x as powerful, or gravity was 1/2 as much, this would be easy. A spacecraft would have the weight budget and safety margins of an airliner.
If earth's gravity were somewhat greater, you'd never make it to orbit with chemical fuels.
But the most interesting thing about his rockets, that they land, which enables a totally different economic proposition, is in direct defiance of this sort of physical limitations first way of looking at the problem. It would clearly be more efficient fuel-wise to not do a controlled landing, right?
Yes, and that costs some payload. That tradeoff is right up against the limits of what's physically possible. How Space-X does landings is quite different than most VTOL landings, which are slow and careful. The boosters approach fast, and then blast at 2G just before landing. Fuel is spent almost entirely to get rid of kinetic energy, not to fight gravity while hovering. That rather drastic solution makes it possible.
I'm not a huge Musk fan, but he does seem to get the physics of rocketry.
Market disruption is the key difference. We now know how CPU operate and it's almost taken as a commodity.
Before Telsa, nobody thoughts electric cars were ready for road. Before SpaceX, I don't think anyone tried reusable rocket thingy. The thing is when you come up with a radically new idea, you have to know enough about it to convince others to work on it.
Steve Jobs knew enough about computer(and general idea of programming) to sell it, and Bill Gates was once a good programmer. Intel, nVidia founder were also chip engineers.
Stupidity is not necessarily a lack of intelligence, but also a lack of common sense. He's clearly intelligent. Some of the most intelligent people I've ever known are quite frankly the most stupid and dangerous with actions conceptually and verbally.
This is the kind of response I expect on Reddit not here. To me it is indicative of being influenced more by personal bias than truth and reason.
To answer your point though, Zubrin does not and never has worked for any of Musk's companies. Watson did work at SpaceX 8 years ago, but works somewhere else now so he has nothing to lose or gain from Musk.
And here is an account of a top NASA engineering official's interactions with Musk who also has never worked for Musk.
> He dispatched one of his lieutenants, Liam Sarsfield, then a high-ranking NASA official in the office of the chief engineer, to California to see whether the company was for real or just another failure in waiting.
Most of all, he was impressed with Musk, who was surprisingly fluent in rocket engineering and understood the science of propulsion and engine design. Musk was intense, preternaturally focused, and extremely determined. “This was not the kind of guy who was going to accept failure,” Sarsfield remembered thinking.
Throughout the day, as Musk showed off mockups of the Falcon 1 and Falcon 5, the engine designs, and plans to build a spacecraft capable of flying humans, Musk peppered Sarsfield with questions. He wanted to know what was going on within NASA. And how a company like his would be perceived. He asked tons of highly technical questions, including a detailed discussion about “base heating,” the heat radiating out from the exhaust going back up into the rocket’s engine compartment—a particular problem with rockets that have clusters of engines next to one another, as Musk was planning to build.
Now that he had a friend inside of NASA, Musk kept up with the questions in the weeks after Sarsfield’s visit, firing off “a nonstop torrent of e-mails” and texts, Sarsfield said. Musk jokingly warned that texting was a “core competency.” “He sends texts in a constant flow,” Sarsfield recalled. “I found him to be consumed by whatever was in front of him and anxious to solve problems. This, combined with a tendency to work eighteen hours a day, is a sign of someone driven to succeed.” Musk was particularly interested in the docking adapter of the International Space Station, the port where the spacecraft his team was designing would dock. He wanted to know the dimensions, the locking pin design, even the bolt pattern of the hatch. The more documents Sarsfield sent, the more questions Musk had.
“I really enjoyed the way he would pore over problems anxious to absorb every detail. To my mind, someone that clearly committed deserves all the support and help you can give him.”
Not parent nor have I contributed to this thread in anyway beside this post, but I have to say for someone who so easily accuse others of having personal bias you seem to be really deeply invested into proving how great Elon is. Your messages in this entire subthread add essentially nothing beside quote without context about how great and smart Elon is.
In an era where online manipulation is becoming ubiquitous, when talking about someone who has a clear ego issue and the desperate need to be seen as awesome (to the point he has several cases of acting against his best interest just to protect his ego, across several companies), and in the context of that person acquiring one the platform most forward in the whole social media space that pushed those issues forward... I find that interesting.
I am not accusing you of anything, I'm merely saying your messages have the opposite result on me than the one you intend.
Many people who are in fact awesome have egos. Anybody who follows sports knows this.
Elon as a person certainty has lots of flaws, but he is also quite clearly really good at a lot of things people who try to downplay that and claim its all 'luck' or 'failing upwards' usually just don't like his personality.
Also, the reason I suspect personal bias in the comment I replied to us because of how low effort and fallacious it was.
They claimed the people I referenced were Musk's employees and therefore said those things to kiss his ass get to get on his good side and avoid being fired.
This so blatantly false and easy to disapprove. Most of them weren't ever employees and none of them are current employees of Musk. When someone grasps at falsehoods like this in an attempt to discredit others, it naturally raises suspicions about their motives.
> Your messages in this entire subthread add essentially nothing beside quote without context
That's not true. I invite you to read my messages again and note that I've made 5 comments, all of them timestamped before yours, and only in 2 of them have I referenced quotes.
> about how great and smart Elon is
That's not exactly accurate and seems tinged with your interpretation of my intentions.
I've supplied quotes to show that Elon is well versed in rocket science.
> add essentially nothing beside quote without context
A commenter claimed that Musk did not understand rocketry. I replied with quotes from industry experts declaring the exact opposite. What more context do you need?
I'm not a fanboy and have anything invested in proving how great he is. Personally, I think he can be a big jerk at times and at others brilliant. The issue I'm trying to address that I see over and over again are the false claims that Musk has no idea what he is doing technically and steals credit from the engineers he hires.
When I see a ubiquitous false claim that is easy disproven in 3 minutes with a Google search and copy and paste, then why not? I believe HN is a place where truth and reason are valued and misinformation corrected, so I think my comments and references have been valuable in that respect and apparently so do the 30+ people that have upvoted my first comment with the quotes even though they are "without context."
> your messages have the opposite result on me than the one you intend
My intention has been to present information to counter misinformation about Musk's technical skills. If you still believe he doesn't have technical skills, that's your prerogative of course. I'm just supplying information that looks authentic to me and leave it up to the reader to decide.
I believe is Musk is as technically skilled and capable as the average or above average engineer, and certainly as the above average billionaire. I believe he can read up on things and carry on intelligent conversations.
I believe he can impress people who aren't used to strangers even trying to understand technical issues.
I don't believe he is solving any substantial technical problems at SpaceX or "designing rockets" himself.
> people who aren't used to strangers even trying to understand technical issues.
Do you think this describes Zubrin, Watson, Sarsfield or the other experts in the reddit post I referenced?
Do you think he fooled Jim Cantrell?
> He is by far the single smartest person that I have ever worked with ... period.
> I found out later that he was talking to a bunch of other people about rocket designs and collaborating on some spreadsheet level systems designs for launchers. Once our dealings with the Russians fell apart, he decided to build his own rocket and this was the genesis of SpaceX.
> or that Zuck knows more than a surface level of how FB's tech works
How about in 2016 where he built an home control AI and iPhone app with voice recognition for it using Facebook tech?
"I had to reverse engineer APIs for some of these to even get to the point where I could issue a command from my computer to turn the lights on or get a song to play."
