Twitter to start layoffs -internal email
reuters.com
reuters.com
Personally, I am sad about these layoffs. Even if there are many many lazy Twitter engineers hanging out on the roof, it's still sad to see people treated so poorly. Elon just treats people with such disgust. I have seen the inside of companies like Twitter, and usually people check out because leadership fails to set any direction. An engineer joins, tries to get some things done, and then finds that they cannot within the company's structure. That engineer will give up and be "unproductive" for the rest of the time their. Elon could have handled the takeover in a serious and humane way. He could have set some product direction, given the employees some time to realign and get some of his features built, and then fired those who could not or chose not to keep up. Instead, he immediately forces everyone to work through the weekend on a random feature, and cuts people ASAP in the most malicious way he could.
I am really disgusted by this brand of "leadership," and it's hard to reconcile this with someone I'd like to respect for bringing electric cars to the masses, and the U.S. back into the space race. I feel deeply sorry for the Twitter engineers who are being squeezed for no purpose but selfishness and meanness, and I hope it doesn't spread through the industry.
Seems like if large chunks of the employee base are talking smack on the possible new CEO, not even as a corporation but as an individual, they shouldn't be unduly surprised if the CEO decides to show them the door when he gets in since he can't be sure they won't be actively hostile.
And I know this is happening in such a way that they aren't just letting go of people that talked smack on musk, but still I don't know what supposed adults were thinking when they were s*t talking their new potential CEO.
So is, "Don't talk open shit about your future boss" a point? Yeah, but so is Elon treating this process like an inhumane animal. The latter trump's a bunch of plebians with loud opinions.
I think it's worth introspecting on where you got this impression and what "many Twitter employees" means. It seems to me there are many powerful people who want you to have this impression but that doesn't mean it's true. Twitter had thousands of employees and I'd bet a strong majority of them are not ideologues in the way you imagine. Just people who work 9-5 and value job security.
What a sensitive man-baby. For all his flaws, Mark Zuckerberg is no glass cannon. He is not prone to rage because his employees dared question him.
Actually, I have noticed that in the last year or two they refuse to show me more than a tweet or two until trying to force me to log in.
Things like that are usually UX driven, developers often don't have any recourse beyond implementing what's demanded in such a setting.
One frame through which you could view Twitter is it was the place where famous / popular / important (athletes, movie stars, government officials) talk to the public. Spaces, enabling audio conversations for those people, makes tons of sense.
So also Twitter Blue letting you read certain news w/o a paywall. If you're a serious consumer of news on Twitter, wsj/nyt/wapo/latimes/ft probably cost $1500/year. If the economics worked for the news orgs, there was huge value there.
Of course, they really sat on the product for 5+ years, so oof...
You underestimate the effort it takes to keep a service as large as Twitter running. Constant software upgrades to maintain high standard of security, inevitable technological break-age, deprecated dependencies, operations, root-causing failures, migrations (you can't avoid hardware migrations; hardware will die out), planning fallacy, etc, etc.
I think the point you are missing that especially tech people might have been using twitter for 10 years like a public IRC client. Open App/Browser, read messages, write messages, complain about lack of linear timeline, close app.
Yes, it has grown, but they added a million features that probably none of the people here asked for. We don't necessarily follow Justin Bieber where the system needs to be able to handle 2m users connected, we follow a kernel developer with 2000 followers.
I guess it's a marvel of engineering that's mostly needed for whatever method they found to make money off, I'm still asking myself this after these years.
He reports that they were worried that if a DC went offline they might not be able to bring it back up again!
Their servers in their DCs were running unpatched operating systems with no disk encryption!
I highly recommend reading his full report. The level of disfunction he reports is insane.
A team of 30 works at zerodha for serving 6.2 million users. They are largest trading broker in India.
There story is worth a read https://zerodha.tech/blog/hello-world/
Edit: Apparently they have 1200 employees for operations and everything else. Thanks to child comment for pointing that out.
They are largest broker so others might be sales, legal, marketting, hr guys
Trading brokers don't need to make spam-filtering tools, CSAM filters, ads tools, handling huge video/image data, or handling a global audience.
I suspect most brokers's tech is way simpler than Twitter's.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2022/t...
"Zatko’s complaint alleges he had warned colleagues that half the company’s servers were running out-of-date and vulnerable software and that executives withheld dire facts about the number of breaches and lack of protection for user data, instead presenting directors with rosy charts measuring unimportant changes."
Firing incompetent people might improve things, not make them worse.
I'm optimistic for Twitter's future. I thought it had stagnated long ago, but I'm intrigued now.
Except it won't take effect immediately. It's not like Twitter will only load 50% of the pages or it will be 2x slower the day the layoffs kick in.
I think the main hypothesis is that Twitter will have an S-curve decline.
Since so much work in a large org is communication, if they're able to do layoffs effectively and actually cut out the least productive people - 50% could take a while to have any visible external impacts.
That's my guess at least.
Sad for the people that lost good jobs, but I'm excited we get an opportunity to witness a massive cut like this and learn from it.
From one perspective Elon is doing what Zuck doesn't have the balls to pull off. The product is mature, has passed peak enthusiasm already, time to stop growing+exploring, and start battening down the hatches?
Sure, in the very short term you could probably fire 80% of people and make the other 20% work 7-16s. But that's not going to end well.
We've seen a lot of these, what do you plan to learn from this specific one?
Yes, this is what people really need to be worried about. Not about Elon's policies ruining Twitter or whatever; that's the good outcome. The bad outcome is: what happens if Elon lays off 50% of Twitter, and a year later it turns from a floundering social media company that's not doing anything with its dominant market share into a profitable adtech powerhouse that rivals Meta and Google? If that happens, then your company's CEO is going to be laying off 50% of staff, too.
Is that really still the case? Most of the time I read something about Elon the comment section is very negative, compared to some years ago and it seems rare to encounter a Musk fanboy anymore.
Can we swap internets? I see plenty of them just in the comments under this story, never mind elsewhere.
Ah yes, the what if I’m really not only ineffective, but a net negative on my company and they find out anxiety.
So dropping 50% even if it harms the company may become a major move.
Isn't one of his stated goals for Twitter to become much less reliant on advertising income? Hence the whole Twitter Blue $8/month thing.
Well the truth is when you walk into a company that hires people for a quarter million dollars at scale, you are truly a number on a spreadsheet. The only way you can cut budget on 500 engineers at that price is not by firing Bob the underperformer, but instead 1/5 or 2/5 of that entire staff.
