Elon Musk Texts Parag Agrawal
twitter.com
twitter.com
> "I interface way better with engineer who are able to do hardcore programming"
In 20+ years of developing, I've only heard non-technical (or well past their prime technical) folks use the terms "heavy duty" or "hardcore" to describe programming.
I don't think it has anything to do with heavy duty.
Falcon Heavy is capable of 57t (recoverable) to 64t (expendable) which makes it actually superheavy-lift.
(Although the Falcon Heavy has never actually demonstrated this ability)
- The owner/CEO of my company met with another local business owner and sold them on us doing some custom software work for them. He gave them an estimate during the meeting, and made a handshake deal.
- Owner tells a PM at our company about the project. Usual project kickoff stuff happens where the PM organizes a team and schedules a meeting with the client, etc.
- PM sends a meeting invite to a dev (me), a designer, and a QA, to meet at the client's office for the meeting.
- The owner of the client company does a similar thing, and at the meeting is 3-4 employees who know a lot about their business and the needs of this project. We talk for 2-3 hours and have a pretty good idea of what they need.
(details: The company operates a fleet of temperature sensors. They currently subscribe to a service that alerts them when a thermometer reports values too high or low. They don't like the software and don't want to keep paying for it, and want us to build them a replacement. Basically to collect a bunch of data from devices in the field, parse and store, send sms/email based on rules configured on a web app, and also have some really basic reports viewable)
- The team (4 people, including the PM) play agile games for a few hours, coming up with narratives and points.
- I get to work. Get access to the data, find a japanese manual online for the devices that describes the format of the data, set up a web app, database, user management, data download/parsing, a polling and alerting service. Lots of parts unfinished, but it's technically functional. Less than one week has passed (and my time is split across multiple projects).
- Project is put on emergency hold. Client found out how many hours we had spent, and was pissed. Apparently the person writing the check was told by our owner that it would be like 10-20 hours of work. That was never communicated to the employees at either company. The requirements gathering meeting exhausted the budget all by itself, unknown to everybody present.
- The PM is fired.
- The owner schedules a 1-on-1 meeting with me, where he spends 40 minutes describing the concept of database tables and rows. His thinking is that if I had only known how to store things in a database, the project wouldn't have taken me so long. Fortunately he gets a phone call and abruptly leaves.
- The client was apparently paying $20 a month for their monitoring software.
Do Tesla employees work for Tesla or are they Elon's personal staff? How is acceptable when employees can be fired for moonlighting?
Legally, Musk has to pay Tesla for this, and someone very senior at Tesla (the board or the senior executive team) has to approve – without Musk being in the room. But, why wouldn't they say "yes"?
So I don't think this story is fundamentally implausible. (As I pointed out in a comment on another post, the "code review" was probably actually an "architecture review", but it is easy for non-technical people to elide the difference.)
that's not true at all. there's no law that says Twitter/Musk has to pay Tesla engineers anything. it's only up to Tesla's management to decide what they want in return for those resources. Also, as CEO there's nothing stopping Elon from using all of Tesla's resources to help Twitter or any other company. it is entirely up to Tesla's board and shareholders to punish Elon for what should be a gross misappropriation of Tesla's resources
As well as the corporate law issues, the accounting and taxation implications of non-commercial transactions with other firms with which you have significant common ownership can be quite messy in many jurisdictions, which is another compelling argument for keeping those transactions on a commercial fee-for-service basis.
there isn't even a need to see a lawyer about this. there's literally no issue here for the company to ever get sued over. the only risk here is for Elon himself to be reprimanded by the Tesla board. and the chances of that happening are below zero.
All major companies employ in-house lawyers. Issues like this always go through in-house legal. Rather than a question of whether they “need to see a lawyer”, their own lawyers will be advising them on it as a matter of course.
Is he writing any software at SpaceX or Tesla? I've heard stories here and there of him sitting in an engineering meeting.
Zip2 was founded in 1995 -- there are credible claims (from a biography) he wrote software there, and that's all I've found.
When I see him talk about AI (which he claims to be an expert in), it’s like hearing college freshman, after first 5 classes of ML 101, who read a lot of pop-science blogs about it.
It's really hard for me to not be disgusted by these people thinking that a web platform whose main purpose are shitstorms is critical to humanity.
This is so absurd.. it could be a Monty Python script.
https://www.twitter.com/TechEmails/status/157558827770002636...
But these descriptors obviously make no sense when we're talking about CEOs, not random people for whom "age group" is a relevant or informative descriptor.
Predicting the future is an imperfect science, as it turns out.
Why do you say this?
1) Edit Button - already in production
2) "Absolute" free speech - not legally possible, and his tweet (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1585619322239561728) indicated that he knows it's not palatable to advertisers either
3) Get rid of the bots - Either a) it's not that big of a problem or b) it's a big problem, but will greatly reduce the number of users and impressions used to drive advertising revenue
Plus, there's no clear growth plan as it's not an attractive platform for youth or young adults.
Of course, it's possible Elon moves mountains and turns it into a thriving business, but it's not clear at this point in time how that happens.
If you thought he was a troll first and genius second, and paid attention to the analysts who read the fine print on the offer, you probably expected he was going to be hoisted by his own petard.
Maybe all that is wildly out of band, but we've seen him operate for years now. He routinely lies; that is, creates a message he wants a certain market to hear to achieve a certain effect, and in a couple of moments, despite his massive wealth, has demonstrated that he has a keen interest in acquiring more wealth.
I don't care what happens since I'm laughing at the whole mess and chaos.
Speaking of emotion, this is a far cry from a good faith read on this.
I hope Musk turns Twitter around and makes it a great platform.
This is not insightful and an obvious aspect of being human.
> In this case, visceral contempt for Musk being against censorship.
This is an emotional opinion without the support of facts. Are you sure you are being rational?
Very nice glass house you have there.
Uh, Elon just fired him.
Well, that doesn't seem like an upside to me, but that's just me.
> He can go around now saying that he forced Elon to buy the company by not backing down
Are you or anyone impressed by this?
> Are you or anyone impressed by this?
I mean he produced shareholder value by getting the richest man in the world to by the company for a huge premium...
There are certainly plenty of CEOs who have done worse who are having no trouble finding work today.
Even this huge premium you guys are so impressed with was set by Musk. Parag had nothing to do with the price.
And before this, what commendable things did Parag do at Twitter? This was just a lucky break for him.
Not impressive at all. At best an unforced error on Musk's part.
You're making that out to be such a great thing that he got fired because he gets a huge severance. Big deal. CEOs all over get huge severances for doing shit. Look at Mayer leaving Yahoo. At least she didn't get fired though.
Anyone with half a brain in his situation would have done what he did. It was obvious common sense to go to court with Musk. And the case was a slam dunk against Musk because of Musk , not Parag. He didn't make any brilliant moves. He just had to show up to court with Twitter's lawyers.
What would be impressive is if he deserved to stay on the company and worked with Musk to turn it around. But he didn't deserve it because he did squat for Twitter. Only thing he did was catch a lucky break at the end.
No, it's not a hard life at all, but not impressive at all either.
The amount of consumption that Parag will be able to do with his golden parachute is very impressive tho.
absolutely, and so should you. he made all the shareholders a massive amount of money. not just that but he got them the best outcome possible. he should be celebrated
And before this, I'm not so impressed with what he's done with Twitter in his tenure.