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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

I know it’s getting boring to talk about Musk, but the ongoing Twitter experiment is just so fascinating because it’s the first time in history that someone has tried to autocratically reboot a $40 billion tech company with massive regulatory liabilities.

So I’m wondering about this part:

> Elon is currently applying the playbook to Twitter:

> Scale back drastically, ideally the closest to your Series A size and cost base;

> Protect your core: engineering and science

What exactly is he doing to protect the core? It seems like it’s been all stick, no carrot. What are the incentives for Twitter’s best to stay, other than second-hand exposure to the Musk aura?

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One of the reasons MuskStuff us getting boring us that he hasn't said anything real/significant regarding his intentions, strategies, motivations, analyses and whatnot.

There was an investor case/ business plan that could have been prepared by 19year old MBAs. There was some nonspecific media bait on free speech. That kind of noncontent is pretty typical for business comms, but it's not what Musk did before. With Tesla/SpaceX/neuralink/etc... Musk told us the strategic case. We knew what he was up to, what the main risks were, the goals the milestones, the reasons.

All commentary about Twitter is rooted in speculation and smartarsery.

Maybe what you describe (reboot) is what Musk's up to. We don't know. It's like taking sides in the abusive screaming session happening in the house next door.

No one cares when

> What are the incentives for Twitter’s best to stay?

Money maybe? If the employee count is half and they have more lax firing due to non performance, theoretically it could allow them to better reward top performers. Not sure if that is practically what is happening, but Musk seems to have good enough track record previously in building teams of productive people.

Also lot of best people like to work in productive teams, and don't like teammates that slack off without repercussion.

Musk has a great track record at building top teams in situations where the company has a world-changing mission, and the company is basically the only place in the world you can work to achieve that mission (Tesla, SpaceX). That attracts people who care about that mission, and means they'll accept relatively low pay and Musk's abusive management practices.

Nu-Twitter doesn't have that. They've got interesting infrastructrure problems, but so do a dozen other companies working at similar scale. Musk's product vision seems to be incredibly incremental, e.g. the $8 checkmarks. Honestly, the only mission that Musk seems to be setting up in his public writing is the free speech bit, applying only to his alt-right pals? And if that's the mission he tries to build a team around, it's hard to see advertisers and normal users sticking to the platform for much longer.

He hasn’t shown you his hand.

The obvious stuff:

* adding features people want but are denied by ESG transnationals (privacy, e2e encryption, removing politically motivated censorship) - this is huge and a guaranteed win short term.

Stuff that will happen if the google/Apple make the wrong moves, which they likely will:

* programmable mobile phone with crypto chip and starlink carrier for recurring revenue when/if google and Apple ban Twitter app from their walled gardens

* adding crypto/stable coin based “wallet” to Twitter which cross-sells the mobile phone with crypto chip

> programmable mobile phone with crypto chip and starlink carrier for recurring revenue when/if google and Apple ban Twitter app from their walled gardens

This would be a world-class feat of engineering, which would also require that Twitter hire a set of engineers entirely different than the ones they have. It's difficult to see how they'd pull this off successfully.

Man, I was wondering about this myself, as a guy with 10 years in the phone firmware business

I don't think Musk has any realistic chance of competing with Apple. Apple has been poaching from the best of the best in every level the phone industry for over a decade now.

He could quickly and effectively crank out an undifferentiated Android phone for sure, but I'm not sure what he'd do with it or how he'd convince anyone to buy it. His phone would be more expensive to make than the ones out of Moto, Huawei, etc, and it wouldn't work as well. Maybe if he hired aggressively or borrowed people from Tesla somehow he could make a good Android phone, but I don't see why anyone would buy it.

I actually thought that by now we wouldn't really be bothering with apps so much, and computers would be more like the one on Star Trek. I don't think Musk could just toss that together any time soon though, haha.

People won't buy it because it has a fifth vestigial camera or whatever the latest gimmick is. Smart phones are a commodity at this point.

They'll buy it because 1) they don't want transnational ESG digital hall monitors spying on them and curating what apps they can install, and 2) it would have global cell coverage. That's more than enough to compete with Google and Apple at this point. People are fed up, I think you underestimate just how many people.

There's no way he'll be able to get global cell coverage IMO. Even if he pulled it off, that's a feature for fancy rich people. Most people don't travel regularly.

I don't think the privacy angle is going to help at all either. If anyone actually cared about privacy or control we'd all be using the same weird open source pocket computer as Stallman.

That said, I wish him the best of luck

A new phone platform. A crypto wallet for regular people. Two massive projects where other companies have wasted billions for zero traction.

The solution to cracking both at once is somehow to cross-sell this to Twitter users, the vast majority of whom want neither to switch phones nor to make crypto payments on the hellsite? I remain sceptical, to say the least…

> programmable mobile phone with crypto chip and starlink carrier for recurring revenue when/if google and Apple ban Twitter app from their walled gardens

This all sounds very far-fetched to me and not at all obviously profitable in any way. If Microsoft didn't manage to build a viable smartphone ecosystem I don't see how twitter will.