It should make you wonder what is that leetcode for? You are not that important or expensive in the backroom of some enterprise or medium sized business to be slashed like that. But when you are part of a 50 million dollar budget, bet your ass you have a 50/50 chance of being part of that 25 million the company suddenly wants to save.
The underperformer stuff has nothing to do with it.
Both companies were very close to failure several times. There was never a room for slack.
Reusable rockets and Starlink for example are extremely expensive investments that paid off, but SpaceX didn’t need them to prosper. Tesla’s stability suffered from continuous expansion of manufacturing requiring continues investment as well as Self Driving and other R&D investments which weren’t actually needed.
Which isn’t to say these where poor investments, but pushing the envelope simply increases risk.
Absolutely yes. The sort of high performing people who join places like SpaceX and Tesla need very very little pressure to get them to work at full speed. Usually it just takes a nudge here and there, and they'll work themselves like crazy. The extra pressure on top is pure stress, and causes people to narrow their thinking and make mistakes.
The most important thing that good leadership brings is clear direction and high standards. Elon has these qualities for sure, and he could do away with the overstressing of his employees and would still be just as successful. Happy employees are productive. This was obvious in the early days of many startups, with Google as the prime example, but now the copycats will think that treating people as disposable is how to be successful like Elon.
You are making it sound like Elon is the type of person who always pesters people and attempts to micromanage them to squeeze every ounce of "productivity" juice he can get out of the forcefully.
But obviously if that was his style, Tesla and SpaceX would never take off.
> The most important thing that good leadership brings is clear direction and high standards.
Isn't that exactly what he brings? And isn't that what's bringing him under fire in this HN thread? People acting all horrofied because he's actually enforcing the high standards that you say he should have.
This is exactly what I hear 2nd hand. His workplaces are miserable to be in because of extreme micromanagement, and expectations of long hours despite the personal and health cost to his employees.
>> The most important thing that good leadership brings is clear direction and high standards.
>
> Isn't that exactly what he brings? And isn't that what's bringing him under fire in this HN thread? People acting all horrofied because he's actually enforcing the high standards that you say he should have.
Yes, but he mixes these good leadership qualities with pointlessly bad leadership qualities. He has high standards for the quality of the work (good), but he combines it with high standards for how unhappy you have to be while doing it (not good).
I'm not debating that Elon is successful and effective--it's obvious that he is. However, on top of being effective he just chooses to treat people like shit.
Twitter is much leaner compared to Meta or Google, and they can't really be compared on many levels.
The experiment is nonetheless interesting.
I bet that the major influence if the layoff is the internal company spirit and morale, if the damage is too deep, the company could sink.
Fortunately for them, I don't think they really need a huge team to simply keep the lights on and the servers running.
Can you turn around people who are used to coming in at 10, getting coffee/snacks for the next 30 minutes who then talk shop for 30 minutes, figure out who's on-call this week, set up some meetings, train new onboard, then discuss lunch plans and when they'll head down to the gym, then return at 2 for a meeting, at 3 do some work, then talk about whether it's uber or something else back home while getting their favorite drink prepared.
Can that be turned around, or are those apples spoiled?
Here is a biz-dev at TWTTR: in her own words: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/skmAZHNuEP0
Same, with MST 3000-style commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk6T1pmHCAE
That commentary video is also worse than useless; they're obviously not aware of how tech companies operate. They're commenting on things like the office being empty and the employee visiting the office for the first time. Are they not aware of WFH? The "gourmet" meals are also standard at many tech companies, and are an extremely small part of the cost. It's not like vegetables are more expensive when you prepare them in a way that looks good. On the net, offering the free food (and smoothie, foosball etc.) leads to much more value created than they cost to provide. This mentality is penny-wise, pound-foolish.
This isn't a knock on you. This is a knock on people who are parasitic to a company. Look, people cargo culted the SGI&Sun ethos and said, aha, they know! Let's follow. But these places are no longer the cult of engineers, it's the cult of MBAs and biz-dev types who if they were not in tech would be doing similar useless things at investment banking firms.
These are the kinds of people who balloon spending: we had this and that at [FANG] Let's get this that and the other here without knowing why we had it there and whether or not it make sense here, but, hey, you hired me, so let me have what I know -no, I don't want this viable alternative, that's not what the cool kids at FANG used, eeewww!
Anyone who focuses purely on hours worked or misery while working is merely perpetuating this country's unhealthy Protestant style relationship with work. If an employee can be fully productive to the demands of their work and still have time to chat or go to the gym, what is the issue? You act like you've just described the worst thing you've ever seen ("spoiled apples") but I just see a happy workforce.
Of course, if they are truly not productive, that's something different. But unless they are your reports, you have no idea what their true level of productivity is.
It's beyond time we start recognizing that happy employees are more productive, and stop shaming people for daring to seem happy at work. Because right now, a lot of us seem like the proverbial crab not letting others crawl out of the bucket.
Here's Andrej Karpathy's (ex-Tesla head of AI) explanation of Elon's leadership style and effectiveness.
I also saw the complete opposite at two companies which were decades old, but were distracted by CSR and processes. Both ceased to exist a few years ago.
I think that’s why Apple created so many iconic products under Jobs. You hear stories of Steve using the product and seeing a minor flaw and just flying off the handle that it’s not good enough, for the type of bug you know would have been a “priority 2 - won’t fix” in most large orgs on a product the CEO will never even use.
A “big hammer” who cares about the product can make a huge difference.
SpaceX has higher headcount and less revenue than Twitter. Despite the long hours and hazardous working environment they are dramatically less productive than the lazy woke Twitter employees.
Nothing I've ever read about him suggests that he operates in a humane manner.
He's like a lot of billionaires, views humans as cogs in the machine.
True. He could have. In the meanwhile, he has signed Twitter up for massive amounts of loans whose annual interest exceeds the company's annual free cash flow. I am not up to speed with all of Twitter's finances, but this right here might be one of the fastest way to grow the free cash flow without affecting the core revenue stream of the ad business.
I don't think this would be an act of leadership if it comes to pass. This is just a consequence of the straitjacket that Elon has put Twitter in. Sometimes, constraints help. Let's see what these financial conditions do for Twitter.
Letting people coast by in jobs they've given up on is not compassionate. Those people would be happier in a job where they can make a difference, and society would be better off too. I see a lot of people lamenting how the greatest minds of our generation have been stuck in big tech golden handcuffs putting eyeballs on ads. Well, this is what the fix looks like!
