Twitter Office Supply Auction | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Office Supply Auction

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212 pointsbubblehack3r302 comments

This is pretty unsurprising, they're not really going to raise any serious money from this (what do we reckon? 1FTE Salary at most?) but they've got office space for 7.5k people and less than 3k less. Musk keeps saying "If you code come to the 10th floor" - which basically implies that their entire team of engineers fit onto 1 floor of the building and that there a load of empty floors now that don't need kitchens or desks or chairs.

Wouldn't it just be smarter to sublet the space and fill up the building. Rather than having empty floors on a building you barely use.

There's more than the whiff of a move to Texas in the wind.

By the time they make the move, they'll be able to fit all the staff in a campervan.

They can take a road trip over to Texas.

Why is the sibling comment flagged and dead?

At a minimum, I'd suggest "office freeloaders" and "energy vampires" are indicative of someone not commenting in good faith.

It seems fairly clear that Twitter had at least some employees that were adding very little. Trust and Safety leadership enforcing moderation based on political views while ignoring staff concerns about child sexual abuse (per this morning’s news) seems like one example.

> Trust and Safety leadership enforcing moderation based on political views

I assume you're referring to the "Twitter Files" revelations* there? Because that showed nothing of the sort, did it?

Yes it did.

Can you point to some examples? Note that they have to be examples which only apply to one side (I'm going to assume you mean conservatives) and aren't standard violations of ToS.

They suppressed Trump’s account before the election…

> They suppressed Trump’s account before the election…

That fact was public knowledge.

Did the twitter files reveal anything more specific about why they suppressed Trump's account?

It seems to me that merely calling them "Twitter files" is very effective at evoking and implying possibly more than what they actually contain.

This was not public knowledge, it was publicly denied.

Please be specific. They have publicly denied shadowbanning but under a very specific and narrow definition.

> but under a very specific and narrow definition.

Which I think is the standard definition - suggesting Twitter have made up their own is a bit snarky?

> They suppressed Trump’s account before the election…

If by "suppressed" you mean "suspended for repeated violations of ToS even though they'd protected him for months by saying he was POTUS and therefore newsworthy and should be granted much more leeway than other accounts", sure.

Not exclusively. We knew political based moderation was going on far before that. But yes also including the recent revelations about how it was handled internally.

If you consider interfering with an election to be non political, I’m not going to bother arguing with you.

> But yes also including the recent revelations about how it was handled internally.

Can you point to some examples where one side (I'm assuming you mean Democrats) were handled favourably and the other not favourably? Outside of ToS violations, obviously.

Fair enough, those terms are unfair and needlessly aggressive. I just found the comment rather interesting (especially the last part).

I think Twitters priorities are balance sheet related. Moving would seem like a bizarre distraction.

Most of this mess just seems like a bizarre distraction.

It is shocking how entirely unnecessary it all has been.

There’s no reason for the whole situation. The company is in a bad spot now.

I think it’s because the company wasn’t very profitable and has low growth.

They were not in great shape, but they’re now in substantially worse.

Elon is basically doing a Gilderoy Lockhart trying to repair Harry's broken arm impression.

They were barely keeping their heads above water, but the interest payments on their new loans was like tying cinder blocks to their feet.

It amazes me that the world's richest man was able to buy this company with a bunch of borrowed money, and saddle the company with the debt rather than himself. If he actually cared about Twitter's financial health, you have to figure he would have bought it outright. He has the money.

Sublet to who? Downtown SF office space doesn’t have a lot of takers right now.

Subletting commercial space in San Francisco is not a simple endeavor at this time: https://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/sf-office-vacancy-...

Do you have a permit to make this post about San Francisco?

Don’t draw attention! Installing a permitted comment is $1.7M so no one is doing it by the books. It’s unpermitted comments all the way down. Like be honest Did you get a permit for that comment?

Can you explain to the uninvolved foreigner who hasn't visited SFO for nearly 12 years what the sarcastic comments about permits refer to?

Everything requires permits. EVERYTHING.

You got a loicense for that permit, mate?

Installing a public toilet in a park cost 1.7 million dollars and years worth of effort, for something that a random contractor would have built for 10k dollars in a pair of afternoons.

We really should be turning that space into housing

"we"

Not sure if their rental agreements allow that. Most don't.

Most residential leases don’t. It’s very common in commercial leases however.

Better than trashing it, I guess.

Can they let the homeless stay in the unused floors? Surely they can find a spot in their heart to help out people down on their luck during Christmas.

Sounds nice until they piss, shit, and do drugs everywhere and get your entire company evicted by the building owner.

This is the sad truth.

I used to live nearby Twitter HQ and that description is unfortunately accurate to my experience, of the majority of the homeless who spent time at Van Ness and Market Street SF.

HOUSING is what is needed, for sure though. Just be serious about it, and not "diamond-mine trust-fund hyper vigilant ego-abusive maniac" about it.

Elon is rich because PayPal investors paid him to go away. Nothing that happened in his life before that matters at all or gave him any extra starting privilege, diamond mine or no.

That is not accurate. Have you seen the video of "multi-millionaire entrepreneur" Elon Musk taking delivery of a $1 million dollar McLaren car, before PayPal?

Eh, that was from Zip2 for $22 million, right? That's something but it's not PayPal money. I think he just had "average Stanford student" levels of privilege to do that.

