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Comment by ok_dad | Hacker News Reader

Everytime a new Commanding Officer (CO) showed up when I was in the Navy we tried to bet which type it was:

1) The kind who investigated the goings-on in the ship, interviewed the officers and chiefs, and learned how the ship was being run, then made small changes over time to optimize the operations based on what they learned. Sometimes big changes in one specific area, if it was required (like fixing the ship's crypto key material protocols, if they are super fucked up).

2) The kind who came in and ran roughshod over the whole ship, made a bunch of big changes and policy decisions, and generally acted like they owned the place in order to fulfill a pre-concieved vision they had of how things should be.

With 1, we were happy because there are always improvements to an org, but the best people to know those improvements are those who know the org. These commanders always resulted in a better command overall by the end of their tenure, bar none.

With 2, we were sad, because suddenly mistakes were being made everywhere in order to try and fit into the "vision", and thus reduced morale due to the massive changes and the constant failures. I saw 2 of these and both failed miserably and brought the command down lower than it should/could have been. One of those was on a great ship that performed so flawlessly that we were always sent on the most important assignments, and after I left I learned the ship fell into disrepair and could no longer even get underway, due to mismanagement. That guy came in and basically made me decide to get an early re-assignment and 3 of my friends on that ship left the Navy completely because of him.

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I wonder if you've read Turn the Ship Around [1]? It's one of my favorite leadership books and tells the true story of the Navy captain who was put in the awkward position of running a submarine class that he was not familiar with.

He adapted to the situation by leaning on the expertise of the crew in a way that was very different than the normal command-and-control style of leadership. It sounds like what you describe in type 1.

[1] https://davidmarquet.com/turn-the-ship-around-book/

Yea, the Navy has basically fostered a shit culture that turned the leadership into MBA-style bullshit artists today. Leadership isn't taken seriously, just promotions and personal gain. Only those who kiss ass can make it in today's Navy.

If more leaders like this guy who wrote this book were sent to the top levels, it would be an improvement. Instead, you notice he's writing books for a living now.

FWIW they teach 1 in MBA schools, if MBAs are doing 2 it's despite their education, not because of it.

Also most top tier MBA programs are an excuse to get wildly drunk basically daily and make a bunch of powerful friends, so it's very possible most people who go don't learn a damn thing.

Same with leadership and officers, we definitely got good training teaching #1, but the actual culture of the fleet is #2.

Sorry to rag on MBAs.

>Yea, the Navy has basically fostered a shit culture that turned the leadership into MBA-style bullshit artists today. Leadership isn't taken seriously, just promotions and personal gain. Only those who kiss ass can make it in today's Navy.

This is a disease of all peacetime militaries. The Army suffers the same problem. They spend an entire career LARPing in camouflage, and think that somehow means they know anything at all about warfare or leadership.

A major problem is that life in the Navy sucks too much compared to the civilian world, so that most of the competent Naval Officers leave, and you end up with a pretty small pool of competent leaders. It’s a super weird dynamic where junior officers are on average more competent than mid-career officers.

As for why life sucks so much, leadership has let there be too much to do with too few people, and inflexible systems.

When I read about Lockheed’s stealth ship, I assumed people would be excited about them.

Because they were run by such a small crew, nobody wanted to command them because the number of people under your command mattered for rank advancement.

When we began looking at farms, the advice we got over and over again was to live with it through a few seasons before making any changes. See how the water flows in the winter months, see what dries out in the summer. Learn what the wildlife get up to, where the best views are.

It's something I think about to this day. As we've made progress restoring and transforming our place, we're constantly informed by those observations — and it's really easy to see how many of the initial ideas would've been premature or lacking context.

Good advice about the seasons. Sounds like "Chesterton's Fence":

  The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to [the fence] and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence

Thanks for this..do you farm-blog by any chance?

and generally acted like they owned the place

To be fair, he actually does own the place.

True, and to be fair, CO's have "own the place" power most times (while underway at least).

ownership != operational knowledge

ownership = ownership

I award no points for fairness because that is completely beside the point.