It's unfortunate that it's happening in a downturn but it's not Musk's fault that the economy started tanking during the acquisition.
Serious question: how many jobs can really make a difference? How well do they pay and with what risk factors? Compare that to a steady paycheck where your way of making a difference it to try to make political and other internet discourse slightly nicer or at least less troll friendly.
He basically has to rely and trust people inside Twitter to make those decisions for him (can he, though?) or he has to fire people in an arbitrary way.
I don’t really understand how you can make that call unless you believe people are pretty much interchangeable and their emotions play no role.
It just seems inconceivable to me how you can meaningfully decide who to fire.
It‘s not as though this was an acquisition and suddenly the sales department is redundant and you can fire them all.
I would assume that you would need at least a couple months time to get to know the company and understand what and who might be redundant. I don’t think that question is easy to answer at all.
You might say that a perception of fairness is important so that employees trust leadership. Well, what's likely to happen is the fired people will think it's unfair, and the people chosen to remain will think "well, at least the right choice was made in my case". Of course, the opinion of the remaining people is what matters to the company going forward.
Is this for real? In Belgium, most developers would have a good laugh, go home and enjoy the weekend.
Did any of this happen as a matter of policy? Or are you getting upset about rumors and hearsay?
> Grace - courteous goodwill.
I think we are saying the same thing. Goodwill can only be built with actions and that would be similar to what Stripe did in their layoffs. The lack of goodwill would result in what you are saying.
The game dev work environmental is notoriously shitty, that doesn't make it okay to make it shitty elsewhere.
You say that as if the working conditions in the AAA game industry _aren't_ widely regarded as horrible...
Crunch happening in the games industry isn't a defense of it happening elsewhere. It shouldn't be happening in the games industry either.
The real measure of Musk will be seeing how well this all goes. If he's really is smart, this may work. But by all accounts we're seeing what taking 44 billion dollars and setting it on fire looks like.
I'm not saying he's a genius, either, but first mover and disruption aren't exactly without foresight.
Is that your honest opinion?
We'll all wait and see how it shakes out.
The skills to run SpaceX and Tesla transfer to running Twitter a lot more than basketball to cooking. For one thing, they all (leading SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter) have running a large business in common.
Jesus christ the dick riding on HN is insane.
I view the whole thing as Elon getting bored and wanting a new toy to play with. When you have as much wealth as he does, a loss hardly really matters. If he can make it profitable somehow, that's just a bonus.
The mental gymnastics people on HN perform to diminish Musk's real achievements deserves 10s across the board.
I mean if you hate the guy just say so (for extra credit, explain why). Don't lie about his achievements and intelligence. They are so obviously real. Yes, luck is involved too, but it's not the only thing by far. He fucken self-learned rocket science in 6 years.
> 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.
Kevin Watson - Head of Avionics, Launcher
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
That's being generous. He's not a paypal founder. He started a different company, which merged a couple times into becoming part of paypal.
Elon is brash, tough to work with and doesn't behave in upstanding ways, and I don't think I'd want to work for him; he's a jerk. But all this doesn't make wishful denial become true.
Where is the Hyperloop? Since he announced it China has build 3 thousand miles of high speed rail.
How many cars travelled through boring company tonnels?
How many years ago was Full Self Driving meant to be released?
> doesn't behave in upstanding ways
He was sued for sexual harrasment, unfair dismissal, dangerous working conditions, defamation, reneging on signed contract, by SEC for lying to investors, and countless others.
If an average person broke this many laws, their life would be ruined.
We can dislike him all we want for all his flaws, he's going to be in history books. If he wasn't so ruthless about achieving his goals, the moonshots he did achieve would have been failures as well.
We can dislike someone and still recognize their impact, people aren't black or white. Nuanced opinions are possible.
No one is questioning his impact, but the people do question and have the right to question the methods. But we live in a corrupt system, we can point fingers in many directions, and rightly so. He is just one of a breed.
I'm not sure anyone ever considered him the average joe. He was born into privilege for a start.
You are right that he is not an average person.
Incredible. The man isn’t smart. Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink were just luck. And he was lucky with PayPal.
No, Musk is only a genius if he does it with a fourth, fifth, or sixth business. Perhaps then he’ll graduate from lucky to fortunate.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33462201
It's just mind boggling to me that otherwise rational and intelligent people can discount reality in this way.
Musk more or less got trapped into a deal with Twitter that was largely based upon numbers that were fabricated by executives.
From his perspective, the way to salvage this mess is layoffs. Some of the previous executives (Parag) have committed fraud imo, and should face consequences. They won't though.
Lot's of twitter employees will suffer. To varying degrees, many of them played a role in the house of cards that is twitter.
This is the only part of this I am speaking to because the rest is exactly what is happening. Musk messed up and now a whole lot of people are put in a terrible situation going right into the holiday season. It's unconscionable for one of the richest people in the world to behave this way.
The Twitter executives have been up to shenanigans for quite some time it seems. That is imo, the actual main reason this deal has been so messy.
Also, it was Musk who waive due diligence. This is ENTIRELY all on him.
EDIT: Since max depth was reach, there are _multiple_ comments about how he waived due diligence.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/06/in-letter-to-twi...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/musk-did-not-seek-due-diligenc...
The bot thing was an entire hail mary to stop the purchase. It doesn't matter if Twitter lied about the bots.
Regardless, I was referring to twitter whistle blower that confirmed the number of spam accounts is fabricated: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22186683-twitter-whi...
There is a LOT of fishy stuff in these documents. The twitter executives have committed fraud but it seems like they'll be getting away with it.
In addition, the number of spam bots is more or less a red herring - the only representation regarding bots that Twitter made during the acquisition was the false/spam/etc. rate among its mDAU. There was no representation made as to the total number of bots on Twitter, nor the percentage of all Twitter accounts which are bots.
That Musk focused on a different number is more or less entirely on him, and is a significant reason his lawsuit never really went anywhere.
It's also important to note that data scientists Musk hired failed to find evidence that supported his "wildly higher" claim - one firm found an 11% "fake user number" at an 80% confidence interval, while the other found a 5.3% spam accounts as a percentage of mDAU at a 90% confidence interval. Hardly the kind of evidence one would want to have when accusing Twitter of lying, let alone fraud.