This is warped, average Stanford grad is well off but not supercar level finances.

The rest is luck.

Simply being white gave him extra starting privilege. I’m sure you meant, vs other cis white males coming from a middle class (at least) family though.

Assuming they could just ignore local zoning:

The cost of security, social services, policing, and hygiene related issues (it’s an office not a home) would seem substantial.

Some locals not far from me tried doing that with an abandoned hotel. It was a mess of crime drugs and etc in the end.

Many homeless won’t stay in homeless shelters due to ‘draconian’ rules like no drugs, no dangerous animals, etc.

Any attempt to do something like you’re proposing in a nice space not explicitly setup for the purpose is going to go pretty badly quite quickly.

Usually what keeps people out of shelters is that they are not staffed/resourced enough to maintain safety. One person being violent can ruin the resource for everyone else. Poor access to health care and hygiene also can destroy a shelter's utility.

Most people don't want to get assaulted, robbed, or infected with disease/pests.

That is a reason why empty office space doesn't solve anything. There's already plenty of of it without Twitter HQ. Running a temporary shelter is more about the logistics/support than it is the physical space.

It’s impossible to provide adequate staffing without restricting what people can bring, what people can do, etc.

Someone with a knife requires 4-5 people to subdue minimum, etc.

Someone with an out of control dog will cause serious, potentially fatal injuries before anyone can react.

That people often get these things and want them to protect themselves just makes the problem more intractable, because when you add drugs and mental illness into the mix, the people are impossible to predict too.

Empty office space definitely doesn’t solve it. But doubling staffing at the homeless shelters won’t either.

Just curious - do you house the homeless in the spare spaces in your dwelling? If not, how can you comment on what others ought to be doing and their hearts?

You'd be surprised. Some of that restaurant equipment is in high demand, and is also pretty pricey. Anything pro grade can be tens of thousands of dollars each.

Just some of those espresso machines are $10K [1] and $25K [2] each.

Freezer is $24K.

Of course, all these are "new" prices.

[1] https://www.espressoparts.com/products/la-marzocco-linea-cla... [2] https://www.espressoparts.com/products/la-marzocco-strada-ee... [3] https://www.webstaurantstore.com/traulsen-rlt232dut-hhs-stai...

For used auctions (for things with demand) figure about 75-25% new prices.

If there is a glut, sometimes you’d end up with just price per lb. (Often just a couple dollars per).

About 10-20% below local used prices is what I’ve seen though sometimes they go above (bidding frenzy?).

Who is opening a restaurant right now with labor costs and borrowing costs where they are?

A lot of that stuff doesn't seem to be "office supplies". There's quite a lot of pro kitchen equipment in there. It looks as if they've broken down a big office canteen.

They famously shut down the free meals.

That's wild. It's untaxed comp that minimizes the time employees need to spend thinking about food during the day. He's mandating employees come back to the office for long hours, but now they need to (at least) order and receive their own lunches and dinners? If he's trying to retain some sort of high-intensity hardcore ninja startup bullshit, I would think free food would be the last thing cut. Or is he planning for them to subsist on nothing but soylent?

I've not been impressed by Musk, but this feels like the most boneheaded thing I've heard about his management yet.

> That's wild. It's untaxed comp...

So tax evasion?

Tax avoidance at most.

… No. Many jurisdictions, provided that certain rules are followed, allow employers to provide food for employees on premises without it being deemed a benefit in kind (ie taxable).

Some go further. I believe in France employers can still give employees vouchers (in practice run over the debit card system these days) for restaurants, and this is also not deemed a benefit in kind.

A lot of this sort of thing is down to long-standing practice, really. It has long been customary for many employers to feed their staff, so this isn’t considered a benefit in kind.

It's really messed up that the tax code doesn't allow a standard W-2 employee to deduct food, transportation, a portion of housing (required to get the sleep to work), etc. If you were a business that invented a robot that could perform a salaried job, the resources required to run it would all be legitimate business expenses. The disparity really speaks to how far our laws have been corrupted by corporate interests, and then making up for the shortfall by turning the screws on individuals.

Musk said publicly the free food was rarely eaten. They had more people cooking breakfast than eating it. That’s probably exaggeration, but it’s probably true that it had little utilization.

It was rarely eaten because nobody was in the office, wasn't it? If he forces everyone to return...

SF Mayor London Breed was talking about this recently as well. It seems that the local restaurants also want people back in the offices because they're struggling quite a bit. If there's no free lunch at work, employees might patronize some of the local restaurants.

You can't believe half the stuff that comes out of his mouth. He probably said that so he can justify removing the perk.

But if its true? I mean is it really doubtful that Twitter, a remote company, had very low office utilization?

The important question in light of a return to office mandate would be what percentage of those in the office utilized the service rather than absolute utilization.

Didn't the person in charge of the free food publicly disagree with Musk?

Yes, and then he dropped the real numbers about utilization.

> (at least) order and receive their own lunches and dinners?

"At least" would be to make some sandwiches and put them in a lunch box like millions of people do every day.

My experience working in such places has been that most people bring better food. Soup, pasta, rice and beans, etc. I'm sure some people bring sandwiches and eat at their desk, but most people prefer hot food.