It doesn't seem like he really cares about the place though

To be fair, he owns most of the place

Only, he doesn't. His lenders do. And he's already talking bankruptcy.

Wait, each ship works completely different from the other ships, there are no established generic procedures, the crew just figures out how they want to do encryption?

When you transfer onto another ship, do you need a long onboarding as well, does each ship have its own culture? How do they coordinate?

Of course there are standards, execution is another story

> Wait, each ship works completely different from the other ships, there are no established generic procedures, the crew just figures out how they want to do encryption?

There's some commonality, but it's like a fork of other ships. When a new ship is stood up and built, the pre-comissioning crew will write the SOPs for the new ship. Most of the time, you crib it from an old ship and make changes you think are useful, like a fork. There are some standards from up high, especially encryption stuff, but things can be run with some discretion.

Crypto was probably a bad example, since no decent Navy crypto tech would deviate from the proper procedures, even in the face of the CO asking for it. Kinda like how once the CO asked me to use more ordnance for training than I was alloted, and I said "no" and he said "yes" and I said "if you do this, I will put in writing that I told you not to and you did it anyways and I also won't operate the system to check out the ordnance, so we'll have an imbalance" and he said "ok".

> When you transfer onto another ship, do you need a long onboarding as well,

Not long, but a bit, yes. Much like starting a new job. For some jobs, you shadow the current position holder for a good while.

> does each ship have its own culture?

Yes, undoubtedly.

> How do they coordinate?

Generally via SIPRchat, radio, flag signals, etc.

But seriously, we have some standards for operations that make the different ships able to inter-operate easily. You also have groups of ships under commanders who do a bit more to coalesce those ships into a unit.

Interesting. I would have expected each class of ships to have the same operating procedures on the technology side.

The ships are so big, expensive, and slow to build that each one varies by request of the Navy and necessity (suppliers change, shipyards are different, parts are substituted, timelines cut optional components, etc).

Military aircraft carriers are going to operate in a manner completely different from boats carrying skipping containers, if we're going with this analogy. The number of social media companies Musk had any experience running prior to buying Twitter is 0.

You are assuming that he is optimizing for employee happiness. I am not associating a value judgement to whether that is the right/wrong move in Twitter's context.

I wish that we, as a culture, stopped harping over what Elon Musk might do to Twitter next.

It does not matter. This will take some time to play out. I hope Twitter employees land on their feet. That is pretty much the only thing that matters. I don't have a lot of reasons to think that they won't barring some exceptions.

Actual happiness was not the point. In the Navy, the CO doesn't have to care about employee happiness, anyways, while Musk sort of does. 'Happiness' was a rhetorical device I used there.

I bet a lot of people actually experience Schadenfreude at seeing these social media empires being toppled.

The point was not employee happiness, but an attitude that completely ignores that the employees might know a thing or two about how to run the place. And plenty of employees are willing to put up with subpar pay and otherwise boring work if they feel valued for the stewardship and experience.

> And plenty of employees are willing to put up with subpar pay and otherwise boring work if they feel valued for the stewardship and experience.

That sounds like a reasonable hypothesis. I don’t know if that is being (or was ever) tested at Twitter.

Elon's the #1 type there. He's been shown to be talking to a lot of people at Twitter to get a good understanding of how the product and company works and removing people as he finds it being unrelated to the future success of the company.

>>>>> and generally acted like they owned the place

this is the $44B problem to your CO analogy.

Skin in the game. The world runs far better on it.

Nah. He doesn’t own twitter like you own a house. People can just quit and leave.

In fact a CO might be in better position in that regard. Soldiers don’t quit as fast as devs.

There will be plenty of devs desperate for work as large companies cuts a significant portion of the work.

Bottomline, the last time tech truly saw a recession and slow-down was in 2001. So, the entire dev cohort has never seen economic conditions that they are about to face.

Even high performers at Meta, Coinbase, Netflix will have to navigate this.

There are two choices in front of them

a) work at Twitter and other startups which requires 60+ hours of work. High workload / High Reward

b) Join services firm like IBM, TCS and have work-life balance but do menial tasks with steady but medium pay.

