Hacker News Reader

You're making two assumptions:

1. The people saying Elon doesn't have a heavy hand in his companies and the people saying he is running Twitter with a heavy hand are largely the same people.

2. It's impossible that Elon indeed both does have a heavy hand in Twitter and does not have a heavy hand in most/all of his other companies.

These assumptions are the same flavor of cognitive bias to the one you're accusing others of: That born of a desire to paint a group of perceived opponents in a poor light.

1. They are largely the same people. The mere fact that it is theoretically possible that it is two separate groups doesn't mean we should ignore the obvious fact that it is not.

2. It's possible of course, but almost nobody making either point (usually both) does so with the kind of nuance necessary to make this argument.

1. what makes it obvious?

> These assumptions are the same flavor of cognitive bias to the one you're accusing others of: That born of a desire to paint a group of perceived opponents in a poor light.

Not the parent poster, but that post didn't seem to contain the biases you mentioned. You had to make an intellectual leap to find them.

1. "People" are neither a monolith nor convenient straw men to be blown down

2. The arguments that he "doesn't run his companies" is referencing the successes, and that he "runs a company into the ground" references failures. These two ways of looking at him are not only not mutually exclusive, they go very well together: "whenever he intervenes he makes it worse, any company that is successful is so because he gets out of the way", or something along those lines.

Whether or not those arguments hold up I neither know nor care about, because this drama is as significant to my life as Amber Heard vs Johnny Depp was. Which is to say: only insofar as it seems to be so goddamn unavoidable when I want to spend my limited time on this earth doing other things.

You didn't finish your argument. It could also be not just "whenever he intervenes he makes it worse, any company that is successful is so because he gets out of the way" — but also "whenever he intervenes he makes things better, any company that is a failure is so because he got of the way". That too is not mutually exclusive.

I found it odd that both the New York Times and The Washington Post had top stories about how terrible things were at Twitter now that Musk took over. A few days is hardly enough time to decide that a new leader has destroyed a company.

why? it's a major media takeover with a lot of big names/drama invovled same scale as the at&t/warner media deal it's one of the top stories in the WSJ too

I mean, if you lay off half of a company and make the rest work double time, "terrible" is not the most inappropriate adjective for an external observer to use.

The Guardian had a live feed of Twitter drama. It's beyond ridiculous and reflects the unhealthy relationship between journalists and Twitter. Compare it to the situation at Meta, where Mark Zuckerberg is calmly destroying his vastly larger and more influential company with almost no media attention.

> with almost no media attention.

Wow, that's not my experience of reading the tech media.

I agree about the unhealthy relationship, but I think you're understating the media lens on Meta: there's been a running column on their (slow) implosion in the NYT for at least a year now. The recent "legs" affair was the tech news story for a day or two.

Twitter gets disproportionate attention because of the relationship you mentioned, but also because what's happening to it is pretty unprecedented. It stands to reason that it'll be the main topic in tech journalism for the next few weeks, particularly as Musk continues his attention seeking behavior (and journalists continue to feed on it).

I think that's because the media like twitter, and everyone hates facebook and hopes Zuck succeeds in destroying it.

If a few days is enough time for a new leader to decide half of the workforce is redundant, then it's enough time for others to decide the leader is an idiot. You can't have it both ways.

Disagreeing with someone's approach or saying you think it will have a terrible outcome is fine. What's weird is seeing major media publications looking at the first few days of a transition period and pronouncing that this is the way Twitter will now be. For instance, this is was the top Washington Post story a day ago[1]: "Advertisers fleeing, workers in fear: Welcome to Elon Musk’s Twitter" with the byline "The company was hailed for its welcoming and relaxed work environment. Elon Musk made that a relic of the past."

I mean, a month ago Musk wasn't even go to buy Twitter. You'd think we'd want to wait at least a few weeks (if not much longer) before deciding that what Musk is attempting to do during the first few days is definitely going to be the way Twitter will be handled going forward.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20221104220914/https://www.washi...

From an article published last month seems that with or without Elon a lot of people were still getting fired.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/20/musk-tw...

Twitter as a public company was a money pit. Now is Elon's money pit.

Twitter's interest burden wasn't this ridiculous as a public company, and they make $1bil/quarter on average (well, they were before Musk ran away advertisers). When you say "money pit" I imagine investors dumping in cash to make up for low revenue, and this hasn't been the case for years.

Musk's purchase, as you may know, increased Twitter's interest burden, so now Twitter is losing $4mil/day.

In the absence of Musk holding the company hostage from April to November, yes, of course Twitter would have to make some cuts like so many others who've had a drop in revenue.

