Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[Barrister]

I don't know that Twitter will really disappear, to me it's more looking at the business situation: because you've gutted almost all the expertise and workforce of the company, you have literally valued the blue bird brand and its low-monetization userbase at $44bn, which is 44x the best year of profit the company ever had. Even if Musk manages to limp the company through to a rebuild...I see almost no prospects that this will prove to be an investment of $44bn that makes that much sense versus...probably a fucking index fund, or just leaving that money in Tesla.

The workforce and the blue bird band have very little intrinsic value.  What was valuable was its user base.

While Twitter has a much smaller user base than Facebook, YouTube, Instagram - heck even TikTok has more users - but it's users included a crazy number of media and government officials that gave it an influence far beyond it's size.

If those users really do start leaving Twitter en masse then the whole enterprise is truly fucked.

[The Larch]

The way things are going, I wonder if the best solution is to simply switch off Twitter for a couple of months or so, reorganize everything with the resources available at the moment, do some sort of rebranding and starting the Twitter 2.0 phase once that's done. Otherwise it seems that stuff will simply start falling on the wayside as it keeps crumbling, and there seems to be a real risk of regulator fines looming if they keep operating with such a small workforce that privacy topics start getting overlooked.

[Sheilbh]

My read on how Musk has (mis)managed Twitter staff is he learned bad lessons from Tesla/SpaceX in terms of what might work in a more general sense.

Tesla and SpaceX both employ lots of engineers, who probably came to those companies from staider/established auto and aerospace firms. They very likely went to Tesla and SpaceX specifically to be bleeding edge, work on new tech, do things that they are deeply passionate about. It is a well-known thing that employees who are really passionate about what a company does are willing to put in longer hours and even accept lower pay. That's one reason for example computer programmers for game development companies frequently take jobs in gaming that pay less and work them harder than what they'd face if they worked at some generic enterprise software corp.

From an owner/manager perspective, there are tons of advantages to having people who drink your kool-aid vs people just coming to work for a paycheck. The idea of trying to create that same culture at Twitter certainly makes sense in that context.

What Musk majorly misunderstood though is Twitter isn't anything like a Tesla/SpaceX in its field. Twitter is a software company that runs a big web application, nothing it is doing or has done is particularly novel or exciting for someone already working in a software company. The list of companies that, tech stack wise, do work similar to Twitter is massive. Sure, Twitter is a little unique in that it's running a midsized and high-visibility social media network, but for the engineering people it's a big web app and there's lots of big web apps being ran by lots of big companies. Twitter is a lot closer to being Chrysler in comparison to Ford than it is Tesla in comparison to Ford.

The people who work there also know all of this, so when you cut 50% of the staff and then tell the remaining staff they need to do more work for no additional pay, they are basically just going to look at the broader job market where lots of companies working in web applications have job openings doing the same shit they were doing at Twitter without the bad work environment. Why wouldn't they leave?

Is it possible to build the sort of enthusiast workforce at a company like Twitter? I wouldn't say it is impossible, but it is definitely harder than it would be at Tesla or SpaceX because you aren't working in any technology that is that interesting or novel as compared to any job you could get at Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Alphabet, Facebook, Adobe etc etc. Those are just the tech majors, there are literally hundreds of firms with similar jobs that are less known to industry outsiders.

Maybe. What I'd say is I've known people who've worked for various bits of Meta and they all left eventually very disspirited and disheartened, but at the time I think they were enthusiasts.

Even in meetings and projects when what they are looking at is how to improve ad sales on Instagram the way it is framed and discussed internally is around "building communities". And lots of people really buy into that describing what they're doing. I think consciously stepping out of that is a necessary step on leaving those companies.

Which is where I think Musk's takeover is probably so damaging internally is I suspect the guys who are most enthusiastic for the "building communities" style view of what they do will be the ones who are most demoralised and looking for a way out. What he'll be left with, as you say, are the time servers and the guys who just want want to get paid.

I also think what he's saying is advertising for the wrong company - and there's something similar with Zuckerberg. This "it's going to be hardcore" etc line is something I think you can get away with if you're a young company, maybe if there's good stock options and there's something sort of evangelical about the project. If you're a big listed or private company with investors, under the scrutiny of regulators around the world and a large existing product and customer base, it is not going to be hardcore. You can cut loads of staff, fire functions that are seen as slowing things down (security, privacy, compliance) but ultimately you're still just paying people, not offering them stock options, and you're still a big company, with a big user base and investors and regulators paying attention.