“The company could not even provide an accurate upper bound on the total number of spam bots on the platform. The site integrity team gave three reasons for this failure: (1) they did not know how to measure; (2) they were buried under constant firefighting and could not keep up with reacting to bots and other platform abuse; and, most troubling, (3) senior management had no appetite to properly measure the prevalence of bot accounts—because as Mudge later learned from a different sensitive source, they were concerned that if accurate measurements ever became public, it would harm the image and valuation of the company.”
The first and biggest problem is that the paragraph is talking about the total number of spam bots on Twitter, while the number that Twitter represented to Musk was the percentage of false/spam accounts as a percentage of mDAU. These are two different metrics and cannot be directly compared. Even if the paragraph directly accused Twitter of falsifying and/or fabricating the total number of spam bots on Twitter, it would have no relevance towards the merger since Twitter made no representations of the total number of spam bots on Twitter to Musk.
The second problem is that nothing in that paragraph implies fabrication - it's basically complaining that Twitter isn't paying attention to a metric Mudge thinks should be measured. "We don't know the answer and aren't interested in finding out" is not the same thing as "We don't know the answer and made something up instead".
The third problem is that Musk's own analysis failed to hint at fabrication as well - even if Mudge directly accused Twitter of fabrication, his claim was contradicted by other evidence.
'In fact, Mudge learned deliberate ignorance was the norm amongst the executive leadership team. In early 2021, as a new executive, Mudge asked the Head of Site Integrity (responsible for addressing platform manipulation including spam and botnets), what the underlying spam bot numbers were. Their response was “we don't really know."'
If they don't know what the spam numbers are, then where is the 5% figure coming from?
I already quoted this part but this is also relevant: "The company could not even provide an accurate upper bound on the total number of spam bots on the platform."
They aren't able to provide an upper bound on the total number of spam accounts.
None of this is to due with the spam accounts that are known, and not counted as part of mDau. Those spam accounts are KNOWN, and not included in counts.
These documents are stating that twitter has no information on the actual total number of spam accounts.
It's 5% of mDAU.
Again, that is 5% of mDAU, not 5% of accounts. Mudge is complaining about the latter, Twitter only represented the former.
In any case, Twitter's methodology to get the 5% figure, based on what was stated in court, appears to be:
1. Every day, have someone(s) randomly sample 100 users from the mDAU pool and use various pieces of data to try to determine which of those sampled accounts are spam/false accounts
2. At the end of the quarter, use the 90 samples to estimate the proportion of spam/false accounts among all mDAU users
This allows one to get a relatively tight estimate of the proportion of spam/false accounts among mDAU users without knowing the precise number of spam accounts among mDAU or the upper bound on the total number of spam accounts among all users on the platform. The former isn't known because of the statistical nature of the method, and the latter isn't known because the pool the samples are drawn from isn't the one needed to determine the total number of bots.
> None of this is to due with the spam accounts that are known, and not counted as part of mDau. Those spam accounts are KNOWN, and not included in counts.
Non-mDAU users consist of more than just spam accounts, though - for example, inactive users and users using non-monetizable clients are excluded. If the precise makeup of the pool of non-mDAU users is not known, then that would easily explain not knowing the upper bound on spam accounts.
Strictly speaking, one can trivially provide an upper bound on the number of spam accounts - just give the total number of accounts - but that's hardly a useful answer. Presumably Mudge wanted something with more precision, and if that information is not tracked than Twitter obviously wouldn't be able to give a useful answer, no deception needed.
> These documents are stating that twitter has no information on the actual total number of spam accounts.
But it doesn't state that Twitter fabricated the total number of spam accounts, does it?
And once again, the total number of spam bots is irrelevant to Musk's purchase. Twitter made no representations regarding such a statistic in its SEC filings or in the merger agreement, so there can be no fraud or falsification regarding that statistic. The only statistic Twitter provided regarding bots was the 5% number, and that was bots as a percentage of mDAU, which is different from the statistic Mudge was complaining about.
The very next paragraphs state that they have no idea just how many total fake accounts there are. That is, there is a number of fake accounts that they don't know about (and don't make any effort to count), and they are concerned that counting them will affect stock price.
Said another way, they are admitting they aren't counting all the fake accounts. That's in paragraphs 17 & 18
Mudge isn't saying that Twitter's statements about mDAU are wrong; he's saying that he thinks it's a bad metric, because mDAU ignores the effect of fake accounts. Even if Mudge is correct in his assessment that mDAU is a bad metric, it does not sustain any allegations of fraud.
He literally did say that. I get the sense you're not reading the whistleblower docs... Or just arguing for the sake of arguing. I've quoted Mudge. Whereas you are inferring things based on what Musk said.
I've already linked the docs so I won't again. I've pointed out where this information can be found. Those documents are in no uncertain terms stating that Twitter does not have a grasp of how many fake accounts there are. Therefore, any number they give is wrong.
P11:
> On May 13, Mr. Musk expressed doubts about the accuracy of Twitter's claim in legal filings that <5% of accounts are “bots,” or automated spam accounts that spread propaganda and hurt the experience of real users:'
He's repeating Musk's claim here. Recall that Twitter says that 5% of mDAU are potentially spam. That's not the same as accounts.
P16:
> However there are many millions of active accounts that are not considered “mDAU,” either because they are spam bots, or because Twitter does not believe it «can monetize them.
So when Twitter is saying "mDAU generally excludes spam bots", he's indirectly saying that it's correct.
P26:
> A more meaningful and honest answer to Mr. Musk’s question would be trivial for Twitter to calculate, given that Twitter is already doing a decent job excluding spam bots and other worthless accounts from its calculation of mDAU. But this number is likely to be meaningfully higher than 5%:
Quite literally saying here that "<5% of mDAU is spam" is correct!
So, yes I have read the whistleblower docs. The disconnect here is that I believe you have not read Twitter's filings, which do not in fact claim that "<5% of accounts are spam" but "<5% of mDAU are spam" (see, e.g., https://sec.report/Document/0001418091-22-000075/).
This is an incorrect conclusion to draw. Twitter states that they estimate that a certain percentage of a subset of users is spam/false accounts. That they don't know the percentage of spam/false accounts outside of that subset of users has no bearing on the accuracy of their statement regarding their chosen subset.
As a greatly reduced example, I can say that neither the @elonmusk nor the @chancery_daily accounts are spam accounts. I have no idea how many accounts Twitter has, let alone how many of those are spam accounts, but that lack of knowledge does not affect the accuracy of my first statement.