"As the CEO of Facebook, I don't get much time to write code in our internal environment. I've never stopped coding, but these days I mostly build personal projects like Jarvis. I expected I'd learn a lot about the state of AI this year, but I didn't realize I would also learn so much about what it's like to be an engineer at Facebook. And it's impressive.
My experience of ramping up in the Facebook codebase is probably pretty similar to what most new engineers here go through. I was consistently impressed by how well organized our code is, and how easy it was to find what you're looking for -- whether it's related to face recognition, speech recognition, the Messenger Bot Framework or iOS development. The open source Nuclide packages we've built to work with GitHub's Atom make development much easier. The Buck build system we've developed to build large projects quickly also saved me a lot of time. Our open source FastText AI text classification tool is also a good one to check out, and if you're interested in AI development, the whole Facebook Research GitHub repo is worth taking a look at."
Actually Zuck has a tremendously strong understanding of how his system works. He used to geek out explaining pieces of it. Obviously it's grown but let's not let our personal feelings (for someone we've likely never met) cloud reality.
> Stupid people with money can look like they are clever
I get it, some people hate Elon’s guts and equally hate Elon fans. I also think that it’s pretty well established that he has a range of character flaws that really hurt him and threaten his future success. However, anyone who insinuates that Elon is stupid needs to establish how a genuinely stupid person could found two successful dot coms and then hire all the brilliant engineers that have made his subsequent companies so successful against such odds and become the world’s richest person. Luck and debatable opinions about his alleged wealthy upbringing cannot explain this. Even assuming all the highly debatable opinions about his technical contributions any reasonable observer must admit he is at least a genius at hiring the right people to achieve his vision and then avoiding getting in their way enough to make enormous inroads and sell it all brilliantly. I am far from an Elon fan but I couldn’t hope to achieve 5% of what he has.
Being smart in one field doesn't translate to being smart in another field. For example, Steve Jobs making medical decisions, doctors making investment decisions, bankers making tech decisions.
> Stupid than the average person in making a purchasing decision
I would wager that anybody widely regarded as a genius has a decent sized rap sheet of stupid crap they pulled. So "made stupid impulsive buying decision" is great evidence for impulsivity and hubris, not "stupid."
He's an investor- patron, who got extenely lucky in the dotcom boom. He pays people to build good businesses, and he (was) good at personal-brand marketing.
Sure, dude. You're just as smart and capable as the world's most successful entrepreneur, but you're just a little too ethical to lower yourself to his level.
This is pure faerie-dust self-aggrandizement. If you want to make these assertions, you can prove them. No one else is stopping you, after all.
Counterpoint: most people who are incredibly smart or incredibly hard working or even both, are not incredibly rich.
Musk is clearly an intelligent person in so far as your average person is not really interested in rocket science, or capable of running a business, but I hesitate to attribute his becoming the richest man on earth to his incredible intelligence. I think it should be evident that success in capitalism relies on a huge combination of factors.
> it should be evident that success in capitalism relies on a huge combination of factors.
I’ll be happy with the discussion if a single Elon hater admits that regardless of anything else Elon is not actually stupid. You cannot be actually stupid and do what he has done it is totally beyond any reasonable interpretation.
I know lots of highly successful charlatans in areas that require being smart but who are basically unethical fools. I'm talking about scientific researchers and engineers. People with 300 grange papers running a research institute who have never published an original thing in their lives.
Putting aside that these "unethical fools" would have to be at least really good grifters, politicians, and other synonyms...to make the analogy more accurate I'd wager these alleged charlatans didn't serially found multiple research institutes, run them concurrently in some cases, that are producing ground-breaking real-world results some of which their contemporaries said was essentially impossible (e.g. landing an orbital booster). Elon is either a genius in some manner, be it the greatest grifter in history or something, or Zeus is rigging the wheel of fortune in his favor for some reason. I'm not a big fan of the Zeus theory.
If someone wins the lottery, does that mean "they're a genius at picking numbers?" How many people with musk's starting wealth have started businesses? Do you think every single one of them is less of a genius than he is?
Musk's success story is just anecdata, as almost all wealth stories are.
If someone wins the lottery 4 different times buying only like 10 tickets in their whole life, you better fucking believe something special is going on there.
>How many people with musk's starting wealth have started businesses? Do you think every single one of them is less of a genius than he is?
Who are you talking about? Tesla and SpaceX dominate the markets they operate in. He didn’t take some family wealth and just maintain it with a business. He grew multiple companies from sub million dollar values to hundreds of billions.
Did he reset his wealth, connections, etc. between each of those 'tickets'? No. Each one was built off the previous success. Without paypal there is no tesla (or at least not involving him). Without tesla there is no spacex. These are not independent events in the way that lottery ticket wins are. The analogy is not perfect, but the way it falls apart is not favourable to your interpretation.
And we will never know if those companies would have succeeded or been created without him. We can't test the counterfactual. His success is only evident in hindsight and the only proof that it's somehow unique to him is the fact that it happened.
> Who are you talking about? Tesla and SpaceX dominate the markets they operate in. He didn’t take some family wealth and just maintain it with a business. He grew multiple companies from sub million dollar values to hundreds of billions.
The claim here is that Musk is uniquely intelligent and that somehow explains his outsized success. That implies the people who don't have his success are not as smart as he is.
Unless... perhaps... there's more to this than intelligence or hard work.
> Did he reset his wealth, connections, etc. between each of those 'tickets'? No.
More or less yes. Read up on how close spacex and Tesla came to imploding at the same time.
> Without tesla there is no spacex.
You’re confused about the timelines there.
> These are not independent events in the way that lottery ticket wins are. The analogy is not perfect, but the way it falls apart is not favourable to your interpretation.
Again, you think it was just PayPal doubled down to Tesla, which then somehow turned into a war chest for SpaceX or whatever. Tesla and SpaceX happened in parallel, spacex didn’t get help from Tesla, and both ran out of money from PayPal.
> Did he reset his wealth, connections, etc. between each of those 'tickets'? No.
So because he once made 23 million. Making 23 billion $ is not impressive?
> And we will never know if those companies would have succeeded or been created without him.
Tesla had his money but not his leadership and was run straight into the ground. Musk took over and now its making almost the same amount of money as Toyota.
> Without tesla there is no spacex.
What? This isn't accurate.
> And we will never know if those companies would have succeeded or been created without him.
There is a long history of rocket startup before and after him. And non are SpaceX. Most failed. Beal Aerospace being a good example. There was a company called Rocketplane Kistler that could have been SpaceX but failed.
So yes, we do have quite a bit of evidence that starting a successful space company is incredibly hard even with quite a bit of money behind it.
> Unless... perhaps... there's more to this than intelligence or hard work.
And perhaps you need to reverse your thinking and realize that huge success without hard work work, intelligence is very unlikely even if some luck is also involved.
> And perhaps you need to reverse your thinking and realize that huge success without hard work work, intelligence is very unlikely even if some luck is also involved.
I said none of these things you're reading in to my argument.
If someone wins the lottery repeatedly (Zip2, X.com/Paypal, SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, The Boring Company) I'd entertain the possibility that they weren't just 'picking numbers'.
Without commenting on the others, the Wikipedia article for Neuralink seems to say it’s taken a ton of funding but failed to make any big improvements in the science or technology, and without even reaching initial human trials. The Boring Company built “a single-lane underground roadway less than a mile long, driven by conventional Tesla automobiles, constructed at a total cost of $48 million” (see the Wikipedia article for it).
I don’t see how either of those can be considered winning the lottery, to use your phrase.