It's like trying to live like you're 19 when you're 45 and have a mortgage and two kids. You can do it, but that won't make it the same.

[Barrister]

The way things are going, I wonder if the best solution is to simply switch off Twitter for a couple of months or so, reorganize everything with the resources available at the moment, do some sort of rebranding and starting the Twitter 2.0 phase once that's done. Otherwise it seems that stuff will simply start falling on the wayside as it keeps crumbling, and there seems to be a real risk of regulator fines looming if they keep operating with such a small workforce that privacy topics start getting overlooked.

They could maybe get away with shutting down for a weekend, but any lengthy shut-down will just cause the user base to migrate to other platforms fairly rapidly.  I see lots of people on Twitter describing how to move to Mastodon, or about a beta for a social media company called Post, or just moving to instagram or whatever.

[Jacob]

Saw someone quoting a European Twitter employee to the effect of "Elon's email is about as legally binding as me sending him an email saying 'from now on I'll work 3 hours/ day k thx bye'. I'll just keep working as usual until I hear something formal from HR."

Does anyone know how much of Twitter's staff is in Europe? Presumably they can't managed the same way Elon's handling his California staff.

[OttoVonBismarck]

https://twitter.com/ZoeSchiffer/status/1593649356661436417?s=20&t=ozmwM7-ZoUeGU-l1rVx3oQ

This tweet thread I think is kind of interesting because to me it shows Elon views Twitter's problems as...technical in nature. He wants to get "good developers" into his war room to solve the problem.

The issue is while I'm sure Twitter has IT processes and software optimizations that could be made, Twitter wasn't losing money because of "bad code". And it is unlikely to magically start making money by replacing any "bad code" with "good code." It was losing money because the valuation of Twitter's 400m users is X to advertisers, and X is not enough to make that much money. It would take something far different from code optimizations to change that basic calculus.

[The Larch]

This "it's going to be hardcore" etc line is something I think you can get away with if you're a young company, maybe if there's good stock options and there's something sort of evangelical about the project.

Yeah, it's "ambitious start-up" rhetoric, not something for an established company.

[The Larch]

Saw someone quoting a European Twitter employee to the effect of "Elon's email is about as legally binding as me sending him an email saying 'from now on I'll work 3 hours/ day k thx bye'. I'll just keep working as usual until I hear something formal from HR."

Does anyone know how much of Twitter's staff is in Europe? Presumably they can't managed the same way Elon's handling his California staff.

There must be something about it, when this all started and the first round of firings was announced it was reported here that those firings were invalid under Spanish labour laws, so staff based in Spain couldn't be fired that way unless the proper legal procecdure was followed.

[DGuller]

Why do eugenics nuts always assume smart people have smart kids.

Why would you assume that smart people would not have smart kids? Is there some reason to think that intelligence is not heritable?

The science certainly suggests otherwise - IQ is generally highly heritable (although of course influenced by a large number of other factors).

That is not eugenics.

IQ is not the same as intelligence or being smart, though.

Few things in real world are the same as other things.  However, many things are correlated, and in the real world correlation is often good enough.  If children IQ is correlated with parents' IQ, and IQ is correlated with intelligence, then barring some very strange covariance behavior, parents' intelligence is correlated with the intelligence of their children.

[The Larch]

The way things are going, I wonder if the best solution is to simply switch off Twitter for a couple of months or so, reorganize everything with the resources available at the moment, do some sort of rebranding and starting the Twitter 2.0 phase once that's done. Otherwise it seems that stuff will simply start falling on the wayside as it keeps crumbling, and there seems to be a real risk of regulator fines looming if they keep operating with such a small workforce that privacy topics start getting overlooked.

They could maybe get away with shutting down for a weekend, but any lengthy shut-down will just cause the user base to migrate to other platforms fairly rapidly.  I see lots of people on Twitter describing how to move to Mastodon, or about a beta for a social media company called Post, or just moving to instagram or whatever.

I'm just spitballing, but I don't thinkn it would be a bad thing if Twitter was taken offline for a while to reorganize behind closed doors rather than making all the drama public. Sure, the longer that offline period is, the riskier that alternatives will pop up, but I think that Twitter has enough inertia to whitstand a short period offline in order to do a comeback. Sure, it can't be a super long period, but just a weekend won't solve anything.