Elon Musk will have no trouble hiring them.

Most devs are completely out of touch about the economic reality. Now they have to work hard like the rest of other industries.

> Elon Musk will have no trouble hiring them.

He just held an all hands where he said he doesn't know how long a run rate Twitter has, Twitter may lose billions next year, and bankruptcy isn't out of the question, so it sounds like it's possible he may have trouble hiring anyone.

Yes, just like Tesla, SpaceX, probably NeuraLink.

That's how he motivates people

By sending all of his companies into bankruptcy? He motivated 5 top execs to leave!

Good Riddance

You can’t realistically argue that twitter will have as easy a time hiring as SpaceX and Tesla. They might have the same shitty working conditions, but without the risk of the company going under in a year or two. Plus everyone already there knew what they were signing up for when they joined, but at twitter you should expect a 50-75%+ employee churn over the next year. You don’t join twitter today unless you treat it like a short term contracting job.

There is always a fresh supply of extremely bright engineers from Stanford/MIT/Berkeley and thousands of universities who will have trouble finding jobs in a hiring freeze environment and wouldn't mind working for a startup like Twitter (driven by mission and large upside with equity if successful).

Not everyone in this world is a coaster

See, I’ve been wondering this, so you think that he’s driving all the advertisers and employees away to start fresh, with advertisers and employees who are loyal? Do you think the subscription service will be enough to make up the lost revenue or, how do you think he’ll earn the billion in interest payments he needs, sell Tesla stock?

Surely the mission of those companies act as a motivation. Going to mars etc. Twitter is just a utility. It isn't exciting in that way .

Remove Twitter from a) and add a third option: c) work at any company that isn’t clearly being run into the ground.

Can you give me an example of this unicorn company which isn't facing cash-crunch and burn rate?

I can give you many examples of unicorns that weren’t firing people one week after a takeover by a billionaire who doesn’t understand how account verification works.

Musk was firing useless departments (DEI, Human Rights, Ethics, Communications) -- Mostly rent-seeking roles that has no place in startups.

Musk also fired Engineers who weren't productive in the past two months. Musk has enough software expertise to see through people who bullshit and people who know their shit.

That's why the best Car Designer, the best rocket engineer, the best AI expert were all working for Tesla/SpaceX.

Is Musk clueless about Social Media? absolutely.

Do you think he isn't spending every waking second to figure out the nuances and deliver something amazing in 2-3 years?

This is where HN/Reddit/Blind/Media are clueless about Musk. They look at current state of Musk and mock him (they mocked him for his rocket dream, his electric car dream, they mocked his tents)

True to form and cluelessness, they are currently mocking his lack of expertise in creator economy and other social aspects of social media.

Let's try 2 years from now. Musk is a fast learner and has always pivoted when data shows him where he is wrong.

He will make plenty of mistakes and clueless media will be there to highlight that because there is an audience of clueless people who are thirsty for Elon Musk thrashing articles to feel good about themselves.

At the end of the day, Twitter will be successful, Elon will be a Trillionaire (from all his ventures) and there will be salty HN/Redditers who will still be mocking him in 2030 because he probably would be doing some stupid thing in some new industry

I hear, Fanatics has alot of cash.

> a) work at Twitter and other startups which requires 60+ hours of work. High workload / High Reward

Twitter is not a startup, and my understanding is startups are only "high reward" if your bet pays off (e.g. you got in early enough AND the startup was successful enough).

> Most devs are completely out of touch about the economic reality. Now they have to work hard like the rest of other industries.

Your a/b binary choice is out of touch in its own way.

This is exactly what I mean by 99% HN dev cohort completely out of touch with reality.

Twitter is absolutely a startup. They are trying to a) find product market fit with a new vision b) Have negative cash-flow, so everyone has to workhard to reduce burn rate. c) Will have new fresh equity issued them with high upside rewards. d) Will have a liquidity event in a couple of years (IPO)

For all practical purpose, Twitter is a startup.