Neuralink is trying something that amazingly difficult and many medical companies, specially those working in something as complex as operating on the human brain are not expected to launch a product within a year or two.
> The Boring Company
The Boring company if sold today would likely make more money then most lottery winners get.
Thanks for your contributions btw. I don't like Musk, but suggesting he is talentless or just lucky is asinine Reddit-level commenting and it's good to see it called out.
Winning the lottery once increases your ability to win it in the future because you can (if you want) buy more tickets. Success creates conditions for more success in pretty mundane ways.
only Paypal & SpaceX though, the rest may fail, Neuralink & The Boring Company are merely hype at this point. Tesla will face a lot of competition in years to come and now it has no novelty factor.
Every hitherto successful enterprise might fail due to future conditions but Tesla getting us from essentially zero to a competitive mass produced electric car market is already a historic achievement.
Isn't the Chevy volt or the Prius the cars that went from essentially zero to mass production?
Curious about this claim, Tesla introduced the model S and in 2012 it was roughly 25% of the EV market (22k of about 90). For the next two years, EV sales doubled while tesla sales grew by 50%. The next year tesla and overall ev growth by went up by about 50%
Is going from 70k ev to 90k the same as going from zero to mass production? It was for tesla (very much so), but not the overall EV market. Then selling 30k put of 180k the ne xt year, seems like the scaling up is not complet6due to tesla. Though tesla recently is pushing about 2/3 of EV sales and recently was at 75% (source => googled: percent EVs sold in 2022 by brand)
The idea single handedly brought about the EV industry seems not to be supported by this data. Namely the growth in EV sales outpaced the growth of Tesla sales and in this early days Tesla was not an overwhelming percentage of the market (though recently it is).
My inference here is Musk had good timing for market fit, he made a lot more people aware of EVs (cultural change), and he scaled up production to a high mark recently achieved. All of which is commendable. Though the comment of "zero to nothing" applies (from what I see) only to Tesla itself and not the broader EV market (which is still quite an achievement, and the actual broader impacts are as well)
> Isn't the Chevy volt or the Prius the cars that went from essentially zero to mass production?
The Chevy volt never got up to mass production territory as they never broke 25000 per year [1] whereas >100,000 model 3 and model y are each being produced per quarter. [2] That's a respectable mass production volume if not record breaking amongst all cars. The Prius is a hybrid car so it's not in the same category.
> Tesla introduced the model S and in 2012 it was roughly 25% of the EV market (22k of about 90)
The Model S and X are not mass-production models.
> Is going from 70k ev to 90k the same as going from zero to mass production?
They increased the number of EVs produced to truly mass-production volume. The difficulty going from a few thousand per quarter sold at a high price to >100,000s sold at an affordable price is a huge leap.
The tesla sales numbers also include their hybrid offerings?
I suppose it is a matter of opinion whether 25k constitutes "mass production" or not.
Seemingly Tesla did not break that threshold for 5 years. The OP I took to imply that tesla drove production of _all_ EVs from roughly zero to large scale. The data I'm seeing still does not support that claim. Within Tesla, yes, but globally, no.
Eg: While significant, tesla was not more than 20% of global EVs sold (in recent years) [1].
Tesla's are still expensive too? 2023 models look to start at $70k to $110k
It's not clear to me where our apples are turning into oranges since the different delivery numbers do not line up (perhaps hybrid vs not, perhaps pre-order and sold vs built - not sure)
Regardless, the [2] citation says of the response above states: "Clearly, the production and sales ramp in the second half of 2018 is the first big, noticeable bump in Tesla’s output."
The time frame is very significant as it alludes to whether Tesla was the reason for EV growth from zero, or if they are a significant (but not sole) part of a larger trend.
Quick google has 3M EVs sold in 2019, compared to tesla selling 10% of that. The rest of the car industry was not dormant.
I do agree though that going from 1k's to 100k's is a big leap. The fact it is in the same general ballpark as F150s is remarkable. The rub though is that happened over 10 years, mostly over the last 5 and during a period where absent tesla there was still very strong YoY sales growth of EVs
In sum, is Tesla the birth of EVs? No, but it is nonetheless a significant and remarkable part.
He was about to found an electric car company. He then got information that there were 2 guys in the Valley trying to build an electric car company. They had only minimal investment (personal, family) and their fund-raising was hitting a wall, nobody was investing and the company was basically dead men walking. Tesla was basically 2 guys with business plan, and the business plan was a pretty vague idea about building an electric street car.
Instead of just ignoring that, putting his money in his own company and essentially 100% dooming Tesla, he got together with them, funded them and brought incredibly important people like J.B. with him.
People now use this as a negative, but seems to me not just ignoring them, and dooming them to bankruptcy and starting his own company was a pretty nice. Its not like Tesla was far enough in development that their technology was a must have. Tesla was founded based on a lot of false assumptions.
He even allowed one of them to lead the company for the next couple of years until Tesla had been run straight into the ground, only then replacing the CEO.
Ok later he insisted the he and J.B. were founders as well and that what people don't like. But the reality is without him and J.B. Tesla was doomed and for the history of Tesla Musk and J.B. are far more relevant then the original founders.
Yep, it's a whole class of equating X thing with being "virtuous" (or similar). Your height, your sex, your weight, your hairline, your income/savings, etc. It's uncomfortable to talk about or admit but people regularly take controllable (or uncontrollable) traits and assign value to them even though it doesn't have any actual bearing.
"Oh that billionaire did something that seems odd/crazy to me? Well he must know something I don't else how would be be a billionaire!" - Yeah, that's not how things work. What's the line? "Past performance is not indicative of future results", paraphrasing it: "Past advantages are not indicative of future results". Very, very few "self-made million/billionaires" are anything of the sort. I'm not saying their lives have never been hard or that they have never worked hard at something but I think you'd find that, at scale, most people would succeed if put into that position (from birth, which is why this is near-impossible to prove).
Indeed. My father said it this way, rather well: there are many more failed assholes than successful assholes. Do not attribute success to being an asshole.
Incidentally he was a failed asshole. All his staff deserted him and watched his business burn to the ground. Perhaps ironically a big fan of Musk too.
> Indeed. My father said it this way, rather well: there are many more failed assholes than successful assholes. Do not attribute success to being an asshole.
I don't know. There are also many more failed nice people than successful nice people. We don't have hard stats, so the success/failure ratio for assholes could actually be higher.
> Yep, it's a whole class of equating X thing with being "virtuous" (or similar). Your height, your sex, your weight, your hairline, your income/savings, etc. It's uncomfortable to talk about or admit but people regularly take controllable (or uncontrollable) traits and assign value to them even though it doesn't have any actual bearing.
Reality can be hallucinated in either direction.
What it actually "is" here, is unknown. But the mind seems to abhor a vacuum so secretly fills it with simulated data. Presumably this had some historic evolutionary benefit, but whether it is still a benefit in 2022 seems questionable.
> most people would succeed if put into that position (from birth, which is why this is near-impossible to prove).
It's actually very easy to disprove. There are 22 million millionaires in the US. There are 720 billionaires. That gives you a 0.003% chance of going from millionaire tier to billionaire.
I don't believe that actually is what I was talking about or that you can use those numbers in the way you are. Your success in life is made up of a lot of different and hard to quantify or even qualify things. I'm talking about being able to go back in time knowing what X person has accomplished and replacing them with Y number of people doing different "runs through life". I'm postulating that the majority of them would end up in very similar positions at the end. Also it's impossible since even if we had the ability to do this (outside a simulation... maybe) the ethics of it are all wrong. Heck if you could actually simulate it there would still be ethical ramifications. If you can simulate full human consciousness how can you ever, ethically, turn off the machine or subject people to even simulated pain/poverty/sickness/etc? I digress.