Food prep at home is cheap, but has a labor cost in time. Are employees really going to do their own food prep in the middle of 80 hour weeks?

When I prepped my own meals I was much more inclined to go home at 5pm sharp.

You're ignoring that they can still get lunch at Twitter though. It's just not free.

I used to work as an intern in a PaaS startup. We had meals paid for by the company. We ate in 35 to 50 minutes, then got back to the office where we started our work environment, putting some work before the official end of the lunch break.

I changed jobs and now work as a "freelancer" (i have missions, the last one had an objective and lasted 20 months, the new one is a bit less clear). The meal is practically free for the employees, but is roughly 12€ for freelancers, and of really bad quality. So we get out with the full team (including employees), walk, or sometime take the bus to a restaurant (we change each week), eat there, then come back. It's often a bit more expensive (15 to 25€), but both the product quality and the preparation are better. Our lunch break at my previous mission lasted on average 90 minutes (we were quite far from good restaurant), on the new mission it seems to be a little less (we're closer to Paris and there is a lot of restaurant around).

Sounds like you get more work done with a 90 minute lunch that includes walking/moving then a rushed 30 min in house lunch

There's also the point that getting out of the office to stretch the legs and have a bit of a walk (eg to food place), is generally good for the mind / productivity later on.

Unless you overeat, and the body gets sluggish afterwards that is. ;p

> but now they need to (at least) order and receive their own lunches and dinners?

That's what the vast majority of office workers do around the world, so, yes, I guess that's what the new CEO expects of the Twitter employees.

> untaxed comp that minimizes the time employees need to spend thinking about food during the day

The meals still exist. They're just not free. So they still dont need to spend time thinking about food. And the company is reimbursed for it.

Obviously it's worse for the employee. But it's not some "own goal."

(Effectively) reducing comp while also telling employees to be hardcore and work longer hours seems counterproductive.

> The meals still exist. They're just not free.

Evidently Twitter are expecting to serve less of them, otherwise they wouldn't be decommisioning what appears to be a commercial kitchen.

My guess is that Musk still hasn't got rid of all the staff he wants to lose. And I suspect that the ones he's already lost weren't the ones he was hoping to lose.

I smell panic.

This might also be, “we fired half our employees and expect to make half as many meals.”

It seems somewhat short sighted if Elon really plans to turn Twitter into a WeChat like he has mentioned. Though he throws so much crap at the wall and very little sticks so who knows. It just feels like if you are going to keep the space then it makes sense to just mothball a few/parts of kitchens instead of trying to get a megar return by selling it off.

Might only be untaxed for overtime:

https://www.henssler.com/employer-provided-meals-are-they-ta...

I know years ago I worked a restaurant and they accounted for the meal we got (like $3 lol) on the tax forms.

If you’re setting up beds in the office to keep your employees working day and night, that seems like a bad time to also take away free meals.

A useful comparison for discussion:reddit has 700 employees and twitter had 7000.

Yeah I think general consensus is that twitter was bloated and I'm guessing a lot of people were skimming by not doing much (or stuck doing things that amounted to not much).

Elon's methodology isn't the best way forward though. Ugh idk.

"Yeah I think general consensus is that twitter was bloated and I'm guessing a lot of people were skimming by not doing much "

Based on what?

Their number of devs combined with how the platform has looked/felt the same for 10 straight years?

I worked at twitter's data engineering org in 2018. It was the most relaxed work culture I've experienced. Great WLB ( code for its ok to coast) . Spent my winters working from ski resorts and ski lodges. My mental and physical health were at all time high.

Why is “great WLB” code for “ok to coast”? What does one write for actual great WLB, without the coasting?

> What does one write for actual great WLB, without the coasting?

what is 'actual great WLB' ?

Work life balance

There's no such thing when you define "coasting" to mean "work 40 hours a week plus unpaid on-call between 30% and 100% of the rest of your time."

They didn't though. One can still have the difference between putting in the bare minimum 40 hours per week or put in their best effort 40 hours per week.

I’m not sure there’s consensus on definitions, but a lot of people (particularly in Big Tech land) do seem to use the term “coasting” to describe working a normal 40 hour week, as opposed to the sort of thing that goes on in the likes of Amazon.

Sounds dangerous. You could tear your ACL.

small price to pay.

> Elon's methodology isn't the best way forward though. Ugh idk.

People keep saying this, but I'm yet to see the fire the smoke implies.

Reddit has an army of unpaid moderators. Not to mention the Reddit users who upvote and downvote.

Also, politicians and other important public figures don't use Reddit like they use Twitter.

> Also, politicians and other important public figures don't use Reddit like they use Twitter

I think that may change in the future. Many politicians, including prominent ones, have done AMAs. Arnold Schwarzenegger is a semi regular. The Sergeant Major of the US Army is a regular. Rick Astley is a semi regular. Verne Troyer was a regular before he died.

But they don't use it the same way.

Twitter allows you to soapbox on any current issue and communicate directly with people.

You could in theory do something similar through your own subreddit but then you'd need to manage it, it's not the same thing.

What does this have to do with the topic at hand?

GP is making the argument Reddit receives free labor that twitter has to pay for

Anyone know why those unpaid mods do what they do? It's like a cult.

