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Comment by pelagicAustral | Hacker News Reader

Seems to me like the guy was a nob. Tried to be funny with the new boss. Got sacked. Blog posts about it because, you know... people need to know.

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He's a rather famous "nob" who worked at Google for years making much beloved cartoons and then went to Twitter. So a well-known (and apparently quite pleasant and smart) person in the industry.

That Musk couldn't interpret this right, and acted in his usual rash and vindictive way says more about him than it does about Manu. Also consistent with the way he lashed back at Gary Kasparov, clearly unaware who he was speaking to ("what have you ever done" indeed).

Any person truly laying claim to the crown of king of nerds would be respectful to both of these people and it says a lot about Musk that he wasn't. Taking over a Silicon Valley company without recognizing its culture and then firing someone who helped build it -- because they made jokes -- is beyond crass, it shows complete obliviousness to what he just bought.

FWIW Google used to have his cartoons mounted on walls around campus. Including ones that were (gently) critical of leadership and culture. How come Larry&Sergey&Eric could handle his gentle critique, but Musk cannot?

Leaders don't behave this way.

I highly doubt Musk was personally involved with the firing of an individual contributor, sounds like typical HR risk minimization

You don't know much about Musk, I take it.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/03/elon-musk...

More like a boarding party from Musk firing at shadows.

You assume Musk had anything to do with it. It’s likely he would have been fired from nearly any companies for this series of actions.

At best, someone was afraid Musk would get wind of this guy and wanted to take care of the problem before that happened.

Jobs was pettier than Musk and by most measures and opinions he was also very successful in leading his companies --and so is Musk. Successful leaders aren't usually nice. Some have been and some are, but that's more atypical. Often leaders in order to lead to best competitors at times have to be harsh.

Say what you want about Jobs but he would have respected and admired someone like Kasparov. (He also would not have been dumb enough to buy something like Twitter)

Anyways, this convo right here -- along with the thread one over where people are rushing over themselves to complain about someone going after Copilot with a lawsuit -- is peak what orangesite seems to be becoming. Deference to authority and ego, and lack of recognition of the nerd community and actual hacker culture and its history. Ew.

Not to get too meta, because frankly it's kind of a boring topic, but that deference to authority has always been a part of it on here. The authority we defer to might have changed, but it's a board that grew out of startup culture: looking up to the big winners of this game was part of it's raison d'être

Deference to authority is simply one judgment of credibility. Another kind is one of dismissal. When you hire a lawyer or a doctor rather than studying the matter yourself, you're making a judgment on credibility. When you decide not to go to a chiropractor because they don't have a medical degree, that's a judgment on credibility.

I don’t believe Jobs would be the kind of person to accuse a rescue worker of pedophilia just because he was insulted over social media. Elon double downed on the claim by elaborating just why he thought the rescue worker was a pedophile.

Being accused of pedophilia by a top tier celebrity is a very dangerous position to be in. Not even Larry Ellison does things like that.

You really think he spent more than a few seconds mulling over employee comics?

It seems really doubtful considering he was getting up-to-speed on a sizeable company bought almost entirely with his own money.

He had time to read and signal boost a 100% fake news article about Paul Pelosi, so I'm skeptical of arguments based on how busy he is

You say that like reading and signal-boosting an article takes meaningful effort. You sit on the toilet, you look at stuff posted by people you follow, see something curious, then you hit retweet or whatever. Modern social media is literally the art form of making this engagement maximally low-effort.

Trawling through the hundreds of actions of thousands of individual employees in a search for subversive contrarian views is a qualitatively different thing with respect to the notion of someone “having the time”.

I fail to understand how taking on 13 billion dollars in loans constitutes "almost entirely his own money"

Loans under his name count as his money since he's presumably obligated to pay them back.

Just like how we colloquially refer to mortgaged houses as being owned by the buyers and not by the bank.

The loan is not under his name. He leveraged Twitter and Twitter has to pay back the loan. The interest payments are a billion a year and that's why he's scrambling to make Twitter make more money. It's not his own money in any which way

This is Musk worship at another level. Active rejection of facts to make up some story about how he's some great businessman. He bought into a bad deal with no research and now he's scrambling

Source?

I love how you very confidently threw something out with literally zero rhyme or reason and now when someone challenges you, you have the gall to ask for a source. This is the asynchronous amount of effort it takes to deal with the ignorant

Banks have financed the buyout through 13 billion dollars of debt financing. There's also billions raised by others with Musk financing about 27 billion in his own cash that he raised by selling Tesla stock[0]

[0] https://www.businesstoday.in/latest/trends/story/elon-musks-...

Resorting to ad-hominems only lowers the credibility of the user writing them.

And the article linked does not list where it got the information from, nor is it a reputable outlet for tech/finance news in the U.S., so it's questionable whether you bothered to actually read the entire article.

Quo erat demonstrandum. Speaking to someone ignorant and choosing to remain so is always more trouble than it's worth. Find a source that you're satisfied with yourself. It's not my business and this is public information

Not providing a credible source, if it's allegedly so easy to find, only further lowers the credibility of the previous claim.

I've only been able to find rumours and so on for specific numbers, not anything a major outlet is willing vouch for.

If you genuinely don't understand that different sources can have different degrees of trustworthiness then it appears you need to do some self-reflection instead of accusing others of ignorance.

stop, you're ruining the fantasy that he's a real life Howard Roark / Tony Stark, blah blah blah

B-bu-but Musk is a free speech absolutist, he should absolutely love this guy's take

I would say he's trying to control the narrative so that his future prospective employers believe that he was not laid off because of his performance.

What narrative is there to control? It's not like Twitter was about to put a big post out saying we fired him. He put all of this out their on his own. He wouldn't even need to bring up being fired in interviews, just say he left

He will be effective in doing so because the email screenshot he included indicates exactly that: he was fired for non-performance related reasons. "Your recent behavior has violated multiple policies" is pretty unambiguous to me.

That's unambiguous to you? It's equivalent to "you were fired for reasons".

I think the operant phrase is “policy violations.” I’ve never heard that associated with anything but breaking a corporate rule: talking to the media unauthorized, leaking, harassment, etc.

Do you think that will sit well with a potential future employer regardless?

Said person could go back to working at Google anytime, likely. I don't think he needs to worry about covering for his reputation on this matter.

I dunno man, if I had a spare $300-$600k/year lying around I'd love to have this guy work for me even if he is a whiny smart aleck

There’s likely a policy about having good performance.

Lots of people got laid off, I don’t think it will be a problem to find a new job unless this turns into something crazy.

If I had headcount for his particular role, I'd hire him in a second and let him know it's OK to continue making his cartoons (which are very on-point and useful to execs who want to learn more about their orgs than what their middle managers are telling them) but he should of course be aware that my abilities to protect him if an SVP gets annoyed are going to be limited.

Reactions like these baffle me. Is it jealousy, resentment of people who are privileged enough to be above the norms of corporate feudalism?

Manu Cornet worked for Google for a decade, making these comics and getting famous for both them and (by all accounts) being a very good engineer. One of the comics leaked and was read by Satya Nadella, who cited it as an inspiration to turn Microsoft's corporate culture around.

So there's at least some people even in Big Tech who can tolerate a bit of very gentle chiding.

Seriously, Cornet is very tame in his comedy. If he didn't actually work in Big Tech, most of his comics wouldn't be considered all that clever or funny - but they get that little boost from nervous laughter of his colleagues. It's transgressive by corporate standards, but barely.

Who wants to work in a hellhole where even that isn't tolerated?

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