Twitter has fired more software engineers
twitter.com
twitter.com
I’ve met many more “witch-hunt” reviews that were just a reason to thin the company to please VC or shareholders.
The article/tweet doesn’t mention it, but I assume they have the same severance package of a few months as the rest. If so, it could be a lot worse
ROFL! Should have been done the other way around, see if the code quality was good enough to keep, then send the "hardcore" e-mail. Doing it backwards, is arguably sadistic.
When there is this much power-imbalance, I actually consider Hanlon’s razor to be harmful. It does not matter to the workers being fired whether Musk is acting out of ignorance or malice. The action speaks for it self.
They should have at least gotten a horse out for the deal.
And during the holidays at end of year, when hiring seems to slow down for a couple months.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/77b-fmla-protec...
The specifics are https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/29/825.220#
In particular:
(c) The Act's prohibition against interference prohibits an employer from discriminating or retaliating against an employee or prospective employee for having exercised or attempted to exercise FMLA rights. For example, if an employee on leave without pay would otherwise be entitled to full benefits (other than health benefits), the same benefits would be required to be provided to an employee on unpaid FMLA leave. By the same token, employers cannot use the taking of FMLA leave as a negative factor in employment actions, such as hiring, promotions or disciplinary actions; nor can FMLA leave be counted under no fault attendance policies. See § 825.215.
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I'll also point to things like Employer Makes $1.3 Million FMLA Mistake by Firing Worker After Mexico Trip that demonstrate the "be careful when dealing with discipline of people who are on FMLA and check with a lawyer first." https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...
Yeah well not exactly. From the thread:
Those fired got 4 weeks severance, by the way. A slap in the face, given that if they chose to not click "yes" to stay just a week ago, they would have gotten 3 months.
They might have believed in Twitter 2.0, but still got a worse deal than those who chose to simply leave.
The performance warning email closes with this line:
"Please use this opportunity to restore our confidence and demonstrate your contributions to the team and company."
It should be Twitter 2.0 that needs to restore confidence with employees.
Happy Thanksgiving.
It is already worse. And just to top it off, management wants people to make efforts to regain their leaders' confidence in them. That's vaguely Orwellian.
(Or pseudo-severance, for countries and states with certain regulations, to ensure actual legal compliance even among the public perception of everything happening instantly without regard to sources of delay.)
True, but not for the reasons you’re implying. Those reporting are accurate Elon is doing these things, but Elon is impulsive, and gets reined in often, sometimes by the few adults in the room, sometimes by the legal system.
So yes, these employees will most likely get their legal severance payments… after a protracted legal case that ends 24 months from now.
This doesn’t change the fact that Elon may not be the best manager or person in the world.
It’s mentioned in the 4th tweet. Says they get 4 weeks.
I have tried this whenever I moved to a new company and read other people’s code and can almost pick out more than half of the coaster or BSers immediately without talking to any of them. You will miss a few more but you rarely get false positives.
BTW the loc is a stupid metric should never be used in the first place.
Doing things like this with kindness and wisdom would be better than swinging the axe with incomplete information. Especially H1Bs who are reliant on an employer to remain in the country are hopefully exempt from such extreme punishment and are at least given a shot at doing what Musk wants in terms of code quality.
From my point of view there’s no need to treat people as disposable commodities who cannot improve given the right environment. And I don’t like anyone thinking their opinions are that much better than anyone else’s, but these are the times we live in…
Wonder how many of them return, knowing they also can be fired at any time based on a single code review."
Why would you return to something that will try to spit you out at the first sign of trouble? Or have those poor people working on a visa no choice?
It's horrifying to allow well-established industry concepts and terms to be redefined overnight by a single incompetent individual.
I honestly wonder if it's as farcical as some of the jokes about it: https://twitter.com/mnateshyamalan/status/159372367039601869...
First you ask a crazy upfront payment to come back, then you ask a crazy wage per month.
If they agree, you're mad at yourself for not asking more.
That's how I would do it. Like a x10 sum of money.
How any engineer looks at Twitter and doesn't say, "We should consider a union..." is beyond me.
Not typically pro-union in tech, but Twitter is making the best case for one I’ve seen yet.
They could afford to pay a lawyer a whole lot to fight layoffs and firings.
Not a perfect set of options, but better options than they have today.
No, they are all fired. Didn't you hear? Every EU software engineer has been fired.
Even in Ireland/UK which have pretty employer friendly labour laws, none of the FB employees have actually been laid off yet, they're still in a consultation period (till December I believe).
Unfortunately for US CEO's, the US labour law does not apply globally.