But there's no reason to believe they would have cut the estimated 50-55% that Elon has.

edit: And now there's impact of this decision: of those who didn't get cut, how many will decide this isn't a healthy environment to work in?

But it wasn't a few days. Musk and his team had half a year to analyse the existing company structure and made preparations. Furthermore, it has been admitted that Twitter had layoffs in the order of 25% already planned, but those were placed on hold during the transition period.

More fundamentally, there's something deeply misguided about anyone complaining about layoffs at any corporation which haemorrhages money the way Twitter has for many years. Quite simply, unless Twitter has a path towards financial viability, there would be no point in it having any employees at all.

Musk spent half the year trying to not purchase Twitter. Or is the thinking that he was simultaneously attempting to not own Twitter while devising the management strategy if he did?

Musk spent half the year trying to not purchase Twitter for 44 billion. What happened was that he (unluckily or foolishly, pick your poison) signed a watertight buy agreement just before the wider stock market experienced a crash. He did try to get out of the deal, but that's not the same as saying that owning Twitter is something he no longer wanted.

Oh you think things are great at a company that just did a 50% layoff haphazardly?

What is your evidence that it was haphazard?

The fact that they're starting to realize their fuckup (among many other reasons such as not giving advanced warning as so legally required etc).

https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1589075543420325888

So by your definition, a fuckup is when something isn't done absolutely perfectly? Let's be realistic for a moment here; surely it would be WAY more remarkable if a company laid off 3,700 employees and exactly zero mistakes were made.

What level of error would be sufficient to warrant the haphazard descriptor? Two percent? One percent?

A company like Twitter is complex, and it's very likely that some number of people are important in a way which cannot be seen from a top-down view. Hence error correction. It's a good thing. I see it as a healthy sign that Twitter management are identifying and rectifying their mistakes so quickly.

The war must not be going well in Ukraine.

For Russia? It isn't.

I thought he was famous for being a micromanager, and that the troughs (and peaks) of his companies are commonly attributed to that. At least in my bubble (which is not particularly "pro" Elon) he's never been characterized as "hands off"; only incompetent in ways that don't guarantee failure when you're already worth billions of dollars.

There is often a single point of failure, but never a single point of success.

If SpaceX succeeds it's because everybody came together and pulled their weight in the right direction, Elon included. It takes a lot of people for a company to succeed.

Twitter could initiate a death spiral at the hands of one person, who culls the workforce too aggressively and scares off all the advertisers.

Maybe the narrative changes because it's actually different people you hear these narratives from? At least that sounds like the most likely explanation to me. Of course there will be die-hard Musk enemies, who will use either conflicting explanation as long as it paints him in a bad light, but the rest of the criticism might come from entirely different groups of people, some of which believe he's actively running his companies, some that things just happen without his doing and he lucked out (or in Twitter's case, potentially had some bad luck, but I think it's to early to decide that in any case).

Just from an employee perspective (speculating, I'm not there) I'd imagine that if 50% of your colleagues were dramatically fired, I'd be looking for a job even if I survived this round. How much of the expertise that built the platform will remain in a year?

And hiring is going to be difficult. As a techie in silicon valley, no way I'd consider joining unless they paid way, way above market since I know any job there will be just one Musk tantrum away from evaporating. Too risky.

>>I'd imagine that if 50% of your colleagues were dramatically fired, I'd be looking for a job even if I survived this round.

Another way of looking at this is since so many people left, there is lots of vacuum, and open positions to be taken, and if you can hold on for a while many good things could be headed your way. What will leaving do anyway, you have to work your way up in the new company. It is also not a very great market for job seekers given most companies are or will lay off people inevitably.

>>As a techie in silicon valley, no way I'd consider joining unless they paid way, way above market since I know any job there will be just one Musk tantrum away from evaporating. Too risky.

This is another misnomer, there is lots of tech talent often for way cheaper going around. Not every body needs to reverse binary trees to build react sites. Or even myriad other infrastructure and general programming tasks that 99% of all software development is made up of.

Of all the ways in which somebody could lose their jobs, Musk surely has some of the most logical reasons. I've seen routine lay offs for a lot more flimsy reasons, where some mid level management often does to protect their fiefdoms, or decide to randomly cancel projects their immediate competition in company is working for.

What's interesting this time is the group of naysayers is not the same as previous SpaceX and Tesla naysayers, but largely comprises prior supporters.