Those numbers don't indicate your chance of going from millionaire to billionaire. How many of those millionaires became millionaires later in life instead of being born one? How many of those billionaires started as millionaires? You'd need instead a study of hundreds of billionaires that started as millionaires then compare them the the number of "peer millionaires" that were born around the same time. Even so it's the "experiment" I'm proposing. Maybe I should have left millionaires out of it completely because even though we throw around things like "millionaires/billionaire" they are very different. You can be a millionaire from your 401K, your 401K will never make you a billionaire (unless inflation really gets out of hand).
For myself it's very easy to look at all the advantages I've had in life and see how they led to the "success" I have today. I have/have had friends/coworkers who I perceive as being just as hard working, just as smart, etc as me who aren't doing as well due to not having the same advantages, I see the opposite as well.
It's intellectual dishonest to the extreme to say he's stupid.
If you really can't see the evidence in front of your eyes, here's John Carmack: "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so."
Here's Kevin Watson, who developed the avionics for Falcon 9 and Dragon and previously managed the Advanced Computer Systems and Technologies Group within the Autonomous Systems Division at NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory:
"Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years."
Garrett Reisman, engineer and former NASA astronaut:
"What's really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I mean I've met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and he'll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across the different technologies that go into rockets cars and everything else he does."
That take frankly says more about you than about Elon Musk. Yes, his manner of speaking was unusual for somebody in his position, but it's perfectly compatible with great technical depth.
I didn't meant to paint stupid as an absolute. He is smart too. Some of the smartest people I know are some of the stupidest people I know and vice versa -- its all relative. I think in this arena he's behaving stupidly. I mean hey I think he does in those other arena too but I'm not going to argue against technical people that have been in those rooms with him.
It’s political. It’s no different than having quotes about Biden, Trump, etc. When people have a habit of habitually lying about people who support missions you believe in, you tend to save evidence to the contrary.
I think the stupidity was in the non-contingent offer to purchase it. Now he's trying to pay for that stupidity. Maybe he's doing that stupidly too, but only time will tell.
He let emotion laden political nonsense lead him into making an extraordinarily bad deal. OK. Fine. Not what prudent businessmen would have done, but now he's where he is with the Twitter deal.
So at this point it's all about leading from where you are, and sometimes where you are is in a place where there are zero good options. Every option is terrible, and probably won't work to extricate you from your situation.
But here's the thing, you have to take one of the options because you cannot stay where you are. The one thing you know is that where you are leads to certain death. Go left. Go right. But you can't stay here. That's the situation Elon is in.
I'm not convinced Elon has actually considered all his options. He didn't have the company for any time at all before he start trying desperately to massively change things. Personally I feel like taking a minute or two to figure out the state of things before slashing and burning would be helpful for choosing the right path instead of making moves that get reverted the same day they are implemented.
More or less similar to my view of where he is, although I think I'm a bit less charitably inclined.
Given his priors and the fact that he doesn't understand social media, free speech, moderation or advertising, the only question is if he can control his ego long enough to find someone to run the place before he burns it to the ground, and whether anyone who could save it would trust him enough to take the gig.
I rather doubt that will happen, but maybe. Assuming he hasn't already done too much damage - I'm not sure where that line is, but it seems like we're approaching it rapidly.
He's not stupid in the domains he understands. I think his problem is impulse control, and he's impulsively bought into a business that he knows little about.
I do think hard times are coming for Musk. As well as burning billions on Twitter, Tesla is no longer the vangard of the EV market, Boring seems to be a dead end, and I haven't heard anything about the solar enterprise for years. Space X seems to be still innovating, and I hope Musk isn't completely cleaned out so his Mars aspirations still bear fruit.
US typically uses pretty strong adjectives. Like my kid keeps on "hating" everything, and there are no shades of gray. Maybe that's how you are using "stupid"? Haha.
$44bn all-cash at a meme-y $54.20....for Twitter, the least profitable of the major social media networks.
just think, the board would have accepted $50 per share, but he went with something that included 420, costing himself an additional 8% on the purchase price.
Tesla made almost the same profit as Toyota last Quarter. While having a much, much better position in terms of debts and company value. And while the company is still growing at incredibly rates each quarter. All this while major competitors are shrinking.
The Tesla stock really only went up when they had proved they had cracked mass production of the Model 3 and were making an electric vehicle at industry leading margins.
One can argue Tesla stock is still to high, but its certainty not 'objective'. Good annalists disagree and you can reach almost any valuation depending on your future assumptions.
What's stupid is people thinking that someone who successfully rules over some of the most influential companies in the world is stupid. Reminds me of all those people who claim that Trump or Putin[1] are "stupid" where in reality they just mean "I don't like them".
[1] You can be a murderous dictator and not stupid, I would actually wager a guess that those people tend to actually be cleverer than average. Some applies to blood-thirsty CEOs.
There is a surprising amount of luck and happenstance in people reaching their current positions. Even great discoveries made by smart people often originate because someone was in the right place at the right time. Most societies rewards these events, for both the individual and through inheritance their children.
Musk may be cleverer than average, but he's also come to own twitter by virtue of being successful at building paypal, followed by being able to successfully deploy capital at impactful problems at SpaceX and Tesla. While impressive achievements, these achievements do not imply that Musk will be successful at Twitter. He's known for demanding people to do their best and hardest work by pointing them at seamingly impossible but impactful problems.
Will rescuing a failing social network motivate people in the same way? I don't think so. I'd probably be willing to work 60+ hours a week for average pay to solve global warming (TSLA) or colonize Mars (SpaceX) - I wouldn't be willing to make that sacrifice for Twitter.
There is a surprising amount of luck involved. More than you suspected.
> being successful at building paypal
Musk never worked for a company called PayPal. The predecessor companies that merged to become PayPal forced Musk out around the time of the merger. Later the company changed its name to PayPal and when it went public, Musk had a big payday.
Musk was the CEO of the merged company for a few months, before being fired for incompetence by the board. Afterward, they renamed themselves "paypal." Musk was rich enough to not have to sell his shares until the IPO, so he made a big payday.
I think of Elon Musk as being that guy who goes on a winning streak playing "double or nothing" coin flips. Enough people are doing it in Silicon Valley that one of them was going to hit a run of several heads, and get rich.
You could also look at this person and wonder how much acumen he actually has if he's the CEO of three billion dollar companies simultaneously and still has time smoke blunts on podcasts. Usually CEO is a full-time job, but for him?
Maybe he's just never sleeps. Maybe the real work is being done by others (cough Shotwell cough) and he's just takes the credit (cough Tesla founder cough). Or maybe, just maybe, CEO just isn't that hard of a job?
No, it is good to call them stupid. If you call them evil or Machiavellian they actually like it and take pride in it. To them not being those things is WEAK.
So you have to actually see where they have a fragile ego, E.g stupid, bad with money, poor, or they have no class.
Success is not really a measure of intelligence. I actually think Elon is likely quite intelligent but a lot of success is determined by luck, ambition and attitude rather than pure intelligence. I definitely do not think Donald Trump is very intelligent, but he has undoubtedly been very successful.
You got be lucky to be raised in the right upbringing. One's upbringing is not their choice.