He should have just left them alone. If the executives were so incompetent, he’d have gotten a better deal by waiting for them to fail. Or shorting the stock like a normal investor.
The deal was always contingent on the confirmation that bot accounts were accurate. This was a precondition from the beginning.
Twitter did in fact lie about the bot numbers and Musk somehow caught wind of it and tried to back out.
I know it’s popular to hate the guy but facts matter more than your disdain.
Did it? At least based on what was shown in court, that seems hard to believe, especially given data scientists he hired failed to produce mDAU spam numbers significantly off from what Twitter had, let alone off to the point where fabrication becomes a likely explanation.
Yes.
Whistleblower report: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22186683-twitter-whi...
This is entirely false. Read the whistleblower report:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22186683-twitter-whi...
“The company could not even provide an accurate upper bound on the total number of spam bots on the platform. The site integrity team gave three reasons for this failure: (1) they did not know how to measure; (2) they were buried under constant firefighting and could not keep up with reacting to bots and other platform abuse; and, most troubling, (3) senior management had no appetite to properly measure the prevalence of bot accounts—because as Mudge later learned from a different sensitive source, they were concerned that if accurate measurements ever became public, it would harm the image and valuation of the company.”
Any citation for that? I thought Elon waived most of the contingencies.
> but facts matter
true, they do. And the fact here is that Elon backed out of the legal fight and purchased the company. Why do you think that happened?
IIRC it's kind of true. Section 7(b)(i) of the merger agreement [0], which is part of the section describing the conditions under which the merger will take place, states:
> each of the representations and warranties of the Company contained in this Agreement (except for the representations and warranties contained in Section 4.2(a) and Section 4.2(b)), without giving effect to any materiality or “Company Material Adverse Effect” qualifications therein, shall be true and correct as of the Closing Date..., except for such failures to be true and correct as would not have a Company Material Adverse Effect
And Section 4.6 of the agreement describes Twitter's representations regarding its SEC documents and financial statements. Among other things, it states:
> As of their respective dates... none of the Company SEC Documents at the time it was filed... contained any untrue statement of a material fact or omitted to state any material fact required to be stated therein or necessary to make the statements therein, in light of the circumstances under which they were made, or are to be made, not misleading.
At least by my reading (and the general sense I got from more knowledgeable commentators), this basically means that Twitter represents that its SEC filings contain no material inaccuracies, and that the merger shall take place unless those filings contain inaccuracies significant enough to cause a Company Material Adverse Effect.
So in one sense, the deal depends on Twitter's numbers being not too inaccurate - if Musk could prove that Twitter's numbers were wrong and that that inaccuracy was enough to cause a MAE, then he would be able to back out of the deal.
What is incorrect, though, is the implication that the deal could not go forward until Musk checked Twitter's numbers. The deal basically assumes Twitter's numbers are correct, with the default action being that the merger will happen. The onus was on Musk to prove Twitter's numbers incorrect to the point that it will cause a MAE; otherwise, he must go through with the deal. Proving a MAE is an incredibly high bar - from what I've seen from other commentators, a MAE has been found once in the entirety of Delaware's corporate legal history, and given how Musk's evidence was turning out during trial it seemed extremely unlikely he would have been able to successfully argue that claim.
[0]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312522...
Factor in that Twitter did not have processes in place to accurately count the spam accounts themselves. The truth is that there is not currently an accurate count of Twitter’s fake users.
Page 8 of this whistleblower report goes into details: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22186683-twitter-whi...
Which is why the court ordered discovery that forced Twitter to give him that data.
First he was on the board, then he wasn't. Then he thought it would be funny to agree to buy Twitter for a price that had "420" in it, then the markets declined and he sued to get out of a contract nobody forced him to sign.
Either something changed recently in Musk, he has been hiding the fact that he has had a few screws loose for years, or both.
I guess most people just get depressed when they hit middle age. When you are wealthy, you can knock up one of your employees and buy a company on a whim.
Small correction: he wrote an open "I declare" letter to Twitter 'canceling' the deal: Twitter got to Delaware court first (within days of his letter), and it took Musk's lawyers 2 weeks to file.
In what way?
What numbers were fabricated?
Page 8 of whistleblower report: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22186683-twitter-whi...
Mudge says Parag is lying about not being incentivized to remove spam, and then tries to do a sleight of hand thing by saying Musk is right because Musk is confused by what he sees in his own replies on the site vs what Twitter is actually reporting in their SEC filings. Those are two separate numbers, and Twitter only reported one.
Despite how many Musk reply guys seem to exist, most of them aren't engineers and even fewer of them are dumb enough to work for a Musk-owned Twitter where you get to be overworked and underpaid.
Are ya going to fire him after seeing his lack of GIT commits after one week as CEO?
But worst case...
These firing decisions are not irreversible! If you accidentally fire a 10x programmer, you can re-hire.
Ha! At a significant price premium, or that programmer is a moron.
Meaning Musk cannot rehire anyone who's left these companies.
You're stating the obvious as if it's not implied by my statement.
Alternatively, they might be A-OK returning to their codebase/team without fuss.
Edit: even if you pay an exorbitant premium, that could be cheaper than keeping N other 1x or -X programmers.
Who are you disagreeing with?
He could be pivoting the company into something astonishing.
Not the hero we want, but the hero we deserve.
Yes, reverse the bans and connect this shit to Starlink and tell governments “I got no clue where those damn satellites are, can’t help ya, Trump’s tweeting from somewhere in Somalia with a VPN”.
Wait hold on a minute isn't there already some kind of amendment that makes this irrelevant?
Although since the Saudis own such a massive chunk of this newly private company I guess the US government is no longer the only one that Elon needs to concern himself with.
Of course, astonishment might still be appropriate.
I guess the zeitgeist really did decide Net Neutrality is a bad thing. Like imagine a telecom owning a social network?
Ok I imagined it and I hate it.
You mean like Verizon and Tumblr? ;)
The takeaway should likely be: Twitter will be fine if people can still post their porn there.
Governments that engage in active censorship also frequently are not the warm-and-fuzzy entities that westerners are used to when they think of governments.
If he can pull this off, he'll go down in history as one of the must successful business person of his generation. If he fails, he will still has Paypal, SpaceX and Tesla to brag about.
Will be interesting to see how all these rapid fire changes play out over the next few years.