I am founder and a mod of /r/schizoaffective been doing it for almost ten years now. I made the sub since I felt those with both mood disorder symptoms along side psychosis weren't served well by /r/schizophrenia, /r/depression and /r/bipolar and /bipolar2.

I am not a fan of Reddit in a lot of ways, but overall the other mods and I have made a pretty safe place for our community, and we have had relatively little trolling, hopefully it stays that way. Before Reddit I did in person meetups for a couple topics and even in highschool almost twenty years ago I was a big support for a lot of people. Reddit is just a pretty good platform compared to Facebook. The relative anonymity helps a lot in a mental health sub.

When I was a free moderator for a thing it was during the time of my life I had little to no control over any aspect of what was happening.

I have to assume it's similar for others. Why do this work for free? My only answer to that is it gave me a feeling of being wanted or needed that I was severely lacking at the time.

A multitude of reasons, I suspect. For instance, they want their community to be civil and not filled with spam. Also, if a subreddit is left unmoderated, it is likely to be shut down by Reddit staff.

Have you ever started an irc channel? For me, it’s kind of like that. I mod some subreddits because I am interested in the topics and want to talk about it and help others talk about it.

I spend maybe five minutes a year on it, so it’s more of a responsibility than a labor.

As far back as I remember there’s always been bbs moderators. And almost always unpaid.

I think Reddit would be worse if mods were paid because then the positions would be more sought after and tried to run as a job.

I don’t think Twitter has equivalent moderation.

Many people like to moderate online communities, it was the same in the age of phpBB forums. Can be explained with both charitable and non-charitable qualities.

If there’s something I’m invested in, say programming, I wouldn’t mind spending time moderating a community about programming. Further, the moderation is a lot easier since basically all I have to do is determine whether something is programming or programming related. And people tend to usually follow moderation rules without claiming that moderation is an existential threat to their FREEDOM.

Twitter, OTOH, is a free for all cesspool. And that was with the moderation policies. Somehow it’s even worse now.

Some people like to have control over others, and get a kick out of enforcing rules they've made. These seem to make up the bulk of Reddit's moderators.

Others do it more casually, just because they wanted to have a forum for a topic and you need to do some light-touch moderating to keep the spam out.

I have a subreddit dedicated to a specific programming topic, and I moderate it so that the intelligent, interesting, insightful, and empathetic members continue to participate and aren't driven away by trolls and low-effort content. There's nothing wrong with volunteering in order to make the world (from one's own perspective) a better place to inhabit.

A slight tangent but...

Post some sort of "anti-musk" or "anti-apple" or whatever is popular at the moment and watch everyone rush in to come to that person/organizations defence.

I always find it astonishing when people do this and was always curious as to the motives as well.

I drive a Hyundai and have an iPhone, if someone were to say something critical of either I don't mind. I don't work for either company, i don't hold any of their stock, no family works there..

Yet there are always rabid fans and i suspect Reddit and such has its "fans" who feel compelled to moderate. Probably because they feel a sense of "community" or belonging to some company and are willing to do unpaid work, the same as people will post "pro apple" comments when someone makes a critical statement.

Look at the post the other day on the electric truck comments and others are writing that this is "a coordinated attack on Musk"??

People do odd things at times.

It’s maybe a little unusual that they’re doing it effectively in service of a for-profit company, but otherwise it doesn’t seem strange. There’s a pretty long (>30 year) tradition of volunteer internet moderators; moderated usenet groups, irc, web forums (Reddit is really just a very big web forum, when it comes to it), now mastodon instances.

The same reason people join HOA boards (hint: it has nothing to do with keeping property values up)

I've seen people volunteer to pick up trash in their neighborhood public park. Do you think that's like a cult?

Or how about people who contribute to open source software that they use? Like a cult?

Volunteering to moderate a forum you participate in and enjoy is not really very different from those.

extremely hacker news comment

Do we know how many of those 7k were content moderators? Twitter also had external moderators that are probably not counted in that number.

Question is more why are they paying for moderators when Reddit has proved they’ll do it for free.

Reddit shows that people will sign up to moderate interest-specific forums that they self-select into. Not that people will sign up en masse to generically moderate a large social media platform.

There are a ton of people frothing at the mouth to moderate Twitter for free, it's just that Elon probably doesn't want them too (for good reason!). Hell, many of them regularly @elon even now asking him to remove content they don't like.

I really doubt ‘free’ (i.e. paid by the Chinese/Russian/.. governments) moderation on Twitter would be a good idea

>Reddit has an army of unpaid moderators.

Smart, Reddit is comfortable with the fact it’s a glorified web forum, Twitter lied to itself that it’s something more.

Society treated twitter as something more, and twitter adapted as it grew.

Despite the recent disruptive events, society still treats twitter as a public square. Politicians, celebrities, charities, and governments all make announcements there. So many updates on the russian invasion of Ukraine have been put on twitter but not facebook or instagram.

My personal opinion is that twitter is a public square. I don't know what that means legally, because it is an international public square with all the judicial/governmental chaos that implies. I guess an alternative would be to have "twitter is a USA public square" kind of language on the site, but that may well dampen any participation from non-US people.

>Society treated twitter as something more

No, journalists did. Society at large doesn’t even use Twitter. Their own stats prove this.

Well Elon is very, very serious about "journalists" on his site.

So this argument gets weird really, really quick.

I mean I think we can all read between the lines with why he’s interested in it.

