This is going about exactly as terrible as you'd have guessed it would. Usually there is some redeeming thing, but it doesn't look like there is in this case.
When they started the layoffs, and with such short notice, I just knew there was a 0% chance that they'd happened properly and with proper preparation. There's going to be so much domain knowledge and expertise that's been lost, and half the teams are probably just adrift and confused because they now either have to do 2x the work or 2x their timelines, at the very least. Doing 2x the work might then also mean doing a bunch of work you're not informed about, so it might actually be 3x or 4x the work for someone coming in.
If I had gotten the boot and they were asking me to come back, I don't think I'd be saying yes, unless it was necessary from a financial standpoint. And even then I'd only stick around until I found a new job, at which point I would quit without notice.
> Many employees learned they lost their job after their access to company-wide systems, like email and Slack, were suddenly suspended. The requests for employees to return demonstrate how rushed and chaotic the process was.
This is par for Musk corps, literally the day after my interview at Fremont they laid off 9% of total staff in 2018 [0] because of how poorly Model 3 launch had fared in the beginning.
I can't go into specifics, much of which are public now, but it was so disheartening after having been so well received and cordial and enthusiastic; everyone was completely there because how important 'the mission' was only to be told 'don't come back' in incredibly uncouth manner.
When they sent the message out the next day, which is how many found out they've been laid off, calamity struck and it was clear that this was a deliberate tactic to re-shuffle and quell not just the rumors of Model 3's shortcomings amongst the rank-and-file staff, but to sweep the poor safety record in the factory under the rug and the have intimidation creep for those who sought to Unionize--at the time I was not in favour of it, but as time went on and I got more insider information from other team members I soon realized that it was likely needed despite my initial apprehension.
In short, I want to see the demise of social media's influence on the Internet (aka Web2.0) and if this represents how the most lauded CEO in SV handles things then I think we're nearing the end sooner rather than later. I think it's a commonly held sentiment that Social Media ruined most of what was magical of the early Internet and ushered in what has been the worst eternal September phase. I just hope it's not too late to correct this as Zuck is killing his corp in an equally embarrassing and out of touch manner.
Lots of social media seems to be a global shouting match, rather than thoughtful discussion. For instance you have first hand experience with Tesla, which is valuable. Many comments are posted after not even reading beyond a headline.
It’s like standing on a crowded square and everyone just shouts out whatever they think.
Unfortunately running ads and thoughtful, curious, spacious and timely discussion (and listening!) do not go well. Too often algorithms where (are?) tweaked for drama engagement.
I just really don’t understand how this whole situation has been this badly mismanaged. I fully believe his original offer to be a troll, but then he got stuck with it, but he has since so mismanaged this entire affair that I simply can’t understand how. Is the guy surrounding himself with idiotic advisers? Has he just gotten so far from reality that he can’t make reasonable predictions? Has he gone off some meds? It just makes no sense.
Yeah I'm thinking the same. Even without the screwups, it's an unbelievable waste of $44billion dollars. He could have invested that in a nuclear fusion startup or something else that would advance his dual goals of clean energy and a multi-planet species (and almost certainly make better ROI than Twitter). Instead through a series of bizarre misteps he spends that on a useless vanity project that will distract him from his important companies, and then proceeds to fuck it up in just about every conceivable way. Like, dude...
> that would advance his dual goals of clean energy and a multi-planet species
From what I've observed over the years, his real goal is to receive attention from as many people as possible. I doubt his sincerity on his stated goals, this is most likely just self-marketing bullshittery.
Well, see it this way, the old owners of Twitter now have all that money. Maybe they'll invest in something interesting? The only difference is that it won't be controlled by an unstable Elon Musk.
(TBH I'm not even sure who the previous owners were...)
I'm sure they'll do something valuable with it after they finish buying back their own shares, issuing new subprime debt securities, and propping up the CCP.
From the guy who managed to launch Starlink and currently runs the most successful/effective space launch provider, it's so bizarre seeing him fumble Twitter so badly. Has something changed about him or has he always been this way and the space industry was just less conducive to drawing out his batshit crazy?