Musk will issue new equity

> Twitter is absolutely a startup. They are trying to a) find product market fit with a new vision b) Have negative cash-flow, so everyone has to workhard to reduce burn rate. c) Will have new fresh equity issued them with high upside rewards. d) Will have a liquidity event in a couple of years (IPO)

That sounds like a very idiosyncratic definition of a "startup" that would match all kinds of poorly performing companies no one would label a "startup." I think being new, small, and chasing orders-of-magnitude upside from that small start are pretty key to the conventional definition, neither of which apply to Twitter anymore.

The labor market is still incredibly tight for engineers. Even these current layoffs have targeted non tech departments for the majority of their cuts, if they included engineering at all. Companies still want to build and there’s not enough hands.

From everyone I’m in contact with it’s a terrible time to be in sales, marketing, or hr, and the engineers are mostly bitching about no raises this year

This is an out of touch comment, not understanding the supply / demand context.

It's not only about layoffs, but not enough absorbing capacity for freshly printed Tech graduates the universities are churning out at the rate expecting previous level of hiring.

Most HN guys demanding work-life balance have seen nothing yet.

This is a great time for Startups and Startup-like firms like Twitter to hire and require 60+ hours workload. There will be fresh graduates from Stanford, MIT, Berkeley who have no choice but to put pressure on existing coasters on various companies

You can keep claiming it’s out of touch but that doesn’t make it real. There is still a heavy demand for software engineers. It’s not as great as it was a year ago but it’s not so dire companies can’t now start demanding no work life balance.

There's a third option of joining a small, lean, bootstrapped company with good work-life balance, which tend to thrive when the market isn't as frothy.

Down votes make me think a lot of HNers are in for a brutal shock.

Here’s the thing: I never said he had issues hiring anyone. I simply said you might argue Twitter is not entirely his even though he owns it.

That’s where all your startup analogies (which I find interesting!) break: Twitter is a “turn around” case. Musk had never to deal with such. He always build up companies from the ground. That’s very very different to acquiring a large company with an existing culture.

Now I’m not saying it cannot work. Maybe it does. But you can’t argue he’s done it before.

The big difference between 2001 and now is that high compensation at top jobs enables greater savings.

Most people in 2001 had to find work quickly to keep surviving. Mid-career high performers from Meta, Twitter, Netflix, etc have millions in savings and assets.

Those people could sit out a few years if they wanted, or even just retire early if they were happy with the $60-100k/year income from interest/capital gains at a consevative withdrawl rate.

Most of these people still choose to work today because they have well paying jobs which they enjoy. High performers gonna perform, etc. But, if the only option was toxic jobs combined with low pay many would simply opt-out.

Many in this dev cohort have been extremely lucky and have the privilege to take a stand. 2022 isn't really a great time to be an asshole captialist banking on qualified employees having no other options.

Fresh graduates and early career individuals are a possibility. But, you still need experienced devs to mentor them and maintain the large complex systems/infrastructure that fresh hires can't yet handle without more experience. Attracting and retaining this senior talent is the hard part.

Yes, The Tech Rich people aren't the right people to work for Twitter / Elon Musk anyway. Now, it's mostly self-selecting people of believing in the mission/elon and people looking for hungry or success.

Every industry works like this. It's only out-of-touch techies who enjoyed unprecedented rewards/hard-work ratio that need to adjust their lifestyle and expectations

Whether or not they literally own the place is aside from the posters point about new leaders coming in and automatically upending everything without taking the time to actually listen to people and learn what actually is and isn't working. But yeah, it's an ironic choice of words.

Skin in the game? A ship commander might die if something on the ship goes wrong.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

I see you edited your comment from the original:

> this seems to be a significant problem to your CO analogy.

So let me ask you… how does a ship’s commanding officer not have more skin in the game? A rich person loses their second home or yacht when things go south… a person on a ship can hit the brig or lose their life.

You’d be surprised at how much you can fuck up a ship as a CO without life-changing consequences. Unless there’s gross negligence a CO is almost certainly not even going to get discharged even if their actions lead to death of a sailor.