In theory that’s a bargaining chip that organized labor could have used (this would involve labor solidarity between the laid-off/fired workers and the ones he wanted to keep). Bringing in “scabs” with zero institutional knowledge to run the site effectively without torching his $30 billion equity investment could have been very difficult, especially since RTO in San Francisco is apparently valuable to him.
Engineering is cut down to about ~10% or less in many areas. A friend of mine told me their group is down to ~10 from 155 after 2/3 being laid off and about 90% of the remainder rejecting the "hardcore" ultimatum.
I'm expecting a lot of the non-SF facilities to close and those people to be fired as well. They should have considered geography more in the layoff, but because he had a bunch of Tesla goons deciding who to cut instead of people who know the business or HR professionals who know how to plan workforce reduction it doesn't seem like geographic distribution was considered. But it's certainly not economical to operate many office locations designed for hundreds with only a small fraction of that number still employed.
Before access was blocked, from what I've heard, many of the EU Twitter employees read the "you're fired" email, said "hah, not from that I'm not" and went right back into work the next day.
If Twitter employees were unionized here in the US, it would be a similar story: Musk could say "you're all fired", but unless he went through the processes outlined in the union contract to fire the people, they would not be fired. At most, if he could get the payroll employees to do his bidding, he could stop them from getting paid, but that would absolutely not hold up in court, and he would have to pay them with back pay once the legal system got done with it—and that kind of legal dispute probably wouldn't take 2 years, since it would be an extremely straightforward case of breach of contract.
"You know, those $500k a year are nice and all, but what I really want is $125k, job security and someone who makes sure only union members are allowed to plug in network cables."
Engineers are making large amounts of money, that's why they don't care about unions.
Give me a break. This sector of the economy is literally the upper echelon of humanity.
They won the lottery compared to most people and act like this is some affront. What a bunch of baloney.
Why would anyone re-join Twitter2 or get hired there?
Why are the people that got put on the PIP doing anything but trying to find another job?
You know Elon's just going to abuse you and not much else, he's proven it a few times now. It's very clear, he thinks you're a chump and he's going to keep treating you like a chump.
It would be odd to expect more from other employers.
No, its all about costs. A layoff for cost reasons gives the employee unemployment and costs the employer higher UI tax rates (which are based, in part, on the cost of UI paid to their employees vs. past payments.)
A firing for failure to meet performance standards other employers met doesn’t give the employee unemployment and doesn’t result in additional costs to the employer.
Of course, a pretextual firing might be the subject of an unemployment appeal, but at the pay of a Twitter software engineer, while people might take UI they are entitled to, they aren’t likely to bother fighting it based on need (but might just to make a point.)
And the enormous amount of debt that Musk heaped on the company as part of the LBO.
Let us not all forget that Twitter's debt service increased by a factor of ten thanks to the acquisition. This is a problem of Musk's own making.
Can this be real? That’s seriously f-ed up.
This is why not getting to review severance (if leaving) and employment contracts (if staying) before having to make the "commit to hardcore" decision was unreasonable.
Lesson: if your employer offers you a buyout, take it.
It already stopped making sense at "10 most salient lines of code". He's trying to spread his truth that he knows anything about software (or tech at large), a fiction that was probably always a big reason for why people gave him money. Enough seem to buy it. Probably the one thing he is an actual genius at: Marketing.
In any case, I wouldn't really trust a food critic who couldn't cook. But even the greatest home cook is not a chef.
Why should you see the code, or learn who the judge is, or be the judge yourself? Are you qualified to judge someone else's $44B acquisition? If you haven't recently purchased a social network for $44B, then you are not qualified to look at things from their perspective either.
Go start your own company and then you can do what you want with yours and your investors' money, but Elon Musk doesn't owe you a shred of explanation for anything he chooses with the company that he bought that he clearly believes was on life support, at best.
Well, it is now.
However, if you were in the fashion industry, and especially if you wanted to work at a company founded by an inspiring woman, it was absolutely the place you wanted to work. HR were inundated by applications for non-tech positions by highly capable and motivated people, and HR acted like it. It was very selective, and the best people fought for jobs there and worked hard.
But for tech workers, it was simply an decent place to work, and was perpetually a little bit short-staffed. HR couldn't wrap their minds around the fact that this one segment had choices and weren't really that fussed about working there, and so it took a lot of work for engineering managers to free up basic recruitment marketing money, to streamline recruitment processes etc.
I wonder if there's some of that going on. For people who want to work on the cutting edge of space-tech, SpaceX has to be very high up on the list of places you'd want to work. For people who want to build electric cars, ditto Tesla.