Effort? I have yet to see any data indicating one can raise their intelligence^1 by effort. What I personally believe is that effort, hard work, tenacity, etc. are all just metaphorical raffle tickets in a metaphorical "success" raffle. Effort is required to play the game, but it at best can only increase your chances of winning. After all, it is by no means a guarantee. More effort = more tickets/chances. Good upbringing? Generational wealth? All more tickets. But, you hardly put in any effort, have a poor upbringing, and still win, but the odds are stacked against you.
[1] At least intelligence in how it's defined and measured by psychology. I do not necessarily agree with psychology and its tools of measurement, but that is irrelevant.
If you took your definition of "smartest" person and never taught them to read , write or do math they wouldn't be very intelligent. Intelligence is definitely learned.
Putin's and Musk's massive ego and narcissism will be their downfall.
By invading Ukraine, Putin has achieved the exact opposite he wanted to achieve. The West is now more united than ever and more Russia border countries are going to join NATO. On top of that he has destroyed Russian economy. Tell me how that's not stupid?
I don't even have to go into Musk's actions. He massively overpaid for Twitter and to service the loan he has to pay $1bn a year. Even if he'd cut all his staff and millions would subscribe to Twitter blue - that wouldn't be enough to service the loan. Plus tons of advertisers left the platform because he's a loose canon spewing conspiracy theories. How is this not stupid?
By invading Ukraine, Putin has achieved the exact opposite he wanted to achieve. The West is now more united than ever and more Russia border countries are going to join NATO. On top of that he has destroyed Russian economy. Tell me how that's not stupid?
But he likely saw the alternative as Ukraine in NATO, colour revolutions spreading to Russia, and ending up like Gadaffi (whose gruesome death he was said to have watched on video over and over again).
Probably he regrets not doing it sooner, when the Ukranian military was in much worse shape.
Why don't those people just liquidate some sizeable amount of money that would last for a few generations and run away into some country that is receptive to rich murderers?
Every dictators seems to have the need to sink with their governments and take the country together for a ride.
This. From his point of view, he was pushed to that. Of course I condemn it, but if we could accept that he does not perceive the West the way we do, maybe it would help.
From where he stands, democracy is a threat. The fact that we disagree won't change it.
But I find Bill Browder’s explanation more plausible. Essentially Putin is like a Mafia boss and his organisation has been stealing from the Russian for years and years. To keep up his regime and organisation he needs to create conflicts.
If he was really that worried about being the next Gadaffi, he could have just retired to a countryside home and set things up so his cronies took over. Even if the cronies fucked up and became the next Gadaffi, Putin himself would have been mostly forgotten by then and all the rage would have been directed to the people actually in charge at the time.
However, when you have narcissistic personality disorder, as Putin does, doing the above just isn't an option.
Putin is not as stupid as Musk. He's causing the EU to fracture a bit more as Hungary and Poland break with the EU on boycotting Russian gas/oil. The EU has already spun off the UK thanks to Russian propaganda. If Trump had won his reelection NATO wouldn't be long for the world either.
Plus, if you look at the way Musk got played recently to spread Russian talking points about Ukraine in order to protect his precious Starlink from weapons Russia probably doesn't even have, it becomes somewhat more obvious how the comparison breaks down.
> He's causing the EU to fracture a bit more as Hungary and Poland break with the EU on boycotting Russian gas/oil.
Nonsense. Temporary disruption and disagreement over energy politics will not lead to a long term break in the fundamental political alignment of Poland and Hungary and will certainty not break the EU.
> Plus, if you look at the way Musk got played recently to spread Russian talking points about Ukraine in order to protect his precious Starlink from weapons Russia probably doesn't even have, it becomes somewhat more obvious how the comparison breaks down.
You seem to love to make lots of assumptions without evidence.
First of all, not everybody who doesn't support war until all parts of Ukraine are recovered is a Russian tool. Most wars end on compromise and both sides usually try to shoot down anybody who suggest a compromise.
And if you really think he did this to protect Starlink you have a series lack of understanding of space politics and relative capability.
> Reminds me of all those people who claim that Trump or Putin are "stupid"
So Russia has all the natural resources you could wish for, economy the size of Italy's, economic crisis, most corruption in human history, and is currently loosing a war fighting a smaller country with weapons made 60 years ago.
Please remind me where is the genius I am missing?
Putin has been in charge of Russia for 20 years. In neighbouring China, CCP has produced tremendous economic growth in that timeframe.
People calling him a genious should be able to point to some great success he has achieved in all this time, in any activity whatsoever, that an average person could not.
In neighbouring China, CCP has produced tremendous economic growth in that timeframe.
Some perspective is needed - tremendous economic growth is common when you're an incredibly poor country. China - after decades of growth - still has a lower GDP per capita than post-soviet Russia.
People calling him a genious should be able to point to some great success he has achieved in all this time, in any activity whatsoever, that an average person could not.
I don't see anyone calling him a genius. I'd imagine he's probably fairly smart, like most world leaders. Calling someone an idiot/crazy for starting a war isn't a very useful thing to do, if you're interested in the prevention of war.
So now we are no longer interested in having an honest assesment in case he gets offended?
Assuming our enemies are just insane is a cop out. It diverts a lot of attention away from how horribly unprepared the west was to deter a military invasion of Ukraine, which is something no one wants to talk about.
He comes across as average to slightly above average IQ so he's not stupid. Definitely not a genius though. Just a really, really great self promoter who likes to take credit for other people's work.
IQ just measures logical thinking ability anyway. It is a very narrow measurement. It says nothing about a humans empathy, social skills etc. Many people with a high IQ might have handicaps which affect their executive function and they struggle with life.
I have about the same opinion of him, but there’s still something i don’t understand : to build something like tesla or even more space x, you need to attract extremely talented indivuals. How do they keep working for musk if he’s a total fraud ?
They are paid to work on what they see as an extremely cool project. They feel special because they work there, and for that I can totally imagine that they are fine having that guy as the CEO.
Elon or Putin are not stupid, far from it, but that doesn't mean they can't make stupid decisions, and not only make them but double down on them.
For example, look at Putin and the state of Russia and their invasion of Ukraine. I think everyone would agree it has been one of the biggest military and geopolitical blunders ever. As far as Elons acquisition of Twitter, time will tell if it was 'stupid' decision or not.
You can't attack another user like this, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. We've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
What you find out is in proportion to how much you fuck around. You have to fuck around to innovate and do new shit. It took a lot of fucking at Tesla and SpaceX to get to where they are.
They fucked around when they were a startup. It’s not often we get to see the fuck around at this level. It’s his and he can do as he pleases which makes this more entertaining than anything I’ve ever witnessed
Levereged buyouts, charging for features that were free, mass layoffs, strict workplace policies are hardly innovation. They're tried and tested standard boring-ass Jack Welch business practices.
All Starlink sats will deorbit in under 5 years if unmaintained, please get a basic understanding of orbital mechanics before repeating nonsense like this.
Edit: And shame on Scientific American for spreading the same nonsense.
It's good that he is throwing every known bad practice that managers keep practicing on it to ensure he will find out the correct result.
But he has mixed so many stupid bullshit at this point that I expect people to refuse to learn any lesson from it, always blaming the problem at some different action.
I think that the NYT article has the much better lede from the emails in it:
Due to resignations by 3 top execs yesterday, engineers are now likely to have to make sure that their code is compliant with the FTC w.r.t. the 2011 judgement against Twitter.
As in, there is a good chance that individual SWEs at Twitter are going to be legally culpable for violations.
