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Comment by MouseTown | Hacker News Reader

Elon’s tactics have been to eliminate positions regardless of individual strength - e.g. his recent “hardcore” email. That is culling but it is not whaling. In my experience, whales have the most freedom to leave and will be the fastest to employ it. So, one could argue, this is anti-whaling.

Whatever the case, it’s clear he’s not in on some master scheme us mortals can’t understand. He’s just a man with an inflated ego who wants to feel above the rest. Just like the Twitter poster here.

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That was my initial thought too about this theory. In any tech company competent people are always the first ones to leave on first signs of trouble. They already have new opportunities lined up and they are just waiting for an excuse to leave and probably get a pay rise on their way out. High functioning people in general tend to have each others backs because they have more to give and it's just more fun to work being surrounded by capable people rather than use your time instructing people who never seem to get it and just leech your time.

In case I sound elitist, I don't think those competent people have any inherent trait that makes them that way, it's more to do with whether you know how to do deep work, it's something you can learn.

That's just not true - most competent/valuable people have an 'ownership mentality' - that is they invest serious mental effort into making every feature as good as it can be, to tackle hard challenges rather than moving - this unfortunately is not always optimal for either career progression or rising through the ranks internally and gives management some leverage to fleece these people.

Or maybe...

Just maybe...

Twitter was a bloated and poorly-run company that was in serious need of an enema.

This is bouyed by the facts. Employees did very little actual work, each had multiple bosses who haphazardly lead their teams to accomplish nothing in 12 years, and oversaw mountains of wasteful corporate spending that produced nothing but losses in 10 out of the last 12 FY. Upwards of $4,000,000,000.

Musk could drag himself into the office, guzzle down 2 smoothies and "relax" ...and do nothing else till 4pm and still do better than the last decade of Twitter leadership.

Instead of an enema the patient has been pared down to a lobotomized quadriplegic.

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