Less than half of Twitter's remaining employees signed up to work for Musk

If I’m considered critical to help in hardcore startup mode not only dig out of a multi-deca billion dollar hole but clock into a multi-billion dollar profit, there will be cash money over the barrel and non-dilutive non-screwable share grants——not options, shares——beyond the usual compensation.

That’s just me but experience taught me to ignore everything business people tell you during compensation discussions except the Benjamins on a written contract your attorney vetted and signed off upon.

Until you have F* You Money, blandishments of living your dream, making a dent in the universe, visions and so on don’t pay for housing, healthcare, childcare, good education, college, and retirement.

Asking employees at the precipice of a recession to stay on a highly risky venture under Gigapress scale, physiological consequences pressure with zero material upside except to leadership is of course going to net few takers.

If I had $50M in the brokerage account, I could take the risk of flaming out and not finding a job for a couple years during the recession. I wouldn’t do that even if I had $2M, the drag on retirement with a SWR would be kind of noticeable, when there are still job openings that would compensate at least enough to tread water until a better opportunity came along with drastically better work life balance. Musk could light all $44B on fire and his personal physical lifestyle wouldn’t appreciably change; maybe give up his private jet and subscribe to a fractional jet program type of First World Problems that he’d shrug off until he made the wealth back. Probably 500 employees of the ~2000 remaining took the offer to buy a runway to find another job.

Running a global scale infrastructure and the adtech business which drives it on that few employees will be challenging. I know adtech has amazing operating margins, but pulling that off would be Craigslist leverage on 11, and they don’t have a multi year runway, more like a one year runway if that. Unless Musk envisions some radically fundamentally different way of operating adtech with profoundly higher leverage ratios, and pulling that off with a fundamentally different technical infrastructure vastly less labor intensive to develop, operate, maintain, and innovate upon, I’m not sure I see how to get from A to B.