But for software engineers who are good enough to do the work that needs to be done at Twitter? meh, there are choices. There are companies with much more interesting problems, companies with larger scale, companies who'll pay better. Are there that many Twitter True Believers? My understanding is the big draw beforehand for Twitter was that they had a great working environment, and that's evaporated.
I wonder if Musk will be able to get his head around that.
Doubtful based on how this is going.
It could be interesting story to tell after years
But you've got to go in knowing it will be intense chaos and it could end suddenly for you personally.
You know how they say that you should hire during recessions etc, going against the stream is often really lucrative.
Your main point is absolutely right: whenever you have a company where a lot of people want to work, that company can (and always does) get away with extreme hiring selectivity and abuse of the people it selects. See also the video game industry.
Did Elon write any code during his time at PayPal?
To recap for folks unfamiliar with the history:
Peter Thiel co-founded the electronic payments company that developed PayPal.
Musk co-founded an online bank which had massive security holes.
The two companies merged and Musk was fired before the name was changed to PayPal.
See part 1 of Common Sense Skeptic's video on YouTube: Debunking Elon Musk
Dartboard.
Musk believes that, having fired 80% or so of the staff already, it's still overstaffed. He wants to reduce it to a group of people he can fit in a room and shout at directly. It's the literal implementation of "firings will continue until morale improves".
He now owns a significant chunk of the firm (not quite 100%, there were some other buyers, etc. but close enough). So now every $1 expensed by the loss-making company, he sees as a dollar he personally loses - and that's after overpaying through the nose for the company (he got hit by a double-whammy: Twitter value crashed along with other Tech stocks, and he had to sell more Tesla stock to cover the over-inflated valuation).
This is quite different from the perspective of a, say, 5% owner. For every dollar spent by the firm, that's only a $0.05 "spend" out of the minority stake owner. It's easier to justify such expenses to yourself, emotionally.
Basically, the more of your personal wealth is locked into an enterprise, the more risk-averse you become about it. If you have a diversified portfolio of small stakes, you're more likely to be bullish on them individually and encourage investment for high-risk / high-reward profile, but not if you basically have one massive bet.
So I'm guessing, he's thinking he not only overpaid for Twitter, he is now paying through the nose just to keep the office open, and he's not clear what it's all for. So without an idea for profits, he is desperate to cut the losses.
Obviously the human cost - collateral damage to Musk - is tremendous and it makes me so sad to see people's livelihoods shattered on a whim like this.
If Musk were risk-averse he wouldn’t be rocking the boat. None of what he’s done since the sale qualifies as “risk averse”.
btw. what happens if you start your own company?
One has to assume he's like this at his other companies as well, which is absolutely shredding their reputation in my eyes.
That is by design. There is a mindset were powerful people feels that they need to show up their power, otherwise why do they have it? That is one of the reasons inequality causes many illnesses in society as the rich few feel the need to be cruel on people with less power. If it was not Musk it would be someone else.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/elon-...
This is an argument that needs to be done really carefully: its logical conclusion is that his cruelty is deterministic and there is nothing he can do about it. People have a certain degree of agency, he actively chooses to be cruel amongst other options at his disposal.
Let Musk keep $5B, he'll be able to live luxuriously forever on that. But he won't be able to ruin thousands of lives so easily.
More than rich enough to live on, but nowhere near rich enough to buy governments and corporations on a whim.
(Snark aside, this idea is completely unfeasible for a number of reasons you can probably think of given a couple of minutes)
'there should be no billionaires' is just a dumb idea put out for impact more than any hope of achieving it. When I try to steelman the idea I come up with the fact that smaller amounts of capital can be allocated more efficiently, and that society should therefore try to ensure capital naturally flows to individuals with less rather than more assets. Not a bad point, Warren Buffet definitely made higher returns early in his career and he credits that in large part to being able to pick targets better when investing millions than when investing billions.
But going from 'billionaires are a sign of capital inefficiency' to 'lets ban billionaires' rhetoric posits using violence to seize or suppress billionaires capital, which requires a larger concentration of capital than the billionaires have now. It's a statement at war with its own ideals, I shouldn't even be giving it the oxygen necessary to refute it.
Try a wealth tax like that and the Musk charitable foundation is founded with the goals of fighting climate change via electric cars and making a Mars colony.
That said, if we can decommidify housing, I'd be much more willing to discuss wealth caps in the millions of dollars.
There are so many nuances in play that you can’t really put a hard number to this.
The irony is that if you want to believe in the power of a market economy (which I do, or at least did before the modern era), you must oppose the massive concentration of wealth because it distorts our markets to the point of irrational uselessness.
