The absolute cruelty of Musk through this whole process is astounding.
One has to assume he's like this at his other companies as well, which is absolutely shredding their reputation in my eyes.
One has to assume he's like this at his other companies as well, which is absolutely shredding their reputation in my eyes.
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)
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/21/technology/elon-musk-twit...
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".
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.