The vast majority of people don’t dislike all those things you say in the second paragraph. What people do dislike is using “free speech” as a stick to selectively encourage the use of racist/sexist language on a platform with a lot of impressionable people. All free speech is arbitrary and his malicious motives are transparent and disgusting in this one case.

I used to be a die hard progressive and campaigned for candidates. Liberals used to have the same basic understanding of American principles, culture and constitution as their counterparts. ACLU was pro-free speech. Die hard progressives were about net neutrality, freedom of expression and against 3 letter agencies. It's the 10-20% left has gone way past the basic rationality and is on the same basic scale as QAnon to me. They can't agree on things like biological facts and everything is racist/sexist, trying to force their ideology by supressing free speech. Total lunacy.

May be your tolerance for normal things have diminished and you find normal speech "offensive".

I haven't found anything sexist/racist on Twitter or elsewhere on places like /r/conservative. It's most likely your definition of racist/sexist that's changed.

I agree, the fall of the ACLU has been particularly disappointing. The former longtime executive director Ira Glasser has done a number of press interviews on how the ACLU has been taken over by 'progressive' ideologues who don't support free speech or other civil liberties.

I was amazed at their intervention in a recent lawsuit where they argued against releasing public records. The ACLU of old would never have done this.

I think this case is also what you are referring to when you mention denial of biological facts? For others reading this comment, here's what the ACLU actually submitted to the court:

> Proposed Intervenors deny the allegation that "it is precisely a combination of anatomy, genitalia, and physical characteristics that differentiate men from women[.]" Proposed Intervenors also deny the allegation that "human beings" are "sexually dimorphic, divided into males and females each with reproductive systems, hormones, and chromosomes that result in significant differences between men[] and women[.]"

It is absurd. They have really lost the plot.

I’m a raging sexist myself. I want women back in the kitchen- subservient and disenfranchised.

But I don’t want to see my views in wider society since it would lead to a shitty life for a lot of people.

The difference between me an you is you want society to return to being evil and you’ll do whatever it takes to get there. Disgusting.

People are just pissed because their blue checkmark doesn't make them special anymore.

What does he have to do for you to decide he's unfit? Does he have to burn down the headquarters trying to light his crack pipe before you agree the sky is falling?

It always takes years to properly evaluate how well a company/manager is performing, and the right course of action at any moment in time is never obvious, not even to the people on the inside making the decisions, let alone outside observers. If the "right thing to do" was obvious, then every sideline observer could just go ahead and start a company doing all the "obvious" things and be wildly successful. Obviously this isn't the case.

I'm content to reserve judgement and see what happens over the long term. Others are completely free to judge based on day-to-day drama, of course. But for their own sake I hope they keep a note of their assessments and predictions now, and check back in a few years to see how well they did.

Running a company requires a lot more work than destroying one.

> that he's just lucky

In a capitalistic world, if someone is so lucky that he could churn out successful companies one after another, then he is an investment genius, his luckiness is a super power belongs to him and him alone, not anyone else, so capital, in forms of both money and talents, will still follow.

Regardless, he is so influential yet controversial it is going to be very difficult to objectively assess his work and impact.

Certainly I won't buy a cent what some media experts said about him at current moment.

The weirdest part has been seeing which companies are pulling their ads, as if the people making those decisions have political ties that outweigh simply running their companies for the sake of their products. Lock-step with misleading claims about Twitter content policy, it’s very surreal.

I saw a post today that Coca Cola pulled their ads but I saw one an hour ago (and took a screenshot as proof). So who knows what the fuck is actually happening

A company like Coca Cola probably plans their ad spend well in advance, and these are likely managed by external agencies. It's one thing to stop planning new advertising campaigns to run on Twitter; it's quite another to reverse course on campaigns already scheduled in.

I don’t know, if Coca Cola wanted to end ads with Twitter it seems like they could make a call and it’s done. Nonsense all around

Coca Cola would like everyone to know they're pulling their ad spend for all the right reasons, without actually reducing ad spend. They'd love to have it both ways.

If you've ever worked at any sufficiently large company, especially where third-party agencies/contractors/analysts are involved, you'd know that "nonsense all around" is in fact the status quo.

tbh a lot of companies are reevaluating adspend in general right now

That's what I am thinking. Recession or not, recent financial policy is going to have many companies taking a hard look at their expenditures. A few redundant staff here, fruitless R&D project there, ad spend, etc.

Put yourself into their shoes. Why take a risk with Twitter when there are other options with similar returns but without the drama? There is a non-zero chance that just being associated with Twitter could turn out to be problematic in the coming months.

I think there’s a non-zero chance that this turns out to all be fake news and Twitter is fine.