Even if I am totally misreading that quick lede about dense legalese (likely), it still says that Twitter currently has no reasonable way to stay in the FTC's good graces for the foreseeable future.
Y'all, don't try to appease a billionaire and get yourself in legal trouble. Don't even try to chance it. Walk away.
> The FTC reached a settlement with Twitter in May after the company was caught using personal user info to target ads. If Twitter doesn’t comply with that agreement, the FTC can issue fines reaching into the billions of dollars, according to the lawyer’s note to employees.
> The note goes on to say that its author, who The Verge knows the identity of but is choosing not to disclose, has “heard Alex Spiro (current head of Legal) say that Elon is willing to take on a huge amount of risk in relation to this company and its users, because ‘Elon puts rockets into space, he’s not afraid of the FTC.’”
> Musk’s new legal department is now asking engineers to “self-certify” compliance with FTC rules and other privacy laws, according to the lawyer’s note and another employee familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission.
> The employee said this week’s launch of the revamped Twitter Blue subscription disregarded the company’s normal privacy and security review, with a “red team” reviewing potential risks the night before the launch. “The people normally tasked with this stuff were given little notice, little time, and unreasonable to think it [the privacy review] was comprehensive.” None of the red team’s recommendations were implemented before Twitter Blue’s relaunch, the employee said.
> Due to resignations by 3 top execs yesterday, engineers are now likely to have to make sure that their code is compliant with the FTC w.r.t. the 2011 judgement against Twitter.
I think that’s backwards: the resignations by people responsible for compliance were due (among other issues) to the policy change (which they see as violating the order, which would put them personally at risk) that the process would change to engineer self-certification to support the desired velocity of change, the resignations were not the cause of the change.
Also, Twitter apparently has a sworn compliance report due today to the FTC (14 days from the change of ownership.)
How does that work? If a SWE isn't aware of the gazillion laws surrounding their code, why isn't the company liable when X of those laws are inevitably violated?
What about the people who review the code? Or the people who wrote the systems that push the code?
Looking at how complex Twitter's internal systems appear to be based on Mudge's report [1], I doubt informed developers would dare certify things they do not fully understand. Depends a bit on what entity (system, service, environment) they have to certify.
> In January 2022, Mudge determined and reported to the executive team that (because of poor engineering architecture decisions that preceded Mudge's employment) Twitter had over 300 corporate systems and upwards of 10,000 services that might still be affected, but Twitter was unable to thoroughly assess its exposure to Log4j and did not have capacity, if pressed in a formal investigation, to show to the FTC that the company had properly remediated the problem.
> Mudge knew that the actual underlying data showed that at the end of 2021, 51 % of the ~ 11 thousand full-time employees had privileged access to Twitter's production systems, a 5% increase from the 46% of total employees in February of 2021 that Mudge had shared in his initial findings delivered to the Board in early 2021
To be clear, the FTC is more than happy to pursue criminal charges against individuals when they screw with users.
The (former) CSO of Uber, Joseph Sullivan, is now a felon because of a 2016 hack of Uber and his attempts to cover up the hack.
Joe is looking at a potential of 5 years in a federal prison, where there is no time off for good behavior and the like. In the Fed, you serve the whole sentence (some caveats do apply). He'll also loose the right to vote and hold public office, employment rights, domestic rights, and financial and contractual rights, plus a lot of 'probationary' issues. This will follow him for the rest of his life, likely.
Wow, if that means that the engineer is personally responsible that Twitter follows the FTC rules, then RIP the engineers. I would just stop writing code at that point. No compensation worth that risk.
And it opens up interesting questions. If I decline to implement something then can the company fire me at all? Or do they have to prove first that what has been asked does not goes against FTC rules.
This is just another way to materially change the job position to force people to quit.
I would also be shocked if the FTC accepted a certification from anyone that is not qualified and does not have the appropriate support system in place to certify.
I don't think the intention is to suspend ElonJet since Musk has already explicitly said he made the choice to not suspend it despite the alleged "personal safety risk". Trolls in this case probably refers to accounts that paid for new Twitter Blue and are now impersonating well-known figures/entities.
The wording seems consistent with everything going on at Twitter so far, that he's just kinda winging it while everyone else is frozen in confusion over the abrupt changes. A $44B acquisition is quickly reverting into the volatility of a 2006 startup.
These are amusing to look at, but for Twitter to be taken seriously long term this can't keep happening. Musk's $8 Twitter Blue change is what unleashed this chaos in the first place.
You think this matters? Did you not see the whole "comedy is legal again" followed by banning/suspending people for parodies? How quickly he went back on "free speech"?
Really tearing off the mask there. Another point into the "free speech until I don't like it" column.
Not to mention not understanding what parody and satire are, of course. To this day there are people who still think Sarah Palin actually said "I can see Russia from my house!" but that doesn't make it not satire.
It's called parody, and you can't actually seriously be asking, can you? You probably thought that The Onion amici brief on parody was good! Yet here you are, insisting that if parody doesn't reveal itself, it's identity theft and impersonation. Never heard of a comedian that "does impressions"? Doing an impression isn't illegal. Mimicking someone except as to say things they'd obviously not say, is exactly what parody is and it's not illegal and it's certainly not problem speech in anyway (as opposed to spam, which makes sites illegible/unusable).
Is creating a false “Musk” account to spam people with some shitcoin “parody”? Is creating a fake Musk account to post hatefull shit under his name “parody”?
What is up with the New Left and this total absence of reason and ethics?
Actual parody is completely okay and NOT banned (unlike it was on Old Twitter).
>Is creating a false “Musk” account to spam people with some shitcoin “parody”? Is creating a fake Musk account to post hatefull shit under his name “parody”?
No, and yes. I'm not sure what's difficult to navigate about that? the first might even be commercial speech.
>"What is up with the New Left and this total absence of reason and ethics?"
I don't know? You tell me? Who is the new left? What do they have to do with this conversation at all?
>Actual parody is completely okay and NOT banned (unlike it was on Old Twitter).
There is no category of parody that is "actual parody". There is just parody, and not parody. The examples I provided were all parody that is now again banned... In your example, posting hateful shit as musk is parodic and is banned.
Reminder that "forever", "unlimited", "never", "always", and other superlatives, when spoken by companies, only mean the limit is not yet known, not yet coherently defined, or that the definition is provided elsewhere.
Illustrates a case where even workers who have a good relationship with their management might benefit from a union. Management can change; then who is left to hold the new management to former promises?
A hundred and twenty people die every minute in the US. How far will you go to ensure that doesn't happen? How many civil liberties will you suspend, and how many cherished norms of life will you cast aside in your goal?
Is there any reason for anyone to stay at twitter? I’ve not seen Musk offer any upside anywhere to remaining. He’s laying out a stark plan of hard work and fewer benefits and a brutal management. What reason other than inability to find another job (perhaps due to visa status, the hiring freezes at end of year, and layoffs) does anyone have for working at twitter now? I’m shocked if they don’t see another 50+% voluntary attrition in 2023.
Even though the pay is lower and hours longer - at his other companies they offered stock options that at least 20x’d over the past 10 years at SpaceX and Tesla.
If the employees at Twitter think under Musk’s leadership that they can grow the company to 200 billion or more - then yea it’d be worth staying to collect stock that no one else can get now.
Hopefully they’re giving the remaining employees generous stock awards for staying. With the user base they have there’s no reason they can’t grow the company a lot with the the right strategy.
Musk has already discussed attacking YouTube directly and it sounds like he wants to expand into other social network niches. The whole X.com thing.