They’ll stop being CO and will never be promoted, but will finish out their Navy career in a job where they can’t hurt anyone, and will have almost no impact once they retire and go into civilian life.

They’re not going to do time in the brig unless there’s willful misconduct.

I believe you, but still I'd wager a CO has a higher probability of death than Elon Musk due to the conditions of their work.

I looked it up and found this at https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading...:

> Commander A. L. Wilderman, CO of USS Plunger (SSN-595), lost overboard in a storm just off San Francisco. 2 December 1973.

Who is the last software CEO that died in the course of their duty specifically due to the nature of their work?

A commander doesn’t have to go overboard due to the nature of their work. That’s no different than a CEO who happened to have a heart attack while being CEO.

Lookup James Po Ho Cheung or Sid Agrawal if you want examples of CEOs straight up murdered for their roles.

Of course it’s different. The very nature of a soldier’s job involves death. I don’t understand what you mean by “a CO doesn’t have to go overboard”, I provided an example of just that happening. Anyone on a ship has a nonzero risk of going overboard. Elon Musk has 0 risk of being swept into the sea from his desk.

Every human with a heart has some risk of heart attack. It’s silly to compare that risk to a soldier’s risk of death.

And any CEO that fires someone has a risk of being attacked by that disgruntled former employee.

This is exactly why I said

> software CEO that died in the course of their duty specifically due to the nature of their work

So that example fails the test.

The example of James Po Ho Cheung is more interesting. Now that I think about it, since software can operate in so many different domains, it’s valid that some of those can be dangerous, such as gambling in his case.

> Of course it’s different. The very nature of a soldier’s job involves death.

Absolutely not as the CO of a ship. You are orders of magnitude safer on one of those ships than working as a roofer or a farmer.

> don’t understand what you mean by “a CO doesn’t have to go overboard”, I provided an example of just that happening.

You provided an example of someone going overboard on a ship, but nothing a CO does makes them more susceptible to going over than any other person on the ship. Being a CO is not higher risk than taking a fucking Carnival cruise.

> Every human with a heart has some risk of heart attack. It’s silly to compare that risk to a soldier’s risk of death.

Given that “heart attack” is probably the most likely way a high level officer in the US military would die, I think not.

> Elon Musk has 0 risk of being swept into the sea from his desk.

Not quite. San Francisco has some pretty gnarly long tail risks from earthquakes. He’s also now in charge of one of the biggest propaganda tools in the history of humanity. The Saudi’s have wacked reporters for far less.

I think you’ve lost track of the context here and are just trying to refute every sentence in isolation, but I see no coherent refutation of the main idea.

how much skin in the game .. isn’t this a leveraged buyout, with twitter on the hook for the borrowed money ..

He put up about 30B, financed 14B.

Still a lot of skin.

Steve Job’s return to Apple was 1)

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter is 2)

The difference here is the ship is not running smoothly at all according to the new commander. It is a change in course and I think it's pretty obvious Elon wants to get rid of the people who won't be on board with the new plan. This change is one more opportunity for those dissidents to leave and for those that stay to build a better team.

And how's that been going so far?

It’s been a few short weeks. He had to cut stuff (as others like Meta are) to ease the cost drain.

Give Musk a chance… guy knows how to build and grow companies

Fire people then ask some of them to come back?

Considering his reputation (alone, not the feats of those adjacent) how true is this?

> It’s been a few short weeks. He had to cut stuff (as others like Meta are) to ease the cost drain.

I mean, the massive increase in cost is a result of Musk's debt purchasing Twitter.

Would you mind explaining this a bit further? I'm out of the loop here and don't know anything about Twitter's costs before or after Musk's purchase.

He had to take out a giant loan to afford the purchase (debt financing), which twitter needs to pay about $1B a year to service. Twitter wasn't getting anywhere near that in profit.

Ah, didn't realize this about the $1B/year. Thanks!

Twitter had like two profitable quarters in its existence and now on top of the usual operating costs they have to be profitable enough for 1 billion/year debt repayment.

If I'm being very generous, I'd give Twitter 6 more months.

