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Comment by babelfish | Hacker News Reader

Is this how he's solving the bot problem? By terminating everyone with the ability to measure them?

Edit: Article is likely fake https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1586058607585812481

I would guess he wants to fire the entire team handling the data so he can more easily cook the books, and pretend like he's making a killing on Twitter - and try to flip it to some even more egotistical Billionaire.

Is there another person who can rally investors for a $44B purchase and who wouldn't bother with due diligence?

It will take a miracle for Elon to not lose at least $15Bn on this.

I'd look at it more that he's trying to limit losses than make a profit.

It is only money.

Where did you get the $15 billion figure from?

This comment strikes me being rooted in a limited and almost comical understanding of business finance, especially at this scale. This isn't Hollywood. Since neither of us are privy to twitter's books (and Musk is, btw) it is equally (and more likely) that he's dumping positions that are double and triple redundant - a common occurrence in bloated bureaucratic teams of large companies that are poorly run and/or structured. I fully expect Musk to lay off most of Twitter's existing team and cycle through most staff in the next six months. He still has to weed out bad actors and saboteurs, as well. I also find it irresponsible for you to assume his motivations and intentions when you've been given none that reflect your supposition.

Thinking you can cycle "most of Twitter's existing team" with new employees in just 6 months without any impact to service availability or velocity also shows a "limited and almost comical understanding of" the importance of organizational knowledge, operations management, and recruiting.

I actually work in finance reporting, as a data engineer, at FAANG.

Interesting that you think the entire data team is double & triple redundant.

It's almost as if you're the one lacking knowledge.

Speaking as someone who previously worked at a company blatantly committing fraud, the CEO hand-picking the entire data team was instrumental to said fraud.

Maybe that's just my past causing the suspicion. If he laid off 75% of the data team, I'd be less skeptical. Maybe he thinks they're double and triple redundant, as you say. 100% is extremely suspect, though.

As someone who runs Tesla, which has a large data eng team, he knows the entire team isn't useless.

Your entire first comment was an assumption of bad faith on the part of Musk. Given that Twitter is now a private entity, there's no motivation to act fraudulently. I think Musk's track record merits at least a few quarters of actions before everyone jumps to conclusions?

Does Elon have a history of cooking books? Or flipping companies?

Or by firing the whole team responsible and starting over.

Yeah, good luck with that. I guess if you pay enough they will come but they need to settle in and figure out a plan. It won’t happen immediately. I certainly wouldn’t sign up to work for a company that just fires entire orgs without a real plan.

> without a real plan

My guess is there's a plan. You don't spend $44B or whatever it was without a plan. Or... well, I wouldn't. But with Musk, anything's possible.

To be fair, he tried pretty hard to not do it. He ran his mouth, now he's dealing with it as he sees fit since he bought it. He can throw a tantrum all he wants. He's never going to see the repercussions of his knee jerk reactions, but all of the people on the receiving end are now rethinking their holiday plans.

I honestly hope he ends up killing Twitter. Maybe we can convince him to buy the next social platform and then lather, rinse, repeat until he becomes the savior we didn't want but the savior we needed in eliminating the cancer that social has become.

Elon Musk's plan _literally_ 3 weeks ago was to complain to the judge that too many bots were on Twitter, and therefore Elon Musk doesn't have to buy Twitter.

Some of us have more memory than a goldfish ya know? It wasn't even a month ago that Elon Musk was 100% full tilt "too many bots on Twitter / Twitter not worth this money".

We get that Musk has to _pretend_ that he likes the company now. But we all know its the judge who forced him to do this.

Do you know long it takes to staff and train an entire data engineering department? It'll be minimum a year until its staffed to appropriate levels given the sheer amount of data Twitter generates every day, and another year for that team to reach any level of competence. He's driving Twitter into the ground.

I expect they will hire data engineers that don't need a year of training. It's not that hard.

It's not that hard if they have access to sufficient training, organizational knowledge, and mentorship. That was just wiped out entirely. Every new data engineering hire for the next year will be figuring it out from scratch.

I bet you he is bringing in a team of Tesla engineers from their ml and data science departments.

Because they've made so much progress on autonomous driving, right?

LOL @ the person that thinks it's not hard to hire experienced data engineers. There's tons of junior folks around but hiring someone that has experience with working with complex data at the scale twitter has is not easy at all.

It's going to be especially hard to restaff the team with the implicit threat of "and if you don't tell Elon what he wants to hear, he'll fire the entire team again" hanging over it.

Twitter has always been poorly run. They've only been profitable two out of the last 10 years despite user growth.

2012: $79MM loss

2013: $645MM loss

2014: $577MM loss

2015: $521MM loss

2016: $456MM loss

2017: $108MM loss

2018: $1206MM gain

2019: $1466MM gain

2020: $1136MM loss

2021: $221MM loss

Given billions in accumulated losses, where else did you think twitter was, other than in the ground? It certainly wasn't in the sky.

Makes sense to fire the team that is in charge of measuring things since he is going to make up his own numbers anyways.

Six months from now he will announce that the fake account problem is solved. His supporters will laud him as a genius. Did he actually remove bots? No one will know, and no one will care.

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