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Comment by sidcool | Hacker News Reader

Musk has seen production hell. This is a different kind. Good luck Elon. Make good on your promises.

EDIT: What I will be watching for is what Elon will do when freedom of speech is at odds with a big chunk of revenue. He is investing a boatload of money and at his philanthropic worst, he would like to break even in a few years.

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I was thinking the same thing. Musk has done very well on hard engineering problems - now he is entering a special kind of hell running a social media company.

I have no idea why he would willingly take on this kind of distraction at this point.

Presenting Twitter with AI Full Self Anti-Spam!*

*Coming in 5 years

Why do you assume he'll be running the company? I assumed he would appoint a new CEO and just participate on the board.

If he just wanted to participate on the board he could have stuck with his 10%. It definitely seems like he's looking for a more hands-on role than that.

He just has a different kind of decision power by owning 100% of a private company. But he doesn't need to be involved on day to day operations and can appoint a CEO to do his bidding.

You can fix a lot of the interaction at scale by allowing mass verification (there are third party APIs for this) and allowing people to filter on verified real human interactions.

Serious question: how many Twitter employees (engineers + managers + directors + whateveer other levels) will quit/protest/strike if Elon un-suspends Trump's account, and what are the chances Elon suspends Trump's account?

It doesn’t matter how many quit. The asset of Twitter is its network and they won’t be taking it with them.

Does that suggest the vast majority of them are overpaid then?

I'm not saying Twitter engineers aren't good, but you can replace them with anyone and the product will be equally good.

Semi seriously, I think Musk would use a move like that to conveniently encourage the kind of people he doesn't want at Twitter to self selectively remove themselves rather than go through a painful HR process of finding and identifying them manually.

Exactly this. Musk doesn't seem to have any patience for political nonsense - from either side of the political spectrum. The kinds of employees that would do this likely aren't a culture fit in a Musk-run operation, where pragmatism is the order of the day. You can always find another employee who isn't a PIA.

You characterise Musk as pragmatic?

I characterize the organizations he creates as pragmatic. They exist to objectively look at problems and solve them. You cannot solve hard engineering problems in any other way.

While I don't think you are wrong... I have to wonder what % of the staff at Twitter that is. I'm sure their core application doesn't have a bus factor of 1 but... a mass exodus of staff (5%? 10%? 20%?) could be an interesting problem.

Judging by the quality of the work done and the decisions made (Zuckerberg calls twitter a clown car falling into a gold mine) I don't think their departure would matter too much.

Serious answer: nobody cares.

Twitter employees can find employment elsewhere if they don't like their new boss. There's no shortage of people that want to work for Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and Elon's other businesses. Twitter is no different.

I think Twitter could actually financially benefit from lessening their head count. It's not an incredibly profitable company, and could do with changes to leadership and direction in terms of their lagging performance compared to other tech companies.

Serious response: Wouldn't that be good for Twitter to get rid of those people? It's like when Coinbase offered people a payout if you're not 100% onboard with there mission and told people to stop talking politics.

I've no doubt Elon would be happy for these people to quit so that he doesn't have to fire them.

dont they have too many employees?

Serious question: How come he is banned forever?

It’s definitely against free speech, I’m with Musk on that one.

If he (or any other person) does something against some written/objective rule then sure ban him temporarily. But permabans should be only for posting illegal stuff.

He used Twitter to foment a violent insurrection.

See their statement on it below. Inciting violence against others is against their ToS, and his comments about marching on the capitol building were interpreted by the team responsible for banning accounts that break ToS (presumably a specialist committee with it being Trump) as a violation:

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...

> How come he is banned forever?

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...

> due to the risk of further incitement of violence.

No one but the (US) government needs to give a hoot about free speech, nor should they.

If they have stock options then leaving might be a bad idea if Musk increases the value of the company significantly with his changes.

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