I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt on this but it seems like he's acting erratically and reactively, not inspiring confidence

Grey check mark lasted less than a day? To me it seems like he's trying to do it all by himself in an area he has no expertise.

He's ignoring an FTC consent degree and seems to be running on annoyance that journalists got free bluechecks from their jobs.

Twitter is not in a "build and grow" phase. This is his first hostile takeover of a large company with a saturated market, is it not?

> Give Musk a chance… guy knows how to build and grow companies

Not sure, is there a government bailout or subsidy for tech companies as he got with Tesla?

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-201...

Yeah but at least from the outside, to continue the metaphor, this seems like a CO taking over a struggling ship and deciding to just blow up all the ammunition in place. The ship needs to do something new, and this is something new, but it seems like it's just sinking faster now.

Wouldn't the new commander always say the ship is not running smoothly?

Wouldn't they know going in what high-command's view of the ship was? Couldn't they judge the ship and crew against the others in the fleet?

The only thing that ever happens on these scenarios, are that the skilled folks who are concerned about losing their jobs will move and Twitter will be left with the dregs who stay because they can't get a new job elsewhere.

Thank goodness COs can operate entire ships by themselves, otherwise they'd probably need some tact and grace to get the ship to its destination safely.

> The difference here is the ship is not running smoothly at all according to the new commander.

That’s not a difference at all, as it would be exactly what (2) were thinking of their new commands as well.

Has that approach ever succeeded anywhere?

> The difference here is the ship is not running smoothly at all according to the new commander

I mean, if you ask any commanders in group 2, they're going to all say that.

Your entire reasoning behind your comment indicates you don't understand this point I'm making about leadership. You're talking about a "new plan" as if we all agreed that Twitter was doing so badly that it needed a 180. You use "dissidents" and "better team" as if it's a fact that things are so bad and the team is so inept that Elon could do nothing but burn the place to the ground and make a phoenix from the ashes.

My point was that the organization/ship is more than it's current head, it's a massive organism and if you make systemic changes that affect a sick or even healthy organism massively you tend to just destroy/kill it rather than improve it. The best way to fix/improve something so large and supposedly unhealthy as Twitter is by small or medium steps that are well-thought-out, over time.

You seem to be basing this on the idea of a ship full of decent and willing sailors who had a common cause. I'm sure even those good type-1 captains you mention would still get rid of malingerers or enemy sympathizers.

Elon's got activist employees who're trying to bring him down personally and entire useless product divisions so the best thing to do is cut out the expensive rot - nothing ruins morale like having hostile and counterproductive teammates dragging you down.

The part of the company takes takes tweets, stores tweets, and displays tweets seems to be working fairly well. The rest is on the rocks or was headed for them full steam.

> I'm sure even those good type-1 captains you mention would still get rid of malingerers

No, they'd try and figure out the motivation of the malignerer, or lack thereof, first. We had one guy who was a great tech, but then for a few months he showed up drunk to watch and was lazy. Found out his wife left him with the kids, to another state. The officer's mess arranged with some of the enlisted senior crew to invite the guy to family events every week, dinner and stuff, and helped him get back that family feeling with the ship, so he had something to work for.

> or enemy sympathizers.

I doubt anyone in the Navy I met was a spy for an enemy. I also doubt someone at Twitter is rooting for TikTok and working against Twitter in that direction.

>Elon's got activist employees who're trying to bring him down personally

Not trying to be confrontational, but whenever I see comments like this, I think that people really need to read up on narcissistic personality disorder. The "I'm being personally attacked" tactic is glaringly apparent. It's super common in cults too when the cult leader starts losing control of things (since they commonly have narcissism as well). People with NPD are completely incapable of comprehending that they may actually be at fault in any way and absolutely have to interpret failure as being due to conspiracies against them

It's not Elon saying this, I'm reading headlines. "Elon to ruin twitter and/or democracy, says Twitter insider", etc.

God how can I downvote this. Did you even read what the OP said? So in this case the "dissidents" are people that appreciate incremental change, like their opinions to be valued in their respective field of expertise, and possibly appreciate being able to work from home?