It got them 44 Billion dollars, they must have been doing something right.

I predict that this will be the Tumblr story all over again. Maybe Apple will buy “Twitter” after their value is less than 1B in a year or something.

When has Apple purchased a social media property to turn them around?

They do keep astroturfing on Reddit though.

Reddit has way more than 700 now. I worked there until 2019 and they had ~600 when I left.

That being said though, I would guess the employee count is still around ~2000 or less.

Reddit has hundreds (maybe even thousands?) freelance devs working remote, full time. You’re only counting FTEs.

Reddit is a total clusterfuck technologically though, no?

The people seem to say despite the not new anymore slow & often-failing frontend. The old frontend is down regularly. Not sure why they don't drop it completely if the care so little about it's uptime.

Twitter has 10x the ad revenue of Reddit, so that seems to even out[0].

[0]https://www.theinformation.com/articles/reddits-ad-revenue-e...

Reddit is by far the worst performing website I regularly visit, it's a technological clusterfuck.

This reminds of the .com crash days so much. There were endless auctions and sales of office furniture, etc. I don’t even think a lot of it got sold as demand was so low and supply so high. I heard stories of people buying chairs that cost $1k for $25, etc.

yeah remember when the herman miller aeron was the ultimate .com status symbol? After the bust you could find those on the side of the road for a while.

They really are damn fine chairs.

Agreed. I don’t require much but I can’t go without my Aeron

That's probably SF thing. Generally corporate America swears by Steelcase.

DoveBid was a good auction site for this stuff back then, IIRC.

Damn, a prosciutto slicer!

https://www.bidspotter.com/en-us/auction-catalogues/heritage...

This auction is clearly not for just the _office_ supplies, but still.

On that topic, the fridges and freezers currently have bids lower than the fucking tables, which is insane. Those are way worth way more than the current bids at 25 USD.

Edit: seems I misunderstood and it's just the opening bids, the bidding hasn't started yet. Still strange that the opening bids are higher for a table than restaurant-style fridges/freezers.

None of the auctions are open for bidding - you are just looking at the start price.

Those are just the starting bids. Bidding doesn't open until mid January, I think.

The opening bids on auctions are almost always meaningless and set very low - the auction company knows that the valuable items will be bid up fast enough, and they do NOT want anything left over because then they have to dispose of it.

Why some are 25 and some are 50 I'm not sure; they may raise the bid a bit on items they think might not get many bids.

Maybe it was set by someone has bought projectors and chair in the past but has no idea how fricking expensive is a large fridge

And a La Marzoco: https://www.bidspotter.com/en-us/auction-catalogues/heritage...

Selling off a twitter bird statue makes it look bad. What a signal that the company doesn't believe in itself anymore.

If you have less offices you have less needs for corporate branding. If you were to consolidate all branding into the remaining offices it would take up too much space. You can not be sentimental about this stuff.

But you can be smart and care about branding and reputation.

Throwing them away would be more beneficial.

If there is only one thing business and companies should be sentimental about is about their origins. No room for sentimental stuff when doing anything else. Twitter is employing humans and the end of the day, not robots.

I imagine there are still plenty of statues all over.

To be fair, Twitter is also employing a lot of robots.

The new owner is opposed to Twitter's origins, and his goal is to employ robots, not humans.

Right, but when it comes to their branding stuff, I would expect the company to either store it (if they have enough space somewhere) or move it straight to trash. Selling their corporate logos for 25 USD looks like they are being liquidated and closing the shop. I can't understand how someone even come up with such idea ...

Companies do this sort of stuff all the time. Loads of companies sell merch, and even very brand-sensitive companies will sell old equipment for fans/nostalgia (see: Disneyland selling old animatronics and ride vehicles).

They aren't selling it for 25 USD anyway, it's a start price at an auction. I listed my iPad at a $0.01 start price, but that doesn't mean I'm broke and need the penny :)

If Disneyland does that while shuttering 88% of parks and staff, would you have the same takeaway?

Disneyland does this when they close a section of a park to rebuild it into something else, removing most of that sections staff from their company in the process, so... yeah, kind of?

You have a good point. That said selling merch or auctioning vintage equipment doesn't feel the same as what is happening here. If they just stored it somewhere and auctioned it few years later, it would send a completely different message.

I heard they need the space to replace it with this:

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/business/2022/12/02/elon-goat...

(ultimate ... infinite ... cringe)

That's strangely befitting.

Musk doesn't seem to believe in this version of Twitter and therefore has no issues dismantling it. There's still lots of damage done to Twitter the employer but I don't think it matters in the long run: there are always suckers who are willing to work for despotic leaders.

Or people on H-1B visas that can't take the risk of leaving.

Apologies I forgot about those people, who really are in a vulnerable position.

I'm surprised nobody walked out the door with it as a trophy. It's not unusual for things to go missing when a company goes through an acquisition.

I’m sure Elon is checking the cameras. Taking items is a great way to turn a layoff into a for-cause firing.

Checking the cameras, overseeing key product decisions at 3 companies, tweeting at all hours of the day....how does he find the time? /s

Pharmaceuticals.

There is one lot of 10 jamboard stands, which makes you wonder where 10 jamboards went

I'm not one of Elon's fans, trust me on that. But I do enjoy different perspectives to things.