What I disagree with is the benefit of an explicit limit that's formally set once and can't be updated. And if it could be updated the limit would be constantly ahead of where the richest person is now and meaningless. Markets are an ecosystem, ecosystems are self-correcting. In large part, markets are the self-correcting behavior of humans valuing tangible things writ large. The market sets the limit, the idea of an autocratic limit set from outside such a system because we don't like the signal it's sending just strikes me as hubristic.
I think it's a mistake to single out one single economic system: specifically unlimited, unrestrained free-market capitalism, and frame that system as the universe's base, "natural" system. Doing so conveniently lets you frame deviations from that system as "unnatural" or "autocratic". Unlimited free-market capitalism is not some natural, universal frame of reference--it is a deliberate choice made and enforced by governments/people, and that choice can be un-made by people.
We mostly agree that a minimum wage that can change with political pressure is a good economic policy. Nothing but reasoning and political will prevents us from agreeing that a maximum wage, or maximum net worth, could be good economic policy.
In fact, even if you're arguing for a state's right to ban emmigration, that's just an additional difficulty to voting with one's feet. People still left East Germany despite it being illegal, because West Germany was outcompeting it in a truly unconstrained market of where people wanted to live.
5 or 10 million starts to look lot more reasonable limit.
Fire, ask people back, then fire again. Roll out a feature that everyone tells you is going to cause impersonation issues, then roll it back when it....causes impersonation issues.
I mentioned in a comment the other day that I heard a take that's very simple. Because Musk overpaid by so much, there is zero path to success. Now he's just trying to stave off bankruptcy which seems inevitable.
He also seems to have zero vision. If he had a vision, getting rid of people doing the work is the last thing you want to do. The old adage, there are no bad teams, only bad leaders comes to mind. He appears to want to run Twitter as-is on a skeleton crew - more like a PE firm rather than visionary founder.
Then again, part of reason behind this might be that now he is playing with something he paid with it own money and lot of it. Not a "toy" project of couple million or dozen million.
Agree completely. Part of my shitshow comment is how haphazard and plan free the layoffs have gone.
That's what it looks like from outside looking in. But it also exposes him as a loudmouth talking out of his ass for cheap PR. The whole Twitter mess is a result of an ego trip/PR stunts he thought he could get out of for free.
If literally nobody in the company believes you to be the CEO, then you are no more powerful than anyone else. Similarly, even if you're not the CEO, but everyone believes you are, you have all the power of being one.
This means if you want to stay powerful, you have to exercise your power to remind people that you have it, thus reinforce their belief in it, and retain it so you can exercise it again to remind people and so on.
Of course, I would argue there are better ways to gain and display power.
From the mindset I mentioned, yes, Musk is needlessly cruel and a bully. But he was quite clear from the beginning that he's doing it in good part for society at large - so the normal priority of stakeholders is actually reversed. Society and discourse become most important, then users, then clients and employees.
Judge a man by his actions, not by his words. So far, his actions have been cruel and destructive, not only to Twitter's employees and Twitter's users, but also to everyone forced to share a society with the newly-chaotic, increasingly-bot-filled, resurgently-hateful, woefully-undermoderated Twitter. Musk is a liar. Stop worshiping this man.
Elon told me he wants to make Twitter a free speech area. Why did anything negative happen because I posted a family friendly meme? Just because it insults the owner of the free speech platform?
I only log into Twitter once a month. I post even less. This is the first time I’ve had issues.
I don’t have proof for loading being janky at times in recent weeks but I could be on the lookout and take screenshots of that too.
The worst thing as a [tech] worker is people being okay with Twitter as it is now and with more gradual degradation. I will vote with my class interest by saying Twitter isn’t fine. Why should most people be fine with shoddy work by overworked employees or with possibly weak safety and security. All of this because debt repayment has to happen on billions of dollars of debt put on to the company’s books.
I don’t know the name of this fallacy but the “if X doesn’t do it somebody will” doesn’t seem convincing.
Especially as the previous management of Twitter wasn’t like that so it’s actually already disproved by history.
Do you mean that in the sense that some superrich person at a different company, or do you mean that in the sense that pretty much every superrich person who would run Twitter would act the same way?
Despite all the lofty platitudes about building good companies, startups are always headed towards the uncaring wood chipper of finance. In a way, Musk violently running the company into the ground (ala the cliche of the rich person buying a sports car only to crash it on the way home) is a better outcome than the surveillance-monetization pot slowly boiling.
On top of that, GOP members of congress were threatening an investigation if they turned down the offer: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/22/republicans-demand-twitter-b...