A better analogy is Twitter is a sick and dying patient and drastic measures are needed to be taken to save it. Whether or not you agree with those measures, well you don't have $44b on the line. Of all of Elon's businesses, this one is probably the most in his wheelhouse. He's a web guy after all.

>A better analogy is Twitter is a sick and dying patient and drastic measures are needed to be taken to save it.

Was it that before Musk actually decided to buy it? Because as far as I can tell, the ad dollars started dropping after his announcement.

Their net profit was all over the place for the last 5 years including a big net loss during the pandemic.

> He’s a web guy after all

Of course he is.

patient is dying, better chop off an arm and a leg and remove some of the monitors and move the patient to a different building.

Extreme, but sometimes patients need exactly that

I mean, those $12B annual debt service payments didn't exist before. Seems clear that Twitter was struggling in many ways, but things seemed to be accelerating post acquisition.

I think it's 1.2B/annum, not 12B.

He’s a web guy in the same way that Rudy Giuliani is an expert in criminal law. It was true in the 90s but definitely not anymore.

He is not a web guy, but he is a Twitter power user, thus sees problems and limitations in the platform. But then: his usage and experience probably is far from representative for most users.

Difference is you served (or are serving) during peacetime. This is wartime..

Twitter is in a shit load of trouble and unlike Meta & Snap which are crashing like a shitcoin.. Elon bought Twitter at 2x-3x what its actually worth.

Unlike the past decade, where these companies had easy access to funny money during a tech bull market.. now we are entering a uuge recession.. Twitter (or any company for that matter) which doesn't go into wartime mode is gonna get rekt

The Navy doesn't differentiate between wartime and peacetime for training or operations, generally. The difference would lie in what type of ordnance we used (real during wartime, inert during peace) and the measures we operated under at sea (we'd emit less signals and dog the hatches).

Also, in wartime, it's actually even more important that a new CO didn't upset the delicate balance or change procedures, because you need to rely on your skills and drills during wartime even more! Changing things just makes it harder to do your job and during wartime that would be deadly.

Also, you don't know where or when I served, so don't make assumptions.

I meant no disrespect, just an educated guess since there has been no major war after WWII..

I'm mainly talking about the difference in strategy/posture during wartime vs peacetime.. Just look at whats happening in Ukraine rn, Russia changing commanders to go full scorched earth.

To save a company like Twitter, this is exactly the kind of thing u need to do. Private equity does this all the time.

Ah yes, it's like Sun Tzu said, the best way to wage a war is to get rid of half your army, and demoralize the other half.

If half of the army hates you and is trying to make you lose, yeah.

I don't think he got rid of people based on how they felt about him, but even if he did, surrounding yourself with yes men is not a good strategy

Seeing someone who served in the Navy being told that their peacetime service is very different from the war that Twitter is currently experiencing is... I'm not even sure how to react to that. Lots of execs like to stretch those military metaphors -- they're all in the trenches, all hands on deck, take no prisoners and all that -- but I think you may have stretched this one way past its breaking point.

You're twisting my words. Peacetime is different to wartime is a general statement that has nothing to do with his service.

Military metaphors are common in business for a reason. Modern business management inherited a lot of the military after WW2. To this day, you'll see people with Special Ops history consulting businesses (Echelon Front)

> Twitter is in a shit load of trouble and unlike Meta & Snap which are crashing like a shitcoin..

Whatever state Twitter was in before Musk entered with a white knight syndrome, it was in a better state than it is now.

> Elon bought Twitter at 2x-3x what its actually worth.

Well, that was his first mistake at Twitter before he even "owned" it.

its is in signigicantly better shape. Ops cost have basically halved whilst growth metrics are breaking records. Revnue down because of commie backlash but thats been replaced by blue subscriber revenue in real time..

still tho, that 2x-3x multiple is a huuge gap to close and the company is still far from getting out its troubles. Troubles which btw existed wayyy before Elon or the recessions.

You google Twitter financials and metrics over the past years, its been grossly mismanaged..

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