Twitter to Lay Off 25% of Workforce | Hacker News Reader

Twitter to Lay Off 25% of Workforce

reuters.com

58 pointsagotterer28 comments

Maybe this is the right move. That's not what bothers me.

Musk's joking about firing 1,700 people bothers me. It might be a necessary, but these people have lives, families, mortgages, and commitments. Getting fired is never easy.

But Musk shows up carrying a sink laughing and joking about "Let that sink in", and the Internet yucks it up and talks about what a clever boy Elon is.

The unnecessary cruelty and the utter lack of empathy -- or even the need to feign empathy -- is what bothers me.

That's what made me abandon my 15 year old account. I want nothing to do with that moronic wannabe $2 supervillain.

The article states at end of 2021 there were 7,000 employees. Assume an average annual cost per employee of $250k (salary+benefits) which might be on the conservative side. This means annual payroll is $1.75B and the cost cutting by laying off 25% (1750) means that would be reduced to $1.31B so about $430mil/year in reduced employee spend. Their 2021 financials indicated a $370mil loss, so this actually makes some sense if the new owner wants to prioritize profit.

Setting aside who is involved and what they want to do to the platform (let everyone run amok, don't moderate til sued is my interpretation) this actually makes sense.

Makes sense unless those 25% actually contribute to revenue.

I think Musk will transfer the best engineers to Tesla/Starlink and downgrade Twitter into a highly polarized platform full of crappy tabloid news. Time to vacate Twitter.

Twitter is already a echo chamber cesspool, it can only get better.

If the Internet has taught me anything, it's that it's always possible for the Internet to get worse.

And you genuinely believe THIS is going to make it better.

Good engineers aren’t slaves they have options. You don’t just transfer them between groups or companies and locations for that matter.

Unless you are dealing with a bully that demands 40 hours min in the office. He is already an unleashed dog pissing left right and center. I don't think it's going to end well with Twitter.

It's clear that Elon is moving swiftly to cut costs, but I think it's all really academic. For any reasonable revenue scenario (even before the bottom dropped out of tech stocks), Twitter just wasn't worth $44bn. It's clear that he's going to try to cut to the bone and juice revenue by any means necessary, but it seems like the company is going to have an awful rate of return regardless.

right, but its also just a 10x revenue multiple. it makes $4bn in revenue a year as is.

he reduces costs and that gets it in line pretty quick

Yea, only a genius like Elon could have figured that out.

uhhh, ok. it is interesting that he can repurpose engineers from his other companies. he might need to make a parent company like Alphabet, because Google moves employees between orgs seamlessly too.

He's going to drive away advertisers by allowing more hate speech. That's their major revenue source. That won't increase advertising. The $20/registered user per month sounded great until I learned there are only 400k registered blue checkmark users. That's only 96 mil a year, a drop in the bucket for a company that cost 44 billion.

I'd suggest he work to get many more users who are engaged, and that would bring advertisers. This isn't helped by silly culture war memes being posted.

It may have cost him $44 billion now, but he's certainly going to take it public again.

Ah, the old buy high, sell low strategy.

That work is being actively aggressively sabotaged by his instantly emerged pattern of promoting unambiguous right-wing agitprop and disinformation, using the classic "I'm just asking question" stance used by prominent fascists like Tucker Carlson.

Stoned-Musk may think it's funny; fascist-friendly-Musk may think it's useful to keep the left distracted, angry, and off "his" site...

...where grifter-Musk sees the eventual ROI is less clear. Maybe a dystopia is good for the long-term bottom line in kick-backs by a single-party state who knows and rewards their friends?

Promoting disinformation to provide chaff and cover for GOP uneasy with an attempted assassination of the Speaker of the House which as 100% stochastic terrorism resulting from relentless histrionic neofascist dehumanizing grievance hysteria for decades, including explicit rhetoric about killing said Speaker,

is more than stoned-Musk meme-trolling.

It's actively, corrosively, undermining functioning democracy and empowering a right wing increasingly openly embracing violence.

QElon has gone over the edge.

> using the classic "I'm just asking question" stance

what is the desired way for people to learn and also criticize aspects of culture that were fine before, but now changing? its easy not to understand what the consensus is and get berated for not knowing that, which just radicalizes people that might have been able to be supportive.

Understand how "just asking questions" has been co-opted by a group so thoroughly, that its use of a rhetorical or dialogue device associates one's self to that group. It's a well poisoned by bad faith.

Realize that people are generally able to tell the difference between authentic curiosity and Socratic-curiosity. The later, as you well know, involves asking leading questions to arrive at a predetermined destination whereas the former does not.

There's many more answers to this question, but leaving those there feels like a good enough place to start as any.

can you give an example?

despite my meticulous wording, you/someone interpreted it as a defense of “just asking questions” when I didn’t say that or have an argument for that at all

can you give an example of a compliant way to be curious?

what about curious and not accepting of the new desired norm but open to understanding it more? its easy to not even know what/how to ask, that leads people to start a conversation based around a reaction to the change, the predictable pushback from looking the exact same as a bigot just radicalizes the person that said anything. so if you know a better uniform way, you can help prevent this

If you keep doing it over and over like Tucker Carlson, then it's clear it's wrong. He keeps asking questions as a way to push people to certain views. He's alarmist in these 'questions'. He asks them that way as a rhetorical strategy for things that are pretty controversial if he just said them.

If you did it rarely but it was combined with observations and facts (not happening w Mr Carlson that much) there is a difference.

Sounds like you've gone over the edge to be honest.

>He's going to drive away advertisers by allowing more hate speech

Is he? Has he done this or said this? Or you are assuming?

This was a few days ago, but just saw your message. He said he'd let people who were banned for using hate speech come back, so yes, he said it. That does not encourage advertisers.

It was either end World Hunger for $6B or buy Twitter for $44B. He could not do both.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/11/elon-musk-un-world-hu...

Eh, I mean to be fair, the proposal to "end world hunger" is really more of a proposal to "temporarily alleviate world hunger in 2022 only". And the plan outlined in the article seems rather optimistic, it assumes there's no corruption, grift, etc. I think what Musk was looking for in his original challenge was a way to permanently end world hunger.

Would Hunger isn’t a food problem it’s a corruption and distribution problem. It’s nearly impossible to get the food to people that need it

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