There's more than profitability that makes a good CEO. And Jack at least didn't run Twitter into the ground.
FWIW it seemed that Twitter was on a good trajectory when Jack left as CEO.
I'm not trying to compare Jack Dorsey to Larry Elison, but my point is that Elon exists somewhere between these two on the axis of "deliberate ruthlessness" and "bumbling incompetence". For Twitter to be profitable, it has to be run like a business instead of a parody of the tech industry.
He left in 2021 when they lost $220M (not a loss of a billion dollars) because of an $800M settlement which means they -technically- made a profit of $580M (very much not a loss of a billion dollars.)
If you're thinking of 2020, that does seem to have been a $1.1bn net loss but that's somewhat balanced by 2019 which was a $1.4bn net income (according to [1])
[1] https://www.republicworld.com/technology-news/social-media-n...
Musk has added a $1bn/year debt servicing obligation - the company will have to make $1bn/year profit just to reach net $0. I don't think there's any scenario available where this isn't "running it into the ground".
Twitter has no such buffer, so we get to see the full scale of his hubris and impulsiveness in action.
Every company I've worked for has this, its very common.
Also, I suspect this is the same story being repeated rather than being sourced from multiple different spacex middle managers. (Which doesn't mean its untrue, just don't assume hearing something in multiple places means it has more than one root source)
As much as you may hate Musk, if you’ve been in this industry for a while, you know SV is full of people who are better at slacking, whedling, and coasting than coding, and in some cases have no skill at all and are clearly nepotism hires. Musk clearly does not have time for that sort of hiring, but I don’t think it’s a unique thing to him; any other non-SV businessowner would almost certainly be doing the same.
Firing them with much less severance than the "nonbelievers" he pushed out previously is a pointlessly cruel action.
Over in the EU, it is quite clearly a set of societal obligations that he is violating, ones that are enshrined in law.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/21/technology/elon-musk-twit...
194.
Twitter has fired more software engineers (twitter.com/gergelyorosz)
139 points by r721 3 hours ago | flag | hide | 242 comments>The FAQ notes that submission rank is impacted by "software which downweights overheated discussions." A good rule of thumb for this effect is when the number of comments on a submission exceeds its score.
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
I recommend checking https://news.ycombinator.com/active ("Most active current discussions") once per day to find these discussions.
It is quite amazing/awful to me how it is possible to break a platform that has been working pretty well for 15 years in a matters of weeks. This is quite fast.
Anyway, most of all I sincerely hope the layed-off people will find another, better job as quickly as they were fired.
It's not completely broken but I've been definitely experiencing a degradation the past 5-7 days.
"Fail whale" is a well-used term for a reason. Twitter has always been known for low reliability. It got better, though, but still nowhere near Facebook etc.
The Fail whale itself got retired in 2013, and there hasn't been a complete global outage since.
On another note, in any major city in the US, a software developer is making above the local average income and has no reason to not have a “go to hell fund”.
If you have above average income, most likely you will have above average outgoings, including on things you can't instantaneously cut like housing costs, car finance and school fees.
The only way I managed to create savings is by earning like a wealthier person but living like a less wealthy one, but there's a social cost to this course of action.
I’m 48 now and I learned a long time ago after my first job to always live in a position of f*^k you (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xdfeXqHFmPI). I believed in living like that from 1999 when I was making $60K a year, for the next 20 years when I was bumping around as your bog standard journeyman CRUD Enterprise developer and after that when I pivoted slightly to get into BigTech.
You are seeing the consequences right now of what happens when you let lifestyle inflation happen.
We also had a house built in 2016 and purposefully chose the cheapest floor plan and even that was 3000 square feet (builders won’t build small houses)
I think it's become a matter of pluralistic ignorance [0], especially in the last few decades. Norms have a way of sticking around longer than the social consequences for not following them.
If you earn good money similar to your peers, your social opportunities will often be commensurate with those earnings.
If people know you earn less you may find them sympathetic eg suggesting cheaper social options. But if they know you earn as much as or even more than them, they may not look upon you so happily. They feel in a way cheated that instead of spending your money on time with them, you save it for future-you. Kind of selfish, it could be argued.
Isn't that natural by the definition of saving up? That you'll have less money here and now, because you are saving for later?
> but there's a social cost to this course of action.
Only if the people you hang around spend more money than you. There can also be social costs to earning and spending more money than people around you.
Of course it doesn't mean you should do all that in lieu of saving, but it's nonsense to claim there are never any social costs to living a lower or higher lifestyle than your friends.
