Twitter spends $13M/year on food service for SF HQ | Hacker News Reader

Twitter spends $13M/year on food service for SF HQ

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22 pointsmfiguiere22 comments

This is peak private equity mentality stupidity. Why is he even thinking about a problem where he can at most save a few million a year? Twitter is losing $4m a day and is bleeding talent. Providing food is one of the highest benefit to cost ratio expenses for employee satisfaction. At a time when employee morale is at an all time low and Elon is forcing a return to office, I can legitimately see charging for meals as the last straw for any remaining talent at Twitter.

Also it probably pays for itself not having your staff have to wait in line at local restaurants and taking longer for lunch, but I imagine his fanbase loving the stories of the efficient business savvy hero coming in and cleaning out SV of the lazy fat cats.

Also, if his solution is to charge for meals… the meals costing $400 a person and people not paying for their meals are two different problems. One is an efficiency problem and one is an expense problem. Charging people for their meals doesn’t solve the efficiency problem(if it exists)

Worth noting that around $3M a day of twitter’s losses exist only to pay the debt Elon himself took on. Why would Twitter employees be working to pay for Elon to be CEO rather than for their own lunches?

Not only does the cost he quotes not add up (given that he's an outright liar this does not surprise me) but even in the extreme example like you said this is a drop in the bucket compared to the millions burning each day. And since Elon decided to force everyone back into the office, he expects them to work but also offer zero perks to working in office.

It's all so incredibly stupid.

He's going about it in an awkward way but Musk wants the employees gone as cheaply as possible. Everything he's done so far is just means to an end. Asking laid off workers to return to work (refuse = fired for cause + no severance), demanding everyone else to return to the office (quit = no severance or UI), killing office perks (quit = no severance or UI).

The pettiness is the point. Elon is working hard to dismantle everything and anything that employees enjoy to drive them to leave without severance.

How much talent does Twitter really need? It's still online. Is talent only available when lunches are free and swanky, and work is remote?

Believe it or not, there's talent outside Twitter and even SV. Twitter employees aren't special.

Is he cutting snacks too? Or just full-fledged meals?

Meals seems like something an excessively profitable company would offer as a perk, but that ain’t Twitter right now. I don’t think Microsoft or Amazon provide free meals to their employees.

Elon needs to message whoever is in charge of his food service and ask them to cut back. The guy is morbidly obese.

That being said, $13 million divided across 7,500 employees is approximately $1700 per employee. I’m curious what the cost per employee in the office was. At first glance $140 per month per employee does not seem outrageous.

I'm sure employees could easily grab a $20 sandwich near Twitter HQ. ;-)

Assuming an occupancy of 20% with 5000 employees, that's around 1000 lunches per day or around 2*10^5 lunches per year.

Works out to about $65 per lunch. How did Elon calculate >$400 per lunch?

> Twitter's San Francisco headquarters houses about 2,500 employees [0]

2500 * 0.10 = 250 * 20 workdays/m * 12m = 60000 "meals"/year or 13000/60 = $216.66 per meal.

[0] https://www.builtinsf.com/2020/02/18/twitter-office-san-fran...

>Works out to about $65 per lunch. How did Elon calculate >$400 per lunch?

Probably the olive tapenade [1].

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/moiravetter/2015/06/04/the-4000...

Twitter holds talks and meet up style events for area developers. They provide food, and their offerings are among the nicest.

My data is a few years old, but I always loved the Twitter meetups for this reason, and I remember the food more than I remember the talks.

Elon about to make one of the classic blunders, next to starting a land war in asia.

Instead of assuming that he is making mistake after mistake after mistake, it might be worth examining how he might benefit in a quick Twitter bankruptcy. I wonder what the terms of that debt look like.

This seems like a question that helps people preserve internal just-world thinking and protect against the feeling that the idiots are in charge. Why would he personally need to oversee running the company into the ground? in a universe where there is some theoretical payout for bankrupting the company (which may be this one) wouldn't it would be much easier to keep his reputation as a genius intact and let somebody else crash it? Occam's razor says he just doesn't know what he's doing.

No, wait a moment, I think it's a fair question. Elon's default posture for the past decade has been clowning on the surface whilst having an agenda underneath. At the very least, he hedges his bets if nothing else.

I don't like the guy, but him suddenly sucking at business is admittedly a new phenomenon and I wouldn't rule out a greater play.

I would expect that running a product based company and running a service based company are two different things, where one can be good at one but sucks at the other.

Fair enough, I certainly don't claim to have full knowledge of what's at stake here.

Reminds me of The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free

https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

People expected Musk to solve hunger. Turns out he is unwilling to solve even the employee hunger!

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