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Comment by darth_avocado | Hacker News Reader

> I'm sure there were many people at Twitter doing mostly nothing

So just because he is well known, you suddenly believe a Twitter employee. But others who Elon claims to not be working, they’re probably not working?

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It's almost irrelevant whether or not he was doing anything - even if he for some reason 100% deserved to be fired, the way Elon responded was wildly unprofessional.

All Elon needed to do was to reply "thanks for bringing this to my attention, clearly the ball has been dropped somewhere. I'll make sure someone responds to your e-mail", and then take it private.

It's true of any large company. There are many people not doing anything. Simply because of the number of employees, and the manner in which large companies tend to stop focusing on outcomes.

That doesn't mean most were not doing anything, but "most" is not the word used in the comment to which yours replies.

aka Price’s Law: Why Only A Few People Generate Half Of The Results

https://medium.com/darius-foroux/prices-law-why-only-a-few-p...

That article is total garbage and the author comes off as a complete douche bag. Did he add anything of value or just regurgitate a link to Wikipedia, quote Jordan fucking Peterson and take some time to attack some straw-man voss-water drinking academics he made up?

This is true in the entertainment industry, but it's because consumers want to buy what everyone else is buying. Not because there's a huge difference in performance. In fact, it's the opposite. There are many equally attractive/talented performers who can do the job just as well. It's very competitive, success is rare and fleeting even when it does come.

This translates into other parts of the economy. High income households experience high income volatility, consistent with the hypothesis that there is lots of competition at the highest levels of success—not very little competition.

I think that this person is more trustworthy than Musk. After reading Musk's depositions he is not a person that I would consider to be honest and forthright.

He doesn't have to work. Twitter acquired his company and the payout was structured as salary for tax reasons. Musk firing him suddenly turned that opex into capex, for no other reason than Musk has no idea what is going on in a company he runs.

But in this case the "tax reasons" was to maximize the tax: "In an agreement between him and Twitter, most of the purchase price was paid as salary to maximize the tax he would pay for the sale in Iceland. He chose to pay for tax out of respect to Iceland for the disability benefits he received."

I assume if you came into work and your manager says stop everything you're doing and then in the afternoon calls you into a meeting and says you're fired with cause because you aren't doing anything you would probably thank them for helping the business!

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