Ignoring everything else, if a manager at your company has coined a term like "Elon’s rage firings", I don't need to know anything else about the work environment.
I'd say Tesla/SpaceX achieve cool things not because of him, but despite of him.
Why are we giving Musk credit for these things? We don't give Jobs credit for the original technical success of Apple; that goes to Woz. Somewhere behind the scenes at SpaceX there's one or more people analogous to Woz who get all the actual work done. Musk's entire contribution is just to shitpost and posture for the techbros. He's not a technologist, he's not a programmer, he's not an engineer, he's not a physicist, he's not a rocket scientist, he's just a blowhard with a cult following.
> He's not a technologist, he's not a programmer, he's not an engineer, he's not a physicist, he's not a rocket scientist, he's just a blowhard with a cult following.
These people and quite a few other experts in this field disagree with you.
> When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn't come just from hanging out with people.
Robert Zubrin - aerospace engineer
> Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years.
Kevin Watson - Head of Avionics, Launcher
Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so.
> How much did he pay them to get them to say those things? He's clearly overmatched currently.
Zubrin? One now very badly decaying hab at MDRS? Oh, and I think he might have chipped in for the observatory via the 'Musk foundation.'
My point of contention is that how can you expect to be taken serious as the 'Chief Engineer' at SpaceX, and be abreast of all of the mintua of Starship/Starlink/Falcon etc... when you're also the CEO of all those other corps and still on Twitter shitposting all day and then getting into countlesss legal battles and that result on buying Twitter and showing up with a sink.
None of this makes any sense in a practical level, and it seems like we're being trolled by the channer who broke the matrix and actually made it big for his own enjoyment; what it has done is allow him to cultivate the very typical Silicon Valley slight of hand of making himself to be able to walk on water and turn everything he touches turn to gold which makes for good marketing. Which is what I think he does well, despite being perhaps the worst public speaker and CEO of so many unicorns.
Which leads me to believe that most of it is an act, and he is perfectly well aware of what and how he is doing: and it's worked thus far, but whether it's pumping and dumping in the crypto markets or buying useless social media companies I think it's clear that most are seeing the writing on the wall about him, these latest escapades with Twitter are just making what was likely kept in secret now public--lets not forget the accusations from the flight masseuse and his distorted perception of reality where he is seemingly trying to re-populate the Earth with as many women as possible just like the most deranged cult leaders.
> how can you expect to be taken serious as the 'Chief Engineer' at SpaceX, (...)when you're also the CEO (...) and still on Twitter shitposting all day (...)
Hardcore emphasis on all day I’d assume.
Just don’t fire Netflix as soon as you’re back home, actually do not get back home, and spend an insane amount of hours on the field will get you to a place where you can legitimately be in charge (CEO) and understand deeply the business (chief engineer) - aka become chief micromanager.
And that somewhat explains the rest of the personality: skip enough hours of sleep and you’ll finally end up as an over-sensitive, selfish bro.
Not exactly saying the above is a sane way of living and doing things that should be praised, but I personally respect him for the passion/time he puts in the process, which at the end of the day is the reason why some like-minded engineers are working for/with him on his bold visions, even if they don’t have as much skin in the game as him, financially speaking.
I mean, he’s not faking it, and that goes a long way when selling a narrative and embarking your next partner, whether a banker or an engineer.
> I mean, he’s not faking it, and that goes a long way when selling a narrative and embarking your next partner, whether a banker or an engineer.
I've said it before but I think he is PT Barnen 2.0: that doesn't mean he hasn't taken immense financial risk, it's just that he is marketer cosplaying as 'aerospace engineer' and will pick and chose what he is a savant depending on what meds he decided to take that day--no one asked him to make a submarine to save children in Thailand.
Which is what was necessary to get the masses interested, sure, but has ultimately back-fired at this point.
It's a fundamentally different kind of company. You can bang the desk and yell at engineers when you're building rockets, because ultimately customers only care about the tech. And there will always be engineers who don't care about abuse as long as they get to Build Cool Stuff.