I’m not sure the path to growth for Twitter depends on a lot of net new development. More so better monetization of the existing platform, which can largely be done via small tweaks here and there
Those loan rates were negotiated before the recent hikes. They had some range built in based on what the market did, but he is definitely paying below current market rates.
But they did right? As in the group lacks conviction.
There was not a single stipulation in that sale that said “please keep our people on for X amount of time”.
They took the cash and bounced.
Musk explicitly doesn't want that though, because he needs Twitter to earn a lot more money than it currently does.
He just made Twitter take on $13bn of debt to finance his purchase, the company will owe around $1bn a year in interest payments that it didn't used to. The layoffs announced today probably won't even cover that extra interest.
My experience there was pretty consistent with that: if you leave things alone, they won't break. Virtually all breakage was caused by changing things. On a well automated system repairing the physical components, rolling OS updates from time to time and so on, is not a huge amount of work.
Services with hundreds of millions of users, antagonistic spammers/hackers/countries, and advertisers spending millions are never in maintenance mode.
You sound like you're trying to apply your understanding of lifestyle software businesses to one of the largest real-time communication networks in human history.
What is your estimate of Twitter's effort split between those two categories?
No one is. Twitter cannot be "as-is" because it would be overrun by bots and bugs.
Elon Musk, it seems, does not think about the humans affected by his decisions. Regardless of anyone's opinions on whether the culture was good or bad, this sort of sudden mass loss of employment will cause pain. Pain that didn't need to happen.
There is no indication of how many people.
> There's no way these are going to be sensible, surgical layoffs.
We have no clue whose going to be laid off.
You clearly have your mind made up, regardless of reality.
“About half of Twitter’s workers appeared set to lose their jobs, according to previous internal messages and an investor”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/technology/twitter-layoff...
> We have no clue whose going to be laid off
No but we do know this plan was thrown together extremely quickly. We know a few days ago developers were told to print off (!) their code for review. Let’s state the obvious: it takes more than a week to plan an effective layoff of half your staff.
It might not be the wisest thing, but in comparison with others tech companies and only in this component it's accurate.
If I were working there, I'd want the layoffs to be as swift and brief as possible. Having the sword of Damocles hanging over my head day to day would be unbearable. I'd rather Twitter have one big layoff and then re-focus on the product if it were me.
> The service is definitely going to suffer.
I see this claim, but don't quite get it. What are engineers doing there? Are they like Homer Simpson pushing a red button every day to keep the site running? It seems like kind of a set-and-forget type of operation at this point, since so few new features are developed. They copied a couple of other social media startups (Clubhouse & Substack) in the past couple of years, and they changed the stylesheet, but otherwise, doesn't seem like much has happened. Have they done a ton of optimization work that we simply don't know about? (And if not, why do they need it?) I just don't get the claim.
FWIW, I'm expecting to see essentially no difference in Twitter for at least six months.
They will hopefully also talk to EMs, but at this scale might choose not to. It's going to be an ugly process but I doubt it's going to be a random one. They clearly understand that it's in their interest to retain the most skilled and performant employees.
Also, don't want to sound too cynical, but I would guess that it's actually not that hard to evaluate eng performance with all the data companies are collecting during WFH. I am sure Twitter requires using a VPN, so digging into that data would yield quite a revealing and precise performance metric. The only reason this approach is not widespread is ethical, not technological.
Sucks for the people affected now, possibly impacts fewer people long-term though. I doubt many Twitter employees will struggle to find reemployment quickly.
Who's more important the workers or the company? I bet the answer to that question will align with people's views on the layoffs.
The workers all lose when the company goes bust.
I don't think it needs to, nor was I trying to make any kind of argument of the sort. The (former) employees are going to suffer and pay the price for the past mistakes of the corporate leaders. It's a depressing situation even if it is the absolute correct action for Twitter to take.
For that reason, I don't think it is hard to understand why there are so many comments against the layoffs.
There are definitely cases where people losing their jobs is a necessary evil to get us to a place of greater good. We should certainly support those that get laid off, but it shouldn't stop us (collectively) from improving how our society functions.
I'm reminded of the Soviet Union joke about full employment. Of course we have full employment - like at the subway entrance: one person takes your ticket, another brings it to the machine, the third one makes the stamp and the fourth hands it back to you. See? Everyone has a job!
So Musk is probably going to alienate a majority of his users doing this and Twitter will probably go into disrepute and decline now.
I have seen this happen to forums and boards I posted on where some moderators get de-modded which angers a lot of the users who leave or start posting less. Then the culture goes into decline and never returns. Maybe something like that is about to happen, or maybe not.
There you go. I don't think having giant operational costs at a company and having a head count in the thousands and sitting there losing more money without maximizing revenue it sustainable for any business.
Perhaps Twitter itself was overdue a massive correction, hence the first step is drastic layoffs and cuts.
I'm curious how much damage all this negativity will have on Twitter culture going forward and what it will take to rebuild it. Is it just throwing money at the layoff "survivors" or is it really the mission of building the Internet's town square? I'm pretty interested to see how this plays out!
Also, makes it incredibly easy to climb the ranks and get rewarded for it. Whenever there is malaise in workplace, I work twice as hard. Build tools for others, solve their problems, uplift folks and motivate them. What good is it to sit around sadly wasting away your life with a resentful attitude. It's not fun and these people make things worse for others that are around them. By far the worst is working in the Gov. Not only people slack off, but they don't even try to hide it. Openly and shamelessly. It's not my type of an environment at all.
I wanna build shit with cool people and live a fulfilling life.
I can imagine the type of person that embodies this type of developer is someone who clicks 'I agree' without reading the terms of service, or shows up late to personal engagements.
> An employer who violates the WARN Act notice requirement is liable to each affected employee for an amount equal to back pay and benefits for the period of violation up to 60 days. An employer who fails to provide notice as required to a unit of local government is subject to a civil penalty not to exceed $500 for each day of violation. The penalty may be avoided if the employer satisfies the liability to each affected employee within three weeks after the closing. In any suit, the court, in its discretion, may allow the prevailing party a reasonable attorney’s fee as part of the costs. These are the only remedies that WARN provides.
That fine might not be large enough to discourage bad actors
When you're talking about thousands of employees, it gets up in the millions, but that's not much compared to the pile of cash already on fire
Exploiting people is indeed a strategy, whether its with chains, legal loopholes or just taking advantage of their dreams and passions.