And this sure seems like Elon doesn't give a f*ck about people, he's honestly trying to assemble the smallest team necessary to keep Twitter going, in whatever direction he wants it to go.

So yeah he's gotten a lot of criticism but I believe there's a different perspective here of a ruthless businessman just doing anything he wants to save his 44bn investment. Including downsizing it to the bare minimum, and then rewarding the people who stuck around and helped him through it.

He's "assembled" a team of H1Bs who can't quit, but he comes from apartheid money so it's just the old family business model redux.

> He's "assembled" a team of H1Bs who can't quit

So the (still after weeks) unsubstantiated rumours say...

I heard this from multiple sources of my own.

Do you not feel this would be big news if accurate? I'd imagine a lot of media outlets would love to break this story and would be hunting for any source of this, of which there would be hundreds.

It's also a security risk. Get ahold of enough branded stuff and you can make people think you work at Twitter on a video call.

I see it as a commitment to removing the old way of doing things, and starting fresh. Also it's common for companies to erect monuments to their own worship, but only once they've had lots of success and have money to burn. It isn't clear that the new twitter will succeed, and everyone knows it.

For those interested in buying but not in SF, you'll need to arrange your own pickup, craigslist style:

"Buyers may either pick up Goods at the designated auction site themselves or can contract with a third party agent to manage the removal process for them."

Yeah, this isn't eBay. Caveat emptor, as-is where-is, FOB where it sits, payment by wire only, be happy if you can load out yourself.

One would think there would be some times when the lots are open to inspection. It looks like bidding ends on Jan 17th, so there's plenty of time for them to add that.

According to the documentation you can view the items by appointment only.

these type of commercial auctions always offer a captive/partner transporter if you want that. i haven’t looked at the auction but presumably some of the items are large are require rigging and you’d generally use their partner.

> Additional Information Regarding Removal Procedures and Logistics Will Be Provided in January, 2023

I always think about the $10,000 couch in the lobby of the Seattle Twitter office that no one ever sat on.

Twitter wasted money on shit that didn’t matter for years.

10k is really not that much for a lobby worthy couch…

10k doesn't even buy you 2 Barcelona chairs.

And those aren't even comfortable.

The point is they didn’t need any couch there. Or could have gotten something comfortable from ikea and maybe wouldn’t have had to sell their company to Elon and had all this useless shit auctioned off.

Twitter didn't sell out of desperation, the offer was way above what the company was worth. A court was on the cusp of forcing the deal through when it finally moved forward.

So think of it as a $15,000 couch being liquidated.

Tell that to all my colleagues who don’t have a job anymore.

Despite lofty messages about changing the world, every startup is ultimately destined for the wood chipper of finance. Twitter actually did pretty good. It wasn't a fire sale, they managed to find a buyer who would significantly overpay, and they actually did so right before a market downturn. From a shareholder perspective, this was a wild success.

As far as the damage to the people working at the company, welcome to living under a paperclip-maximizing economy. It was abrupt to have the buyer do the analog of the rich guy cliche of buying a sports car just to crash it on the way home. But in some sense it's better than watching the pot slowly boil with cost cutting, dark patterns, and more surveillance ("ad") tech.

You also underestimate just how much companies pay for shit in general. Couches/chairs from Ikea can work for a tiny company, but that's about the limit. Above that, things just need to be built better so they can function as an abstraction and be forgotten about. Plus, the mood that couch helped set was instrumental in increasing the sale value of the company - see goal #1.

The point of a normal for-profit company is to make money for investors (ie: owners). Period. The employees are merely a means to an end and irrelevant beyond that end.

If you're concerned about that shouldn't your critiques be aimed at the person currently wrecking the company with massive debt, rather than the expense of a single couch that's like one month comp for a single engineer?

They wouldn't have a job even if the Seattle office had a futon rescued from a garbage bin instead of a $10k couch.

What would you have chosen to put in place of that sofa?

A $1,000 couch?

Inflatable castle.

I sat on it while waiting for someone to let me in when I forgot my badge… ;)

Are they getting rid off some of the creature comforts for the employees who're still sticking around? I could be wrong but is it another way Elon thinks that he could improve efficiency? Probably overthinking!

I think it's more like having downsized by half, they now have lots of excess unused inventory to offload.

> Are they getting rid off some of the creature comforts for the employees who're still sticking around?

In case you haven't noticed the majority of employees has been fired. There's only so many sofas you need for a certain amount of people.

Some nice espresso machines and grinders listed there. I assume those won't sell for 25$.

I wonder what those will go for. The triple La Marzocco goes for >$20k new and the singles about $9-10k:

https://prima-coffee.com/equipment/la-marzocco/strada-ee-la-...

https://www.espressoparts.com/products/la-marzocco-linea-cla...

I’m half tempted to bid to find out. Shipping probably won’t be cheap either. And there’s no way to know what the condition is.

I expect all the kitchen equipment will go for market value and no less. There's literally an entire little industry in every mid-size city or larger of people who keep an eye on restaurant closures and snatch up the equipment. That includes any business big enough to have an institutional kitchen so they'll definitely be on this one. Most new restaurants open with mostly used equipment and it comes from things like this.