With something like Twitter the tech is more or less invisible. Users care about trust and relationships, and so do many of the engineers.
Musk isn't just utterly clueless about those, he's hostile to the culture that values them.
This is not going to end well. Odds are excellent it's going to turn into another of those legendary loss-making acquisitions like AOL and MySpace.
Well you or I wouldn't make a formal offer as a troll, but someone like Elon Musk might believe they could pull off something like formally offering to buy a company for an epic-bacon-lol share price and then pull out before having to follow through (and god knows he tried to)
> I just really don’t understand how this whole situation has been this badly mismanaged.
You and almost the whole world. There are still some people left believing him to play some kind of genius 4D chess. Same thing happens for Trump and Ye.
Ever since thiel datamined humanitys true nature out of facebooks data he and all his associated are in full catastrophe fallback mode. If a decline to authoriatarian rule can not be prevented, at least make it controlled.
Its also a visible background pattern in almost all larger tech investment - build technology that can not be used for exponential damage in the wrong hands and make humanity resilient to catastrophic change.
Example: Youtube videos containg tutorials that survive all of humanity dieing of that knew a certain technology.
But the clear difference is that Musk is very clearly an extremely high IQ guy. Trump and Ye have incredible skills in their domain but Musk has really high general intelligence, but is clearly fucking this up beyond anyone's expectations.
IQ is about processing speed, not processing quality. If you're operating outside of your competence with limited awareness and inaccurate contextual assumptions you can be super-smart and still make incredibly stupid decisions.
That’s not true-processing speed is just one component of IQ. Some people can have below average processing speed but be in the gifted range in other IQ components. (e.g. on WISC-V, high GAI but low PSI). It is actually reasonably common among people who are gifted but also have ADHD/ASD/OCD/etc
Do you have any indisputable example of this? (as in quick, smart reasoning in real time, so it could not have been written by someone else). It makes sense to me that he would be smart as in raw reasoning capacity, but all the content I have been linked him to made him look pretty normal or even less smart than the average career engineer.
> When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn't come just from hanging out with people.
Robert Zubrin - aerospace engineer
> Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years.
Thanks, I appreciate the links and will come back to them if Elon ever falls in grace with those people. If they don't change their opinion that would be a decent proof of his intelligence.
For now, however, I would prefer a video of the many interviews he takes instead of quotes of people that have a lot to gain from praising Elon (and a lot to lose if they criticized him). Is there any quote from any of the people in that thread that paint Elon in a bad light? I know for sure there are many things bad Elon, from his direct actions. Do they ever comment on that or would they lose their livelihood within a day if they did?
> quotes of people that have a lot to gain from praising Elon
The two people I quoted don't work for Elon so it doesn't seem like they have much to gain or lose either way. Same with John Carmack, Liam Sarsfield and Eric Berger.
> any quote from any of the people in that thread that paint Elon in a bad light
I haven't read the biography or anything like that on Musk, so I'm not sure. I imagine though their opinions of him aren't all positive. The thread I posted selects for the positive ones to prove that Musk is indeed chief engineer at SpaceX.
LOL, imagine "Elon Musk is smart" getting downvoted on a site about tech entrepreneurship and company building. This is Exhibit #1 as to why people should not take this website seriously
Firstly by signing a contract, changing his mind and then being forced to fulfil the contract by a court. By alienating a lot of prominent Tweeters and advertisers. Now by sacking a load of people it turns out he needs.
What will advertising revenue look like going forward?
How many employees have been asked to return, how needed are they, and was it mismanagement or just an expected outcome of necessary, decisive decision making?
I'm sad that you took my comment that way. In fact I'm simply trying to suggest that many people's views in this thread on Elon's management of Twitter are severely underdetermined by the evidence.
I think it’s clear that this is definitely a waste of 44billion. What a staggering amount of money. But I think Twitter has more leeway than people think.
First of all, the vast majority aren’t just going to move. The celebrities won’t because their followers are still on it. Everyone else won’t because by all accounts Mastodon isn’t as easy to signup with as twitter (I’ve not tried, and don’t care enough to to). And they rest of us just kinda read twitter and frankly don’t care if it crashes and burns.