“I won’t be able to go on $x vacation with you all. I will have to catch you next time”.
I work for $BigTech remotely in a lower cost of living area. Our income is much higher than many of our friends. We purposefully choose places that are affordable.
I was just planning a trip with my cousins (we grew up together like siblings) and everyone without small kids and responsibilities was talking about going to all inclusive in Mexico for a week. My being the only person reading the room - knowing that one of my cousins had twins in high school and knowing her situation - I suggested a much cheaper option.
On the other hand, my wife and I have had to say no to vacations we would typically go on with friends because they just weren’t in our budget because of the combination of expenses we are having transition to our digital nomad lifestyle and the drop in the value of my unvested RSUs in the River company.
The things you can do as a married couple with an established social circle are quite different.
Not to mention if you have costly medical conditions or past medical debt to pay, if you have college debt to pay, if you're financially supporting your parents, if you are paying for past judgments, alimony, or child support... There are a lot of valid reasons for not being able to save, despite having a high income, that have nothing to do with living like a wealthy person.
The median household income in the US is $70K
People often also incur substantial costs, almost being wiped out, in moving from poorer countries to places like the US, where they hope to make up the difference and more later on in the new country. If they're laid off just a few years in that could be too soon to have rebuilt their savings.
Nor is it reasonable to demand that everyone live as though they're only earning $70k. Saving is good and should be encouraged, but let's not pretend everyone is in the position to be able to save up 6-12 months of income.
And most of them would probably be here on an immigrant visa for the first decade (?). I specifically said that I understand why they wouldn’t be able to quit.
> Nor is it reasonable to demand that everyone live as though they're only earning $70k. Saving is good and should be encouraged, but let's not pretend everyone is in the position to be able to save up 6-12 months of income
It’s not a “demand” and the result and risk that you take by thinking you are above living below your means should be apparent by what’s happening at Twitter.
Since 1996 - the day I entered the workforce as a developer - the number of days I spent worrying about “burnout” after 3 years, a decent resume and savings, was 0. When the pay/bullshit ratio got too high I left. Yes this was in 2000 during the dot com boom, 2008 during the recession and 2020 during Covid.
1: https://www.marketwatch.com/picks/heres-exactly-how-much-ame...
The reason is because Twitter is the most interesting company in the entire world to work at right now.
Not everything is some monetary math equation, of the best dollar per hour rate you can get.
I want to work on something interesting and right now that is Twitter.
If I want to rest and vest, I'd go work at Google.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/business/elon-musk-interv...
"But this has worried some board members, who have noted that sometimes the drug [Ambien] does not put Mr. Musk to sleep but instead contributes to late-night Twitter sessions, according to a person familiar with the board’s thinking."
This man is a walking zombie on no sleep. I just wonder if he is naturally this wired or he is crashing on upper/downer pills, like Trump did.
If everybody (and i mean everybody) would walk out and demand better terms, things would get pretty tense very quickly.
Obviously, those were highly competent engineers, but perhaps Elon Musk is just trying to get to roughly the same proportion (~60?).
If so, he's still got a long, long way to go, so expect a lot more cutting.
The founders controlled the small set of features available, and weren't beholden to, say, trying to include targeted ads or adding shopping to the platform. They certainly weren't concerned about bots, child pornography, state sponsored actors, data warehouses to store and analyze data for FCC decrees, the list goes on.
It's very easy, looking in, to handwave away complexity that creeps into a business and its technology and assume it's a lack of engineering skill. Do a reality check: Compare Twitter to other similar companies e.g. Facebook, Spotify, Netflix, Bytedance, Snap ... are these companies ran by 6 10x engineers? 60? Do you think EVERYONE is stupid or is unaware of how to do software engineering or is there complexity here you may be ignorant of? It's obvious Elon thinks the former here.
The more features you offer, the more complex your system needs to be, the more people you need to maintain and build on top of the system.
Does anyone else think he's gearing up for running as president for the Republicans at one point in the future? I'm not a US citizen so I just have my armchair criticism to go on, but it's the most rational explanation of his behaviour I can come up with. Haven't read this from anyone else so far though. If Trump can do it, why not him?
Edit: Thanks for clarifying! So I guess that doesn't make sense.
It's "natural born citizen", not "US born". cf [1] which says via a Congressional Research Service report,
> it appears that the most logical inferences would indicate that the phrase "natural born Citizen" would mean a person who is entitled to U.S. citizenship "at birth" or "by birth"
Hence e.g. Ted Cruz being eligible for President even though he was born in Canada because he has an American mother.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural-born-citizen_clause_(U...
As though any company has an obligation to employ people.