Microsoft? Is this satire?

> removing politically motivated censorship

Musk is quickly learning that the "censorship" is motivated by advertisers, not politics. As he scrambles to bring them back to the platform, expect the same policies to trickle back.

There are many more space with good funding(Blueorigin, Virgin Galactic etc.) and lot more EV companies with more money to burn than Tesla. It could be just luck that Tesla or SpaceX became top in their field, but having watched lot of Musk's interviews, I am biased to say that he has talent in understanding engineering inefficiencies and assembling team to solve those.

I think we may find the answers by reflecting upon: what were the incentives for the best astro-aero engineers to leave Nasa, Boeing, etc and join SpaceX in its beginning? Join Elon who had 0 track record in Space, came from dot.com SW? he paid quite poorly. Nobody believed in SpaceX. He made clear he had money for only 3 attempts. etc, etc.

Also, when you are part of a company that used to run with 7000 people, and you realize it can run with a fraction of that AND you have been chosen to be part of that fraction, that must (and should) speak highly to many.

> What are the incentives for Twitter’s best to stay, other than second-hand exposure to the Musk aura?

Fun, maybe? I'm not smart enough to work on those kinds of problems, but I do love a challenge. If I was an actual CS person with relevant experience, I could totally see myself working at that kind of company.

It's not what you do forever, but it's totally fun.

That’s the same kind of fun one can have at a well-funded startup, and it doesn’t come with the technical and regulatory baggage that Twitter carries.

From my POV, the massive scale of Twitter is nothing but downside for engineering focus in the current situation where all the moderation and legal frameworks have been blown to bits. I spent a couple of years at Facebook, so I’ve seen what the legal reality is for product work in high-volume social media. Nothing could entice me to work in a situation where I as an engineer became personally responsible for managing that. Yet that’s the de facto situation at Twitter. They’re not even taking meetings with EU regulators anymore because there’s nobody left at the company! It’s not my kind of fun if I’m being asked to make rushed decisions that can lead to multi-billion fines and/or distress and physical harm to users.

Maybe, but most startups aren't at that scale and impact yet (and they'd be smart not to build as if they were imho), so it's a different kind of fun, and t. The mental reward of getting a fire-fighting assignment and putting out the flames is something I enjoy occasionally.

I'd imagine the same exists on the legal and product side, too. They need people who love a challenge and want to see whether they can overcome it, they need adventurers. No clue if it'll be successful, but I can see the appeal.

Speculation: option pools (at least pre-ipo) are generally a fixed %age and therefore relative size. With fewer engineers the ones left get a higher piece of the pie? Just a guess.

But will that compensate for the almost inevitable outcome that the next liquidity event will be a massive downround compared to the $44B valuation of the acquisition?

Maybe there’s only 25% of employees left to share the pie, but the pie itself is now only worth $10B. That’s not a great incentive when asked to work nights and weekends on capricious initiatives that come and go.

It is if stopping to work is equivalent with getting deported though. Great system the US created with h-1b

The problem is that the following is what is was intended for:

"The H-1B program allows companies and other employers in the United States to temporarily employ foreign workers in occupations that require the theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge and a bachelor’s degree or higher in the specific specialty, or its equivalent."

Note, among other things, the word "temporarily" and the phrase :highly specialized knowledge." The real problem is that H-1Bs are often used by companies in very different ways than their stated purpose.

I’ve never received RSUs in a public company but can’t you basically set the strike price at whatever value you want? It’s just a financial instrument after all. NOTE, I’m not arguing for backdating.

RSUs have a strike price of $0 kind of by definition. And they're income when the restriction lapses, and that's complex when the stock is illiquid, so that's not ideal (sometimes, there's a dual restriction with time and liquidity, but that's messy as well)

Stock options could have a strike price of whatever, but tax favored stock options need to be granted at fair market value. Granting non-favored options away from FMV needs to be treated as immediate income, which is messy.

Assume that's true. Ask yourself this question: Is Elon Musk the sort of person who'd fire you just before you vest so he didn't have to pay out?

Not sure, but I’d assume I’d be such a rounding error on the cap table that it probably wouldn’t be worth a milisecond of his processing time.

He spends his time complaining on Twitter and hosting faux polls to unban right-wing trolls while misquoting "vox populi, vox dei".

He can almost certainly make time for spite.

That makes the incredibly naïve (but equally incredibly common) that employees are literal resources of equivalent value.

In actual fact, excepting "cultural loyalty" (which is usually interrupted in any such large acquisition/disruption event) essential employees are typically the most transient/difficult to retain. Many are not as remuneration-driven (more likely to be comfortable & their competence is often driven by a more vocational motivating factor) & even those who are can negotiate good terms elsewhere with relative ease.

This leads to a concentrated brain-drain where the fewer engineers remaining to partake in the pie aren't contributing as much value. That ain't protecting your core.

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