All the big accounts I follow, simply started cross posting. So I expect nothing much to happen.
However given how much attention Twitter gets, even appearing in the news, and possibly swaying public opinion, I might be eating my words if it maintains popularity but turns into a dumpster fire.
Also by not having a vision, by not having a idea were he can Moist von Lipwig this, so just using the reminder of his more stupid moments as a punching bag.
I believe the previous poster is referring to the acquisition process, not Twitter itself. Although the past week hasn't been exactly a promising start.
Atleast where I live, when you fire someone that's it. They're fired. Even if they still work for 60 days because that's the minimum notice period. The only way to reinstitute the contract is if both sides sign a new contract to overwrite the termination. And this can be used to amend the employment contract too.
So where I live, you'd be in a prime position to negotiate better paychecks because without both employee and employer agreeing, a termination has finality.
iiuc the California WARN act doesn't let a large company (more than 15 employees) just fire half the workforce, so I guess these people have been locked out of their work accounts with full pay and informed of a future termination date.
Sounds like they want to lay them off with three weeks notice or whatever the law mandates in that area to prevent legal action. Personally I would accept the offer and do the bare minimum while I look for a new job.
> I don’t see why anyone would take that deal for a few weeks income, given how much it seems to matter to the company that just laid them off.
Getting called back immediately after a layoff seems like a pretty strong indication you can get away with a lot. Also, the quality of the organization's work on your layoff should indicate the quality of work the organization should get. Just take it easy and make sure you don't give them any key knowledge they need in a decipherable way.
So I've seen every news agency on the planet run this story, and they either cite each other in a huge circle, or they cite "people familiar with the matter".
Do we have 100% concrete first-hand documented evidence this actually happened to more than -let's say- 10 people?
It seems to me that unfortunately there's a lot of "tesla man bad" going around, causing dubious stories to be spread before they're verified.
You'll also see lots of people claiming Musk somehow broke employment law by not giving notice of termination, which is unproven, and in direct contradiction with what he tweeted himself (he said everyone gets ~90 days of salary IIRC).
I can't emphasize how strongly news outlets zero-in on topics that might be inflammatory with almost algorithmic precision. When Roe v. Wade was overturned, there was a story about some Amazon SWE's celebrating the outcome. It's a perfect blend of "Amazon bad + perennial political topic." Amazon has 70,000 software engineers; if some of them weren't politically conservative I'd be very surprised.
Painting him as reckless and stupid and like he doesn't know what he's doing is a great way to sink TSLA.
I certainly don't agree with everything he has said and done, though I can't help but be skeptical people are just jumping on the bandwagon without any concrete evidence/details.
it’s weird. The WARN law requires notice, but, the penalty for violating the law is you have to pay people 60 days of pay. So paying instead of providing notice is technically illegal, but enforcement is pointless if you pay people with no additional conditions. That being said, if you make the pay conditional such as requiring a non disparagement clause, that can be a problem, and is likely going to be a problem here. (Can’t be sure yet, I don’t believe anyone has the details from Twitter yet)
It’s really hard to overstate how badly things are going over there at this point.
It’s incredibly obvious by now that Elon and his crew of weirdos currently running the show (David Sacks and Jason Calacanis etc) were just marinating for years in an echo chamber of right-wing propaganda full of resentment against Blue Checks, fantasies of "shadowbanning", resentment of rules against hate speech, and lies about politics and other topics.
“Move fast and break things” is a viable strategy some of the time. Works for MVPs. Doesn’t work for surgeons.
The corollary is “the cost of fixing broken things that need fixing because you broke them while moving fast is a fraction of the cost of not moving fast”.
Does any of this apply to Twitter? We don’t know. It could still go in either direction and whichever way it goes in retrospect it’ll seem obvious and inevitable.
> “Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day,” Musk tweeted on Friday.