And most importantly, even though Twitter basically just employs PhDs, and other smart people, to hijack our monkey brains into mindlessly scrolling, engaging toxic emotional provocations and consuming advertisements.
Musk lives rent-free in so many peoples' minds. Another sort of derangement syndrome.
Fuck Boss Musk.
It's why we don't cross picket lines, why we unionize and support other unions, etc.
(Or even pro worker over pro management.)
This is the point. It's by design. Musk wants that level of loyalty right now. You can hate his methods or decisions, but I think the entire point is he wants 100% dedicated people right now at Twitter.
Given the magnitude of resistance from so much of the staff about the entire acquisition, and the bloat of silicon valley companies on top of it, I can see his reasoning.
But we’re looking at an EV purchase next year and my wife and I have ruled out Teslas. We also want to liquidate our Tesla stock position as soon as possible. Perhaps we should have done so when Elon himself did at its peak early this year, but that’s bridge under the water. Really want nothing to do with this guy anymore.
Might give you the same result in this case, but it's a good rule to follow.
If you go back and look at Musk's tweets, it's pretty clear he didn't know what he was talking about it in terms of what would work.
The top-rated 2023 Tesla vehicle is the Model 3, which has an overall score of 78, a road test score of 82, a predicted reliability rating of Average (3/5), and a predicted owner satisfaction rating of Very Good (4/5).[2]
The 2023 Tesla Models Y, S, and X have overall scores of 73, 62, and 52, respectively.
[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/kia/ev6/2023/overview
[2] https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/tesla/model-3/2023/over...
The 2022 Tesla Models 3, S, X, and Y have reliability ratings of Very Good (4/5), Good (3/5), N/A (not enough data), and Good (3/5), respectively.
Consumer Reports does tend to rate Toyota vehicles higher than models from most other makes in general, but the Kia EV6 in particular has been evaluated to be an excellent vehicle.
You're completely missing my point. I was speaking of long term reliability. "reliability scores" of this years models tell you very little about long term reliability and maintenance costs! The not so good auto makers have problems that manifest in a small number of years, often right after the warranty period runs out. Reliable cars are expected to have a lifetime of a couple of decades!
https://www.consumerreports.org/used-cars/how-to-find-the-be...
Consumer Reports updates the ratings of used models every year to reflect new information.
Such customers are exceptions and I really doubt manufacturers take them into account.
But I think you may be right. 200 MM users is not enough to truly matter I suppose, but who _really_ cares about Twitter? Journalists. They're spreading this stuff that's going on in a bubble they're in way beyond it.
I get being cynical about social media but let's actually maybe care about the baby getting thrown out with the bathwater. Twitter is more than just journalists and political shitposting.
Huh, my impression is that it was used mostly by the ultra privileged elites. Celebrities, wannabe celebrities, politicians, authors, "journalists", marketing executives, and such. I've never met a regular person that touches Twitter.
Those other places you have to go looking for. If you're on Twitter, and already following some people within your groups, you're likely to see them retweet other people in the group, and over time build out your network that way. I would presume the algorithm will also notice your preference for such accounts, and recommend others, but without personal experience with the Twitter algorithm, that's also just a guess.
My feed has consistently been full of interesting people doing real things, not those you listed with the exception of authors.
Might bring some solace to competitors who badly underestimated Tesla four or five years ago.
The actual question is: why was he able to walk into that area and do so much better than experienced traditional automakers. I’m starting to think that the answer is not Musk’s personal competence.
$8 billion in government subsidies? That critical DOE loan, for example, wasn’t even available to anyone else.
I mean, come on, GM was literally insolvent in 2009 and exists today only because of a government bailout!
GM did receive bailouts and I never even implied otherwise.
So you have existing automakers (GM) who were already in a weak position due to the 2008 crisis and used the bailouts merely to keep *current* operations afloat. I’m not saying it was right for them to be bailed out but that’s what happened. Importantly, it didn’t put them in position to spend a lot of money on EV development, it was life support.
On the other hand you have a startup (Tesla) who was running out of runway to fund their product development of EVs. In this case they could put 100% of the bailout towards EV development. That was just the start, the billions in government subsidies that followed allowed them to not only pay back that loan ultimately but got them to where they are today (a bit of securities fraud helped as well). This wasn’t just life support it was a lot of runway for a startup.
Hopefully the above makes it obvious that government subsidies are indeed the primary answer to why he was able to “walk into that area and do so much better than experienced traditional automakers” as without them Tesla wouldn’t even exist.
