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Comment by cuttysnark | Hacker News Reader

> don't really understand what there is worth talking about here.

Elon Musk, previously adored by many for futurist technology advocacy and largely forgiven for quirky-billionaire-behavior is now on the "bad guy list". This is "public opinion", from my perspective. It is now common to hear people saying: "He didn't really build that" "His family had money" "His family had a mine" "He's a fascist" "He's a racist because of where/when he was born"

Any and every attempt to report on the fallout from Musk buying twitter will command the headlines. Doesn't matter if it's the same strategy any other takeover management would employ. That's irrelevant. Musk? Bad Guy.

So: "Elon Bad. Twitter suffer. Here's an example..."

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Nonsense.

Presumably any private equity firm would also have came to a conclusion of reducing headcount.

They wouldn't have done so in a single week based on ridiculous analysis. And wouldn't have done so in a way to destroy the morale of remaining workforce.

I mean, the running joke in the industry was that you could fire 90% of Twitter's workforce and the company would still run fine. Judging by how few features they've shipped in the past few years, I'm still convinced that's the case.

We'll see when they actually start shipping stuff. Things tend to go smooth when nothing gets deployed...

Right in the article: blue check mark changes. And how a lot of people had nothing better to do on their own projects than to help a person in charge to complete changes.

Because blue check was released with no issues what so ever?

"No issues" is a requirement from some other context. Probably.

> And how a lot of people had nothing better to do on their own projects than to help a person in charge to complete changes.

I don't think any of it had to do with people having "nothing better to do on their own projects".

I don't know about you, but if my new boss, the one that threatened to fire 3/4ths of the staff, told me to do something, it doesn't matter what I was working on before, my sole new project would be what the boss wanted.

True. But the article does not mention that it was the boss who told the author to pitch in:

>Some of us had worked through the weekend trying to help out a colleague who’d been given an insanely tight deadline

Note: the deadline was given to "a colleague", not to "our team". Same here:

>My colleague, whom I liked a lot, was never going to get it done in time without help, so we all pitched in.

Also note that he seems to never have worked on such a schedule before:

>I actually quite enjoyed it.

> And how a lot of people had nothing better to do on their own projects

April 25th, Twitter Locks Down Product Changes After Agreeing to Musk Bid

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/twitter-l... --- https://archive.ph/CK1X1

> For now, Twitter won’t allow product updates unless they’re business-critical, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the situation is private. The company accepted a $54.20-a-share bid from Musk after a whirlwind courtship that began with the Tesla Inc. magnate disclosing a 9% stake in Twitter earlier this month.

> Product changes will require approval from a vice president, the people said. Twitter imposed the temporary ban to keep employees who may be miffed about the deal from “going rogue,” according to one of the people.

April 26, Twitter is protecting its source code from disgruntled employees, reports say https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/26/twitter-lock-source-code-e...

---

For several months, nothing that was not business critical was released (or done). If you were on something that wasn't business critical, you were likely waiting for a fire to fight, working on the "ok, maybe after this all blows over I can deploy this - but not until then."

In either case, not having something to do that was more pressing than helping out a person would not be surprising.

>In either case, not having something to do that was more pressing than helping out a person would not be surprising.

In the context you have provided - yes. But in the context of my professional experience it is rather surprising. Note that the author has not mentioned he was uncomfortable sitting there doing nothing. What he mentioned was:

>we all pitched in. I actually quite enjoyed it.

That looks like that was the first time for him ever. Also quite surprising - for me and my experience.

PS. Also:

>As soon as Musk became owner, there were always three things that had to be done by yesterday

Sweet Jesus. Just "as soon"? Just three??

Yep.

>As soon as Musk became owner, there were always three things that had to be done by yesterday

Just when? Just three??

Literally never heard anyone say this before

I doubt that's actually true (I don't doubt that Twitter had too many employees, but I think 90% redundant is a bit hyperbolic), but even if it was, there are good ways and a bad ways to reduce workforce. Musk chose pretty much the baddest of the bad ways.

> Presumably any private equity firm would also have came to a conclusion of reducing headcount.

Any private equity firm would probably not have come to the recommendation of purchasing a firm that was, in ongoing terms, narrowly profitable in a transaction that would saddle the firm with about a third of its annual pre-acquisition revenue, several times its annual profit, and a sizable share of its project post-acquisition reserves in annual debt service costs, even if the particular buyer wasn’t one where the mere prospect of the purchase would disrupt revenue.

As much as they can be very much be criticized, there is a sense in which criticizing Musk’s post-acquisition actions at Twitter is akin to criticizing actions of the Titanic’s officers and crew after the encounter with the iceberg.

> It is now common to hear people saying: "He didn't really build that" "His family had money" "His family had a mine" "He's a fascist" "He's a racist because of where/when he was born"

To be fair, that's been going on at least 2-3 years. Way before he got involved with Twitter.

I guess I can buy that some of the criticism is objectively gratuitous but, humans hating everything another human does, if that human is hated themselves, isn't really anything new.

I guess the real question is, why should anyone expect Elon to have exemption from the hate game that everyone else is apart of?

Well, no one wants him to have exemption. But every discriminator tool that always answers positive, is a useless discriminator tool. Anyone can use or not use that tool. Personally, I think participating in the whole hate fest diminishes one's self so I don't. But to each their own.

Those are not new comments about musk no? I’ve heard them for years.

The only really important aspect here is that he is a bad business man and Tesla and SpaceX had to manage Elon rather than then the other way around in order to be successful.

Right? Such a liability. I read they had to tie him to his Roadster just so they could actually launch the SpaceX rockets. Unbelievable.

Yep. And the entire media apparatus changed its behavior at the same moment into the same direction. Weird.

Though he is heading on the path of Dr Evil, let's just admit it.

Why so? Without control freaks, I think Twitter is a better cess pool now.

“You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

This is almost a truism. When someone reaches an extreme position, they can never be ordinary again and they will be judged by absolute terms.

It does seem to be the case, I'm just not sure what's worth reading into here. Billionaires do stupid and terrible things constantly, if any of these passionate sideliners actually cared about that stuff then they'd be out for Larry Ellison's head for buying Lanai, or asking Steve Jobs about his $40 million jet.

The whataboutism never fails to show up. It's entirely possible to attempt to address one issue and having missed, not looked into or plain having been wrong about another one.

This isn't an issue, though, and there's no way to address it. A traded company went through a hostile takeover and the current customers aren't happy - it's a story as old as capitalism itself. If people object to the way it was sold, they should criticize the free market. If people are unhappy with billionaires using their money to tangibly hurt the planet, there are much scarier boogeymen to hunt down than the guy who everyone on Twitter hates.

"Bad things happen all the time", "we can't change it can we" and "there are worse people" are cop outs at best. People can worry about multiple things, and things can get talked about.

The Jet doesn't have a family to feed. Also, people complaining probably have been using twitter and have a little virtual skin in the game. Maybe you could call that entitlement.

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