The real question here is probably why anyone would pay 44 billion dollars for a company losing 4 million dollars per day. I mean, it's not some promising startup, it's a company that's been around for a while and has only managed to be profitable for 2 years out of the last 12 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income...)?
Why other investors allow the buyer to assign the debt to the company being bought rather than the buyer alludes me, as I’d assume this weakens the collateral securing the debt.
Management incompetence at several levels. Apparently the CEO and his advisors choose to execute layoffs at this speed, others below that either didn't push back (could be due to the type of CEO / associated culture) or their pushback was ignored. The end result is the organization doing things that clearly aren't in its own interest which is a management fail.
The interesting parts it going to be how many people that are important to keeping Twitter running are going to quit in addition to the fired ones. It's not going to be a nice place to work for, so those people that are financially well off and those that can get good jobs somewhere else are probably considering their options right now.
The whole thing could have been avoided if Twitter/Elon had done it step-by-step instead of terminating staff in bulk. Everyone in tech is reducing headcount, but Elon likes to do stuff on a grand scale. He needs a human Twitter firewall (social media team who can say "NO") to verify each Tweet before sending it, causing chaos every day. But what do I know? I have never been CEO, so I have no idea.
Well, apparently being a CEO isn't that demanding, considering that you can be CEO of three pretty big companies at the same time and still find some free time to shitpost on Twitter.
He just spent $44 billion to eliminate any firewall between him and his audience. His whole thing is turning a dashed off thought on Twitter into a binding commitment that causes dramatic changes.
> it's not going to be a nice place to work for, so those people that are financially well off
I beg to differ. People who are crucial to operation will be much better off. Less meetings, less bloat, less bs, probably better salary.
I do consulting. Recession is good for business, companies lay off team of 10 developers and replace it with single remote consultant for 40% of cost. Also less taxes, since I work in different country.... You do the math.
Why would you expect their salary to increase. And I think the whole "work the whole weekend to get the new Twitter Blue done" thing shows what kind of workplace this is likely going to be in the future.
- Elon said there are 10 managers for one engineer. We can argue about numbers, but I am pretty sure there are no 10 engineers for 1 manager
- Web UI is crap, it is slow to load etc... If twitter would accept pull requests, I would fix it myself. I am pretty sure tech people are frustrated by situation.
- I do not see any research from Twitter into federated networks, cryptography... I did interviews with twitter in 2012, this stuff was all cut latter... I think Musk may sponsor this type of research just to push his Dogecoin BS.
- Read how "hostile takeover" looks like. It is mess, also it is very very sensitive week. "work the whole weekend" is irrelevant. Things will look very different in two weeks!
- Key people will be able to renegotiate their contracts, with much much better salary. You probably need 100 people to run twitter. See Whatsapp...
It depends entirely on the projected trajectory of the company. If the company is laying off people and is trending towards bankruptcy, the smartest rats will be the first to jump off the sinking ship.
I'm not sure Twitter is in this particular boat yet, but if I was working at Twitter right now, I would definitely be brushing up on my plan B pronto.
Project cleanup after sweatshops. Team quits on spot, leaves mess, no documentation. I put project back on track, documents things, help to hire new developers...
Business people in Twitter did not generated any profits (sales, positive PR...). I totally understand Elons position.
They should have him on All In this week, since both Jason C. and David S. are assisting with that process and they keep he narrative that the ship is being turned around and cleaning house is what really needed to be done in order to pivot from growth to profit.
If you can't even take into account what staff members you had cause to layoff, after having the former CEO escorted off the premises after having brought in a sink 'for the lulz' than something needs to be done. Then again, it's a private company and he doesn't respond to anyone anymore.
They have datacenters around the globe and small teams in other countries, both to hadle the local infraestructure and to have always someone on the clock in case some problem arises. For example, in my country they had 11 employes handling the datacenters (which apparently have been also fired).
Yes that was insane. Exactly one year before Whatsapp sold to Facebook for 19 billion dollars, that is in February 2013, they had about 200 million active users and 50 staff members.
And not all of those staff members were developers I imagine.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33496808 133 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33496822 18 comments