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Comment by hallway_monitor | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

> 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.

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?

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 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.

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?

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.

Has that approach ever succeeded anywhere?

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...

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