Yep. The only way to get a deal on an auction like this is to bid on something nobody wants (maybe the Twitter thing?) or be willing to travel to an auction so far from the city nobody has bothered. And that’s damn far, as the used resellers will have a truck.

No, definitely not. Commercial kitchen equipment is expensive even second-hand; these will be bid up.

Some NEC laser projectors looks nice, want to bid on one if shipping to Europe is possible.

You could bid but I dare say they'll sell for more than they're worth if you include shipping to Europe.

I would bid for the sink

Heh, quite a few 60" LED TV's in there, with starting bid price of US$50. ;)

How are the middle-managers and scrumlords going to monitor the jenkins runs?

Out of curiosity, why announce this auction so early? Bidding doesn’t start for over a month.

I think:

Wanting an honest group of bidders, likely other businesses .. should not rush them .. give them time to organize.

There is no warranty with these products so it's a headache to acquire, and a business may need time to plan that out.

Gives you time to arrange a time to come in for inspection. Pretty typical for commercial auctions I think. This one is a little more interesting than most. Commercial kitchen gear is maybe the most common thing I see, but usually someone would have taken home stuff like the bird or the at planter, anything fun or with branding usually doesn’t make it to the auction.

Signed, Someone who wanted unique branded items from a well known local brewery that went under, but just read through 20 pages of “Lot of 100 spoons” instead.

That's common for auctions. It allows time for hype to build, the link to be sent around, interested parties to accumulate.

Darn! I was hoping their excess and vanity was rich enough to warrant them buying Aeron chairs. Who wants a Generation by Knoll?

I guess I'll just buy my own.

I finally did in '21 and it was worth every penny. YMMV but my attitude on price vs value for high end chairs changed quite a bit when I got one.

Looking at all these Google Jamboards for sale makes me think, anyone using a Jamboard, Surface Hub or similar at home or for wfh?

I use a Jamboard regularly. Pretty cool device for meetings over Meet (and rather well integrated into the Workspace suite).

At a previous employer on GSuite we had directors and other higherups demand Jamboards for their office space as a dedicated device to take meetings from.

Pure speculation on my part but hard not to think that they are preparing to move the HQ someplace else.

Austin!

Utopia Planitiae!

I seriously doubt he'd wind up in Austin vs Dallas/Frisco/etc.

Lubbock. Tyler. El Paso. Places where real estate is cheap, and there are no democrats to have work rules.

Purging that many espresso machines… guess they’ve chosen the path of purely amphetamines…

Anyone know if the Dublin office is selling anything?

Retail price for that furniture is appalling.

Well it’s not the type of furniture you ever have to throw away. Real molded plywood furniture will last forever

I would love to have a twitter bird. Only because it's the carcass of its older self. Really wish they update the logo soon.

To imagine this is even news. Most companies get rid of their stuff all the time in many different ways, mostly discretely and with absolutely no interest from the public, which result in the same thing. No news.

But Elon has learned the Trump card. Any news is attention, and the game isn't in good vs evil, moral vs immoral, tyrant vs iron man. It's being in the news, and making people debate exactly that.

And since hate travels broader and faster than praise, at least on social media, here we are.

Negativity First™

Do they ship? I can’t find any details.

Auction companies often do NOT ship, but will have a shipper that you can contract with; it will be overpriced.

According to the fine print you'll need to get a 3rd party shipper.

I am struggling to think how Elon is going to pay the interest on the loan he took for buying Twitter. On other hand his collateral , tsla stock, is crashing.

He got carried away to make this purchase during the rising tide of covid bull market.

I suspect this is going to severely affect both tsla and twtr

Before launching a GoFundMe for Elon, consider that when it’s that much money Elon doesn’t really have a problem, the bankers do. No matter what happens, Elon is going to be just fine.

Only if you consider that your reputation doesn't matter ... (and I mean beyond just the 'yes people')

In this instance, the guys reputation is already trash binned.

That's a nice saying, but it does not really hold true. Sure, banks aren't going to repossess Musk's house or anything like that. But they will recover what they're owed, in some form or the other. That's pretty much all that they do, all day, every day.

Apparently he’s looking to replace some of the expensive debt with new margin loans backed by his TSLA shares:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-08/musk-bank...

IMO this Twitter deal has been nothing but bad news for Tesla shareholders. The CEO is completely distracted and forced to sell his shares, and the company has been dragged into stupid culture wars. Tesla brand perception has crashed among Democratic-voting Americans who previously were its biggest supporters.

It’s hard to believe he spent $44B and crashed his car company’s valuation and personal reputation just to bring back Babylon Bee’s trans harassment onto an also-ran social media platform. It’s even harder to believe that some people fantasize about moving to a Mars colony where a person with this kind of judgment is king.

I work with scientists. Everyone who got a tesla feels a bit off about owning it now. Many jokes are had about being a musketeer, and the rise of twitler etc.

It's all jokes, but then at the end of the day, everyone else drives home in some other car and they don't know what the CEO said about "tweet of the day" etc. Yet Musk is all in everyones face all the time. It doesn't seem to be a winning strategy at the moment.

Tesla cars have been described as an electric car software platform, so I'm not surprised they are nervous. The car is not just what it is today, but depends on remote services, regular updates and foremost it seems like the car can fundamentally change its features based on remote software updates. It's concerning, suddenly you do not trust that software vendor as much as you did before.