We don’t get annoyed at the truly bad ones exploiting people, that’s just the way things are (e.g. Bezos), but because there is a disconnect between what we perceive as lofty goals (e.g. exploring space, electric cars) and exploiting employees, Musk gets a ton of (personal) flak.
Of course, it doesn’t help he can be an arsehole.
I mean, not to say you are wrong, but we only have your word for it ;)
If you were happy with your product, and corporate management wasn't involved, eh, it's fine. I might have stayed at YTravel longer if corporate meddling didn't get to me; although going to an actual small team rather than a small team in a big corp was a much better fit for me and it turned out really well.
This is nothing like Stripe’s 14% layoffs from elsewhere on the HN homepage.
It will take four years and several big bankruptcies before people catch on that they are being conned. By that time there will be other companies coming up that you can jump ship to.
Comp packages will decline across the board, or at the very least stagnate for years.
If you work for a fairly valued, profitable company, you’re likely to keep your job. If you work for a highly unprofitable and overvalued moonshot company, you likely won’t
If a Bay Area techie at a FAANG can't swing a half a year of unemployment after working the Bay for 5+ years, something is wrong.
In Twitter's case though, the writing was in the wall ever since Elon fiasco began.
CloudKitchens: https://archive.ph/t46mK
Amazon hiring freeze: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454151
Investment banks and many other industries were that way once. It’s not new.
This doesn’t mean Twitter is about to die, nor does it mean they are saved. For tech to get sustainable, it is just the start, though.
Twitter's UI design and usability is lacking greatly.
Till this day, I'm confused. This button, it's to see who replied, and this button it's to view actual comments. Clicking an image on a tweet shows a different view with replies in comparison to clicking the body of the tweet. And once I finally get to see comments, it shows me 5 or so comments, with a "show more" that shows 3 more.
Content is just one long stream of white without any grouping/sections. And both sidebars are white. Truly a pain. I've noticed these problems like 5+ years ago. And these problems are not subjective, but objectively wrong. I believe some of these layoffs are correct.
At the time, Gil Amelio was still CEO as well, so can’t necessarily pin this one solely on Jobs.
Ha.
reporter's thread: https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/15883356977855897...
>Employees in Twitter just got an email from their bosses saying layoffs are coming tomorrow.
>Those who are staying will get a note tomorrow in their work email. Those who are let go will get an email sent to their personal address.
>Slot machine-style layoffs.
>Some employees I'm hearing from at Twitter are desperate to get laid off and get severance. The work culture there is beyond toxic.
>Some are afraid to push back against Elon because they don't want to risk getting fired for cause — disagreeing with Elon — and losing severance.
…
>"At the end of this nightmare, I better get a cash prize," one told me.
>Teams across Twitter are racing to present a plan to achieve the cost savings by a Nov. 7 deadline, according to one of the sources and the Slack message. Some employees have been ordered to work in the office every day of the week to meet the deadline, the source said.
Bringing his renowned brand of work-life balance to Twitter I see.
Edited to say "mostly" not profitable.
Grade CCC bonds are well above 16% these days, and the amount of debt is $13 Billion. This very well could be $2 Billion/year interest payments.
I remember reading rumors of ~10% since the debt was signed in April 2020 and rumored to be 50% fixed and 50% adjustable. But I never actually found the real information or confirmation.
I think it's safe to say that the interest payment is somewhere between $1 and $2 billion, but there is also principal that needs to be paid back, right?
-----
That's not counting whatever debt Elon did to get his $33 Billion portion of the bill. I'm just looking at Twitters debt they now owe Morgan Stanley (and a few other banks) as part of the $13 Billion leveraged buyout portion of this company purchase.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/30/technology/elon-musk-twit...
I don't know how Twitter spent its money, but seemingly on undifferentiated software (i.e. not durable) or moderation? Both of which are recurring expenses.
I don't think Twitter is in the same position at all
Everyone knew they had too many employees, and that big money-making possibilities... don't seem to be there, due to the nature of the niche they've carved. But they had a lot of money in the bank, so they didn't need to make any sudden movements. Sensible downsizing and incremental improvement of the bottom line, and, yeah, that's a viable business.
It may not be super exciting, but if you want exciting, head south on 101, Meta is about 40 minutes out depending on time of day.
They could turn no profit in a hundred years, and thats fine.
apparently he was into layoffs before it was cool
I mean, it's not like Twitter had some amazing business plan going forward.
But calling twitter a "perfectly viable company" is part of the problem. It's comments like this that inflate the bubble. Twitter has thousands of employees who have done close to nothing for at least several years.
Facebook/meta are at least trying new things. Twitter seems to be afraid to make any decisions at all.
You people really miss the bigger picture from the business side of things - Musk now owns the most impactful social network on the planet. Having an additional $44 billion in wealth does not bring you anything that is actionable. Its just inert wealth. Only when its used, wealth actually becomes something meaningful.
And Musk bought the biggest social network on the planet with that money. At this moment, he can do anything from boosting his own projects and businesses through Twitter to creating entirely new paradigm like making Twitter into a Western Wechat.
(Im obviously not counting Facebook as a top social network at this point)
> Facebook/meta are at least trying new things
Meta is banking on something that may or may not materialize. Its a gamble. Musk is going to copy what's already successful elsewhere.
This is an extraordinary claim. Most impactful as measured by what? Twitter isn’t even in the top 10 for dau/mau.
They are almost exactly the same size as reddit in terms of active users.
> (Im obviously not counting Facebook as a top social network at this point)
That’s just being unreasonable.
It generates a lot of the agenda in certain socioeconomic segments. It disseminates a lot of information to these segments. Those segments dont overlap with Reddit. And if Musk keeps the 'free speech' thing going, it can also attract the segment that Reddit addresses.
The private equity downsize strategy is probably right--you have to get it into a leaner state to start printing money--but the execution is poor, and Musk can too easily fiddle with the wrong knob and drive away uses a la Tumblr.
Is this normal during mass layoffs?
I’m not sure how normal it is, but it doesn’t objectively seem like there’s anything wrong with it.
Yes, and for good reason.
A company I was familiar with in the 80's had a subsidiary in another state with a couple hundred employees. They decided to close that office, and lay everyone off.
Being nice guys, they gave the branch 3 months notice of the closure and layoffs, and expected them to keep working as usual.
After 3 months, the parent company officials arrived to find the office building empty and looted clean.
That's a striking difference to the stripe layoffs discussed earlier today, and the experiences many others shared there.