If you want to argue that Tesla required government assistance to bring EVs to market, that's fine. If you argue that they weren't recipients of exactly the same kind of assistance offered to other parties in the market, you're way, way off.
What he did was "walk in" and put his name on things.
I've recently seen an anecdote from someone (claiming to be) a SpaceX veteran that at least there, there were whole structures in place within the company to "manage" Musk: people who would tailor information to his biases and moods, ideas presented to him in such a way that he could claim they were his, idiotic ideas of his that got conveniently forgotten, that sort of thing.
I've also seen multiple people point out that at Tesla and SpaceX, his narcissistic whims were always constrained by the physical: any changes to manufacturing processes both had to respect the laws of physics, and would take some time to physically build new components, retool the machines for different outputs, etc.
None of this holds at Twitter.
Thus, he's like a well-respected writer who has always had really good editors, but has become successful enough that he can now claim he doesn't need them.....and now everyone can see just how much those editors were doing for his work.
The nerds, like the people who founded Tesla before Musk bought in, had done the sums and realised battery EVs were the future.
Governments around the world funded the initial rollout, a bunch of environmental orgs helped, another bunch of private businesses making chargers or charging networks or charging apps. Literally millions of people worked to make this ahppen.
Musk just happened to be a loud mouthed asshole with lots of money and onnections that backed the right horse at the right time and ended up with even more money.
At best he's the Bill Gates of EVs.
During the whole time of high gas prices over the last few months, I haven't refilled my hybrid- I've driven 8900 miles on 2.75 tanks of gas (14.5 gallons) and the rest has been electric charging. I am curious but have not computed whether this saved me any money, as electricity prices here are fairly high, but it's been wonderful to stay away from the gas station.
This happens everywhere so nothing new here. Especially when tech investment has been free for such a long time. Maybe even this economic downturn wont disrupt the tech investment machine. We will see next year.
If Twitter goes public again. I will be the first to buy shares. Since it will actually be a good play going forward.
I don't think this logic works.
The company is not made or broken whether or not the software is a bit more complicated than it has to be.
Making it a bit simpler will not change the company.
Moreover, it's very doubtful if they are in a position to magically untangle all of that and make things a bit simpler.
Most of the value of Twitter will come from revenues, growth and other things.
It's entirely possible that Musk could turn things around, but it's also very risky. It's debatable whether the people will perform in a coherent manner for him, that advertisers will come back, that his ideas will pan out.
And after all of that - he bought Twitter at the peak! He's holding the bag! Twitter would be worth maybe 40% of what it was at the peak, just by market forces alone - so he has to climb up to that big valuation to break even.
It's entirely plausible, but there is nothing obvious about this situation, and it's not an 'architectural' issue.
Finally, I will say that just because you thought things were overly complex, does not mean they were. Things are sometime a bit more complicated. Maybe, maybe not.
My view has changed back and forth, his values being incompatible with mine, and his risk taking abilities which are sometimes good.
You could say he put his ego above harm to someone's reputation, but I don't think you could sat he put technology above people there.
What else is good example of putting technology ahead of humans? I am sure there should be a few.
I was planning on buying a new Tesla next year before Elon literally turned into Scrooge McDuck
The good thing is there are decent alternatives now that, in many ways, are superior. I've delayed my decision anyway as I happen not to really need one right now and so I hope my delay results in better technology.
Note: for those who cannot wait, Hyundai ioniq 5 is the one. I was so close to pulling the trigger on that beauty. Test drove it. Loved it. Excellent all around package with the added bonus that it looks far better than the model 3 (which looks horribly dated every time I see it now).
And they're right, frankly. One of the things you'll discover if you start looking seriously at your EV purchase is that the other manufacturers just aren't measuring up, both in specifics (performance, range, seat count, cargo capacity, etc...) and in qualitative stuff (fart noises, navigation experience, watch it drive itself, frankly just supercharging alone would be a decisionmaker vs. the CCS network in North America).
Maddox is so funny. I wonder if it's true.
If they didn't accept and try to finalize his offer, they could have been successfully sued by shareholders: You don't turn down a premium offer unless you think you can get better, and you absolutely finalize that deal if the market takes a sharp downtown after getting it.
If the ceo and board had not taken the deal they would have been (rightly) ousted by the shareholders who lost tons of money.
Musk is the shareholders though? Him and come-alongs, such as Larry Ellison.
It's also not "unsearchable", just sinking much faster than other posts: https://hnrankings.info/33730985/
These people have everything to lose under Elon's plan because they had special privileges on the network and now those will be open to everyone so they're bound to be salty about the whole thing.
Only so many times I can be told the sky is falling at the app via the app itself.