A lot of Twitter employees could come out pretty wealthy if successful. If it were me I’d stick around a year at least to see which way this whole thing is going.
Would be interesting to know if the company is recapitalized/option pool reset and what the new deal is for the remaining employees in terms of options like a traditional startup.
Would lend credence to the belief to have outsized returns for the brutality.
I'd also imagine if this ends in a positive financial turnaround, against all expectations of the peanut gallery, it would be a really impressive career achievement.
It seems that Musk at this point is completely unaware that he is a walking contradiction.
On one hand, he is a technologist. Forward thinking and driving towards the future.
On the other hand, he is an old fashioned factory owner. He views his workforce as pure labour and can't accept that he can't force his employees to work under his total control. He also can't accept the gain in life capital for his employees in working from home for his workforce and that the future of work for humanity is probably decentralised offices and WFH, not middle managed, over the shoulder, supervised, centralised offices.
Cutting edge technologist for the investors, old school factory owner for managing people. Makes perfect sense if you're trying to extract the max amount of money.
True, but the fact that technology is going to reinvent everything, including work seems to be an oversight. I'm not sure an old school factory owner is going to attract the best people in a highly skilled industry
> 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.
This is exactly why in my country the law uses the concept of 'acquired rights'.
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.
Most high GDP countries don't have a business culture of optimizing for maximum cash in the owners hand at all possible costs, and indeed, even are interested in giving their employees a fair shake. Most places understand that employees are valuable and deserve dignity and respect, and have taken steps to ensure they get it.
People that quit voluntarily are always skewed towards the high end, because better employees have an easier time finding another job with similar benefits/pay but has that one thing they want.
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.
> he can't force his employees to work under his total control
That is because he actually can force them to be under his control.
> He also can't accept the gain in life capital for his employees in working from home for his workforce and that the future of work for humanity is probably decentralized offices and WFH, not middle managed, over the shoulder, supervised, centralized offices.
I don't think he cares about their lives. Meanwhile, long hours in office have multiple advantages for controlling CEO like Musk. The people are removed from outside influences (friends, family, time to read) and closed in his own echo chamber. Whatever he wants to normalize, it will be harder for them to see is not normal outside of that bubble. It is another variant on what cults, monasteries, armies etc do ... the more they isolate you from outside influences, the better you surrender own agency.
Plus, people not comfortable with above self exclude. It is win win win for ceo. Not necessary effective, but produces strong loyalty and obeisance. Which has advantages also for productivity.
Creative and innovative - absolutely not. Effective - mostly not, except in some situations. There are many ways how to be ineffective tho, this is one of them many. I think that you dont need to be super effective to compete in the technology industry.
Will he be able to compete? I dont know. Musk twitter moves seem incompetent overall to me. But so far, his charizma and money (to certain people) did allowed him to get quite far in his previous companies. He did treated his previous employees pretty much the same way.
if you look at musk and his friends talking about how to restructure twitter it looks less incompetent. if you remember that he is under a mountain of financial pressure you can also see that these moves are for survival, not to make twitter more awesome. a decimated shell of a company is preferable, for someone who just massively overpaid for a non-growth company, to a much larger organization with higher cost structure.
I dont understand why he wanted twitter and I think the incompetence is in the way he pursued the deal, but once one is saddled with such a problem the steps to get out from under it (or at least minimize the damage) are clear. forcing employees out is necessary.
The thing I read that made the most sense is that he never wanted it. He wanted to use the buyout as cover for selling a bunch of Tesla stock. No due diligence was done because he fully expected to just back out of the deal, but that didn't happen because he and his billionaire buddies were not so happy about getting deposed and dragging all their dirty laundry into the public.
It still looks incompetent. Especially in the area of treating advisers. And in the way he is rolling out new feature, no wait, he does not, cancel that out, actually it is going to be done ... nope, yes. Print out code on paper, nope, shredder it actually.
> you can also see that these moves are for survival
They don't seem like moves of survival. They seem impulsive, emotional and causing him damage.
> forcing employees out is necessary
He just had layoff. Literally, it is not like he would need to send midnight eamils about going back to office tomorrow to make them go.
He's not a technologist, he's a ruthless capitalist playing with other people's money.
Idk why he gets so much support. That guy is a wolf in sheep's clothing.
He doesn't care about the planet, or the people, he cares about his bottom line and nothing else.
Have you heard that didn't invent them or even start the company or even cofound it?
Anyways, yes, he has done a lot of good and is actually smart. But it has also gone to his head and the more power and wealth he accrues the more it shows. Like with most people.
Mindlessly bashing him is just as much of a waste of time as mindlessly sucking his knob.
> Tesla was founded (as Tesla Motors) on July 1, 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in San Carlos, California. [...] Ian Wright was the third employee, joining a few months later.[2] The three went looking for venture capital (VC) funding in January 2004[2] and connected with Elon Musk, who contributed US$6.5 million of the initial (Series A) US$7.5 million[10] round of investment in February 2004 and became chairman of the board of directors.[2] Musk then appointed Eberhard as the CEO.[11] J.B. Straubel joined in May 2004[2] as the fifth employee.[12] A lawsuit settlement agreed to by Eberhard and Tesla in September 2009 allows all five (Eberhard, Tarpenning, Wright, Musk and Straubel) to call themselves co-founders.[13]
> Musk took an active role within the company and oversaw Roadster product design at a detailed level, but was not deeply involved in day-to-day business operations.[14] Eberhard acknowledged that Musk was the person who insisted from the beginning on a carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer body and that Musk led design of components ranging from the power electronics module to the headlamps and other styling.[15]
Correct. The future of sustainable transportation is the electric trolley, the electric train, the electric bus, the electric scooter, and the electric bicycle.
It is not a largely-single-occupant two-and-a-half-ton electric sedan.
> What if he(and others like me) believe that working in-person really is truly necessary for accomplishing great work?
Well, it's his (and your) right to be wrong but that's a belief that was already on very shaky ground before 2020 and has by this point been absolutely proven wrong.
Unless your job actually requires physical interaction with or proximity to a thing or other people it can almost certainly be done equally well remotely.
Processes may have to be adjusted to account for remote workers and even the way people work when working remotely, but almost 100% of jobs that take place at a desk in front of a computer can and should be allowed to be remote.
The biggest thing that doesn't work in a remote environment is micromanagement, so bad bosses who feel the need to micromanage hate it, but those people are terrible so if they don't like it that's a good thing.
I don’t know, it seems not much creatively came out of tech since 2020. It’s all continuing trends started before that or living on past glory. I think you could easily argue that creativity is down in the industry.
What are you using arrive at this opinion? What creativity existed in a measurable way before 2020 and what does that metric look like now? Who is less creative in this environment and in what ways are they less creative? What amount of creativity is necessary for a business to operate successfully or solve meaningful problems?
Not all problems require new or genuinely creative solutions either. And it seems really difficult to try and measure the creative output by individual contributors at any given company. You have no way of gleaning the micro decisions or solutions that people come up with for their internal issues. So this doesn't seem like one could "easily argue" this point at all, in fact it seems quite difficult.
Are you suggesting that product offerings are less creative as a whole? And if so, again what metric are you using to arrive at this conclusion? And are there really no trends of this same metric before 2020?
Why are you surprised? He wants employees in space and on Mars where he'll have even greater control (when employees start/leave employment, all information in/out of their station, the amount of mass employees will own, and even control when authorities are allowed on the station if at all).