It's also not the first time I have seen this type of layoff. I was a part of a few companies that got taken over by vulture capitalists and it's much the same. Everyone gets sorted into an arbitrary bucket based on metrics. Usually, these include commits, vacation taken, etc. Then the MBAs sort the list and fire the worst. Hostile takeovers are always, always bad for the employee. Twitter, however had other problems than a usual company. A dramatic lack of profitability, too many salaries to pay, etc. I'm not saying his methods are just but for Twitter to even have a chance at profit there needs to be some very, very dramatic changes.
If you were to believe the media Musk is literally destroying free speech (on a private platform?) and firing people for no reason. I doubt he would do this. He's a jerk, but he's not an idiot. It doesnt help twitter employees happen to be the most vocal, often whiniest, group of people so this is getting megaphoned to death in a way that wouldn't happen almost anywhere else.
> It doesnt help twitter employees happen to be the most vocal, often whiniest, group of people so this is getting megaphoned to death in a way that wouldn't happen almost anywhere else.
Yeah, and it's not just employees. Everyone seems to think Twitter is bigger and more important than it actually is. It's got significantly fewer DAU than say snapchat.
It's also:
- primarily public one-to-many so the social graph is less important than other mutually social platforms.
- mostly ephemeral, so the value of historical posts is.. Low. Much lower than say YouTube.
- no local communities with independent moderation (like reddit)
- primarily immutable text and links, which is cheap and easy to host
Out of all big platforms today, Twitter is by far the easiest to replace gradually, imo, with the least amount of upfront resources and least impacted by network effects.
Capitalism mandates vultures. Those who are not the vulture variety eventually get eaten by the vultures and in the end, only vultures remain.
This is not the same as referring to all capitalists as vultures. Vulture capitalists are a very specific subset of people engaged in a very specific, usually highly dishonest, business. Whether or not capitalists are vultures in general is just like, your opinion, man.
The firings will reduce the owed cash that Elon has to payout as a result of the stock swap. Smart move
For the Twitter employees (if they keep their jobs and the RSUs are not canceled) this is a very good deal, because the stock price was really high due to the deal.
2. Delayed Cash bonuses with vesting terms tied to some company metric or calculation derived from company metric
3. Not replacing it to cause attrition to reduce costs
4. Some sort of hypothetical share tracking unit that only has a value if the company goes public or is bought again
I'd be out the door already except the day they announced that, my director called me and gave me an RSU equivalent that was even bigger. Apparently they don't want to lose me yet. We'll certainly lose some developers though, and I don't blame them. Eventually I'll be one of them.
What Musk is doing with Twitter employees isn't a layoff; it's tossing employees into the trash.
Let's compare how Stripe and Lyft have handled their RIFs this week:
STRIPE:
- 14 weeks severance pay - Approximately 14 weeks of health insurance - Waived RSU cliff and accelerated vests
LYFT
- 10 weeks of severance - Something like 20 weeks of healthcare coverage - Accelerated vest - Notified via work email - Not immediately locked out of their systems
TWITTER (under Elon)
- Asked to work well beyond 40 hr/wk - No severance - No vest - Notified via personal email - Crapshoot whether they can access systems later today
This is reprehensible.
I know I'm a small fish, but this was a chief reason behind me not buying another Tesla next year (which I was going to finance next month). I cannot support leaders who treat their people like this.
Reminds me of that AOL employee that kept their badge for 6 months after they were laid off and kept eating at the cafeteria (or something along those lines)
1. Take over. 2. Layoffs. 3. Profits go up short term. 4. Then you notice all of the folks missing. Productivity drops. 5. Revenue drops, followed by dropping profits. 6. Folks move on to the next take over.
Difference, crucially, here is that Musk actually owns the shop, so we'll see if it is different with Twitter.
You'd think he'd be more circumspect about how he handles this $44 billion asset which he does not yet fully understand during his first week on the job, but I guess that's not his style.
[M as in the Roman numeral M]
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/ [2] https://web.mit.edu/e-club/hadzima/how-much-does-an-employee...
I find that very unlikely!
(but that’s because you made a typo)
Edit: Twitter median employee compensation is $232,626. Assuming they do fire 50% and that's the average of fired employees plus 50% tax and overhead that would come to about $1.3 billion per year. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/ceo-pay-ratio/
if you only count tech people, this is too low. If you count all employees, including people paid to review posts or moderate, or handle customer reports etc, it might be too high an estimate.
So if you fired half, which half? If it was the tech employees, i think twitter would save a lot more than your guess, and if it was just the support/moderators, it would not save much money at all imho.
If you do, they would still be massively unprofitable.
git ls-files -z | xargs -0n1 git blame -w | perl -n -e '/^.?\((.?)\s+[\d]{4}/; print $1,"\n"' | sort -f | uniq -c | sort -n | head 1500
Merged with a hitlist of people who have made anti-musk comments internally or externally of course.
A purge based on silly metrics and grudges, as all good bullies and tyrants do.
There will be lessons learned either way and I have a feeling this will eventually lead to major changes in tech. Industry culture.
Not necessarily. Musk is such a wildcard that lessons won't be generally applicable.
Isn't it just a question of "when" not "if" it's done?
They've never made more than half billion per year and much of that was some kind of financial "restructuring"
And now with the way things are going, this might soon be the final nail in the coffin.
Good thing I still have HN, Reddit and (already way too many) Discord servers.
-> I made some shitty comments last night about this (firing lots of people) in another thread. I regret them because it was mean. It was meant to be cold in a business is business sort of way, yes, but they came off as mean after I read them again.
you mean: the company now owes $1 billion a year in interest on the debt used to finance the leveraged buyout. musk paid too much and now has to loot the company to afford it
> Twitter said its offices will be temporarily closed and all badge access will be suspended in order "to help ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data."
You can probably find this number in the 10K or 8K
Therefore pie-in-the-sky projects not making money are scrapped.
How Elon operates may be appropriate at Tesla and SpaceX, but not everywhere.
But I don't think a social network with a head count of more than 7500+ and increasingly burning hundreds of millions of cash, nearing into the billions for years is sustainable. The layoffs where going to happen either way; with or without Musk's takeover of Twitter.
But of course I couldn't care less on what happens to Twitter, Elon Musk can do whatever he likes with it and yet the screeching loudmouths relying on Twitter will end up screaming in outrage and will calm down and end up paying for their verified checkmarks.