[Sheilbh]

Saw someone quoting a European Twitter employee to the effect of "Elon's email is about as legally binding as me sending him an email saying 'from now on I'll work 3 hours/ day k thx bye'. I'll just keep working as usual until I hear something formal from HR."

Does anyone know how much of Twitter's staff is in Europe? Presumably they can't managed the same way Elon's handling his California staff.

Oh absolutely - there is no way anything Musk is tweeting flies with European labour law. I'm not sure on numbers but they've got offices across Europe - couple in the UK, couple in Germany, France, Spain, Belgium and (like the rest of the tech companies) a big hub in Dublin.

In my world on a purely regulatory/data protection side it'll be interesting. European law on that applies to companies who are not based in Europe if they're targeting or monitoring Europeans. But it's regulated at a member state (and, in Germany, federal) level. If you're a non-European company in scope then the general rule is that you are fair game for all European regulators. But if you have a "main establishment" in a European country then its regulator, for most stuff, will have exclusive jurisdiction - that means an establishment that is capable of making decisions basically.

So most of the big tech companies have a "main establishment" in Ireland because they have a fairly relaxed regulator, but also they have 200 staff and they are, on behalf of the entire EU, tasked with regulating Meta, Google, Twitter etc. The result has been that Europe has fairly robust laws and absolutely pathetic enforcement/policing. The French have got so frustrated they're just coming up with pretexts on why issues aren't in Ireland's jurisdiction so they can fine Facebook

But the thing I wonder is whether Musk's firing of loads of people - including in Dublin - has accidentally blown up his "main establishment" in Europe and it's now a free for all for European data regulators including the really strict ones everyone tries to avoid like Berlin

They could maybe get away with shutting down for a weekend, but any lengthy shut-down will just cause the user base to migrate to other platforms fairly rapidly.  I see lots of people on Twitter describing how to move to Mastodon, or about a beta for a social media company called Post, or just moving to instagram or whatever.

On this worth flagging that I saw a couple of disabled BBC journalists who have physical issues with video or picture based platforms noting that they were a bit saddened at what's going on with Twitter because it is a further decline of a more text based social media in favour of Instagram or TikTok etc which just won't work for them.

[Jacob]

We get it DGuller - you scored well on your IQ tests back in the day

More seriously, though, there are of course strong correlations between parents and kids. I think the more interesting question is to what degree that correlation is down to genetics vs various social conditions - including nurturing of the parents, the effects of wealth, the effects of social class and peers etc).

[DGuller]

We get it DGuller - you scored well on your IQ tests back in the day

I've never taken an IQ test.  I just really despise selective innumeracy that is politically motivated.

[alfred russel]

I look at this as a threat because as a member of the professional managerial class, what I see is someone from the entrepreneurial class challenging the need for professional managers. For all the talk of turmoil, twitter is still on. My understanding traffic is at an all time high.

I literally wrote the last post while in a meeting with three other people about if we can finally implement the rationalized reporting structure to simplify the process of producing the results management sees by line of business. We came up with the structure two years ago but there has always been a reason not to do it. Does the structure even make sense anymore? Who knows, the people that came up with it are gone. Currently we decided not to implement it now because we ironically have layoffs impacting the accounting team that would be doing the implementation and it wouldn't be well received. However, what if instead of 4 people making that decision (which we all probably knew would be the outcome going in, which is why i was disengaged and posting on languish during the meeting) we fired 3 of us and let one person make it unilaterally without a meeting? Maybe the reports management gets wouldn't be as clean, but I don't think the sky would fall.

Or even more radically, what if we fired all of us, plus 90% of the accounting teams, and just did the minimum necessary to close the books for SEC reporting and didn't produce any specialized reporting at all for senior management?

If the CEO or CFO floated that idea to me I'd give a zillion reasons not to do it, many of which would be convincing and some of which might be true. But I'd definitely be concerned and threatened if a company tried it. That is from an accounting perspective, but it is easily transferrable to almost any other department or group.

[Jacob]

I've never taken an IQ test.  I just really despise selective innumeracy that is politically motivated.

Fair enough.

Conversely, there's an argument about reducing complex social factors to simply numbers - especially if those numbers are then used for decision-making based on numeric models that leave out critical nuance.