Maybe $80k capital assets turning into scrap-value bricks would finally be significant enough for the general population to wise up to the scam that is the Internet of Trash.

It was predictable that this day would come, given the overt, public, and controversial personality type of Musk.

Sounds like a poor reflection of your companies culture.

Your phone, clothes, the mug you're sipping from were all likely made from if not child labour, at best abusive and unfair labour.

Worrying about the what moderately disagreeable thing the CEO of the company who made your car may have said on social media seems an incredible view.

> IMO this Twitter deal has been nothing but bad news for Tesla shareholders

Can they do anything about it? Or is he protected like that Facebook Zucker?

Elon Musk is fairly well protected. Tesla corporate bylaws require a supermajority of votes for any major changes, so despite only controlling a minority of voting rights he has an effective veto over any shareholder resolutions.

https://www.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/how-elon-musk-con...

TSLA was always going to go down since it was (and probably still is) way overpriced. In fact I think a large part of why he started this twitter saga was to have an excuse to offload a bunch of stock at the top. He probably then hoped to get more people into the deal with him, so he could keep some billions left over.

What if distracting the CEO is good for operations?

That’s actually good news for Tesla in the long run.

It’s a company that sells cars mostly to yuppies and woke buerguesie who drive the cars as a statement.

Now it’s time to let this bird fly and see if it survives, for that it needs to appeal to the mass market and not just the ones who “move to Canada” every 4 years.

Tesla stock like every stock is (over)valued based on the future, and at this point de-Musking Tesla a little bit could be the thing that actually brings the money to those Tesla stock “investors” in the mid/long run.

Is that actually a good way to expand the market?

Apple around 2000 was stuck in a niche that would probably be described as “woke” today: graphic designers and hipsters.

The way that Steve Jobs broke out of the niche wasn’t that he suddenly started courting Dell PC buyers and went around saying: “Designers are dummies and ‘Think Different’ was a joke anyway.”

That’s basically how Musk is treating his existing Tesla customers now. (Including myself. The car is still good but I have serious doubts I’d buy another.)

> It’s a company that sells cars mostly to yuppies and woke buerguesie who drive the cars as a statement.

You’re bringing a lot of emotional baggage to this mischaracterization. Tesla’s buyers are affluent because they didn’t sell anything cheap but that doesn’t make them woke - the dedicated environmentalists bike or take the bus to work - and the smartest move Tesla ever did was making the first one a sports car. That got all of the “car guys” interested because it changed the thought of an EV from something bland but virtuous to a fun, premium experience. Even knowing that “woke” is how right-wingers describe anyone who isn’t, it’s really not accurate – I know more libertarians who bought them until the quality control problems started catching up with them.

Is this a joke? You are struggling to think how the richest man on the world can afford to pay interest on a loan? He has assets worth $150B

The interest on the loan is $1B a year. Twitter’s revenue in 2021 was $6B. Can he pay the interest back? Sure. Is he going to have 1B in liquid capital every year? Harder.

Does he ever recoup the cost of buying Twitter at that rate? outlook doesn’t look good.

Just because he’s super-rich doesn’t mean he’s immune to bad decisions. Becoming rich and staying rich are two different skill sets. Many a fortune has been squandered by people pursuing bad ideas.

They have to make room for the beds. Hardcore twitter demands you sleep at work.

Not (while) at work of course, but in the office!

New twitter allows from working from home as well, now that your office is your new home.

Homing from work?

Surprising the system appears to run efficiently without the extra 7000 employees.

Elon didn't fire _everyone_ so the delta is less than 7k.

Still, has it been long enough to evaluate that? The missing employees might be noticeable once there is some big issue with the infra and all the greybeards are gone, or once there is some big EU investigation and all the compliance experts are gone, etc.

Here's the Twitter Death Watch grafana that's tracking API response times, etc https://deadbird.singlepane.io/

> some big EU investigation and all the compliance experts are gone

AFAIK the compliance experts are gone and they have an FTC audit in January.

Twitter was supposed to have collapsed and died a month ago, but seems to be working well enough during the current mega world event known as the FIFA World Cup.

I feel like the more we learn about Twitter the more it’s just a tiny company that tried to look like Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Apple.

It’s really just a trash company that had a lot of junk and a lot of people doing nothing with overly inflated salaries.

Why is twitter trash? Problems are pointed out with all those four large companies way more often than with twitter. Maybe smaller companies with smaller scope are in fact more productive, effective and less problematic rather than the opposite.

>Why is twitter trash?

We can prove it objectively with how history played out.

What’s the biggest, most influential and main social network of the next 10 years that every legacy network is desperately trying to imitate?

Well Twitter owned the concept a decade ago and didn’t think it was worth taking any further so now someone else reaped the benefits.

“Trash” isn’t a strong enough word.

Because it was over valued and produced nothing. 7000 employees. Moderation didn’t actually enforce rules. Nothing changed in 10 years. 0 attempt at fixing issues. Killed off vine with no attempt to make it better.

I thought we all had the consensus this whole time? It's never even had half the userbase that Facebook has had. It hasn't innovated in years. The web interface is awful to use. It hasn't been able to get any traction on any other product (vine etc).

Like I really want a $25 used La Marzocco LINEA 1EE Semi-Auto Espresso Machine filled with the tears of the forker compliance team.

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