Whatsapp had 1B users with far fewer eng, why is Twitter so big?
Here is my back of the envelope math of how big I think the company should be for their main offering.
Over the past years Twitter has acquired a ton of companies, but I'm going to leave them out of this equation.
In all seriousness, I think many of us are falling into the trap that the PayPal guy fell into. Twitter isn't just the app and the website. So it's much harder to run and maintain than it seems like from the outside. If it was just the Tweets, why would they ever need more than 10 iOS developers for instance?
If we cut Twitter into what it is on the surface, and perhaps lose some data retention, then sliming down the engineering organization significantly should be possible with the right people. Not to 50, that's really low for a platform the size of Twitter. That being said: 7500 employees is also way to many for what they do, or at least for how little money they make.
Nobody asked Musk to acquire the company. The only reason it went through is thanks to a long line of court rulings starting with Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. that prioritized shareholder interest over every other stakeholders. You can't expect to practically traumatize a company's culture like this and expect all the "right people" to still stay here and give their 100%.
So that was meant as a joke, probably should have left that out.
>Nobody asked Musk to acquire the company
Technically I believe he was forced to buy in the end, but no. You're right, no one asked him to do anything. The shareholders saw an out. They had a failed company on their hands and now the PayPal guy shows up and stupidly promises to buy the whole thing for way more than it's actually worth. Of cause they are going to dump the stock on the idiot, by (legal)forced if they had to. Now it's Musks problem. He has zero ideals when it comes to Twitter culture. He doesn't care. All he currently see is 7500 people who needs a paycheck, paid by him. He stupidly thought he could run Twitter successfully, like most of us HN backseat drivers. When he realized that he can't it was to late and now he stuck and have to either save the company or at least not lose to much more money.
The one-sidedness of the comments in this thread surprise me.
If you want to work remotely, don’t work at Twitter.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Musk thinking it’s more beneficial for his employees to work in the office. He has goals and methods of working towards them. He wants likeminded people to work towards those goals.
Can you really not think of pros and cons of either situation? To give my opinion, if I ran a business that I was trying to grow or trying to meet lofty goals, I’d probably have people in the office too. However, I see upsides to working from home too.
I’ve been working remotely since the beginning of COVID and currently work 2,000 miles away from my work.
In an all-else-being-equal world, yes I can see the tradeoffs.
The problem is that Elon has already destroyed the trust that should’ve existed between him and his newfound employees. It shouldn’t be surprising that in such a relationship any managerial decisions are viewed with extreme skepticism towards their motivation.
Not to mention all of the text messages we’ve already seen that already explain the motivation behind this move. Those were just one of the things that destroyed the trust.
It is my understanding that Twitter has been extremely friendly towards remote work.
Switching that up from one day to the next is just inhuman cruelty without empathy. I’m not even taking any kind of legal perspective, just a purely ethical one. The disruption to employee’s lives can be enormous.
I’m so happy to live in a country where this would be quite illegal to do.
I love working remotely, I definitely feel like I am more productive and pretty much all of my colleagues feel the same way. Perhaps individually, we all are more productive. However, that said…as a team we are simply not as productive as we were prior to the pandemic. No one wants to acknowledge it, but it’s true. I suspect we are not the only ones.
At some point someone in a decision making role is going to see it too, and at that time we will all be disappointed.
Taking the benefit away from employees currently exercising it (with zero grace period) is a little different than someone joining a company knowing they don't do remote work from the start.
I'm not saying it makes Elon Musk a bad person (I think he's a bad person for plenty of other reasons), but I do think it's a poorly thought out move on his part that will cause some of the better employees that survived the layoffs to quit.
Yeah, but most of the posts here aren't really critique, they're just sarcastic scorn. We get it, HN, you like remote work a lot and can't imagine any alternative.
I'd wager most of us can imagine alternatives because we lived alternatives. We've figured out a method that works better for us and don't want to go back to losing hours a week for what we expect will have negative value (lower productivity, happiness, etc).
Further, this edict is coming from someone that is presumable working remote now (for at least one company) and will continue to do so indefinitely. It's only natural to push back on that.
I'm reading the same comments, and there seems to be a reasonable amount of thoughtful writing too. In addition, there are sarcastic/scornful comments in the other direction too, yours included ("We get it, HN, you like remote work a lot and can't imagine any alternative."). Try not to get focused on individual snarky comments, because doing that makes those comments a bigger part of the conversation.
Agreed. I have been reading HN for a while, and the overwhelming tone here is definitely "screw the manager/CIO/CEO" together with "If I have to go into the office, I will quiet quit, quit without notice, sabotage my employer", etc. It is truly shocking.
I feel many on HN simply can't appreciate the great working conditions the IT industry has compared to other industries (health care, food service, social services, etc). Getting paid over $100K a year and crying about going to the office? Wow, just wow. Imagine how nurses feel getting much lower pay that are forced to go to work and deal with sick/unruly people...
> HN simply can't appreciate the great working conditions the IT industry has compared to other industries
These conditions don't happen by accident or by the goodwill of employers. They happen because people in the industry have such a hard attitude toward management. Stop pushing back and all these conditions will suddenly disappear.
Your example of nurses is a good one. In some countries they have excellent conditions. In other countries, they have very poor conditions. Their impact on society is the same everywhere, but different historical events have allowed them to have their current work experience.
I don't know where you work/worked before, but I've only had 1 "bad boss" in my +30yr IT career. Even that boss did not rise to the level of "bad bosses" constantly criticized here on HN. Most/all of my bosses have been extremely understanding about work-life balance, family commitments, teamwork, collaboration, etc. Seems I been very lucky compared to the vast number of HN comments.
> These conditions don't happen by accident or by the goodwill of employers. They happen because people in the industry have such a hard attitude toward management.
I call baloney on this. It always cracks me up how wrong people are about management’s attitude about them. Been in management at upper levels across multiple orgs, and not once have I ever heard discussions about “how we can screw our team”.
All I know is that when you have within a few weeks nearly 15k+ former Facebook, Twitter, Stripe, and (name the next SV company to layoffs) folks entering the job market…if you are still employed, you might want to lay low for a while and count your blessings, because there is going to be a hundreds of impressive resumes for every open position in tech that comes open for the next 12-18 months.
Rage quitting would be really really stupid right now. You’ll end up replacing your cushy 6-figure tech gig with a lovely career slinging hash and eggs for minimum wage plus tips.
The takeaway is that nurses should get higher pay as compensation for being unable to not WFH. Not that everybody else should feel glad that they aren't getting screwed to the same extent.
covid is over. it's been over the day we got something else we are supposed to be agitated about. at this point, it feels like a distant memory. nobody cares or pretends to care about it anymore.
"Why shouldn't we go back" doesn't have any more weight than "why shouldn't we stay". The old normal relies on the acceptance of a lot of life-time wasted and a certain amount of misery, and people were increasingly unwilling to accept it. The pandemic simply provided an impetus - that's all.
It's possible that a lot of office workers have decided they have good reasons to prefer working from home beyond the highly contagious airborne disease. I know that I personally have, but further research is probably necessary to determine whether this is a widespread trend.
Haven't you ever been forced into a situation that turned out to be better in certain ways?
For many people, discovering the quality of life improvements afforded by remote work, that were forced on us by COVID, has been a blessing. Many have reasonably argued that there wasn't much loss in productivity compared with the huge boon in life satisfaction resulting from remote work.
Your comment doesn't respond to the opposing view as though it could be reasonable.
