Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
twitter.com
twitter.com
I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore". It's a lose-lose situation; I don't think Twitter's problems would be solved by engineering harder; and you will spend 80 hrs/wk where you can end up fired because people aren't as deterministic as cars.
It's a completely bewildering move; I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter. What's most surprising it seems he has no thesis for the company or how it can be made better or what was so terrible about it.
This is a death march - no question about it. The book by Edward Yourdon should be required reading for any who are still at Twitter.
One of the things that is in the book had in it that I recall was a four quadrant grid of 'morale' and 'likelihood of success'(?).
There are indeed high morale high chance of success death marches - and they can be fun to be on. The "we will get this done and it will be glorious" type things.
There are also the low morale high chance of success that just drag on and it is a "we will get this done, and then we will all quit." I've been on that one - it was awful. I can only imagine the low morale low chance ones being completely dreadful and people hoping that it gets canceled before too much longer.
Amazon says that I got a copy of this on August 11th, 2012... and that was an order in which the book I got was given to my manager at the time. The project rolled out in October (before Black Friday code freezes went in effect) and I started looking for new employment in January after the company did its yearly bonuses.
And for the right financial upside. I completely understand going hardcore at a startup in which you have equity. But hasn't Twitter going private removed a lot of the incentive for employees? What is the upside for a Twitter engineer dedicating themselves to the company? Making one of the richest people on the planet slightly richer?
And as much good a pubic soapbox platform could have been for society, destroying the company seems to me to be the only appropriate karmic justice for all involved, including society because of what Twitter had become and had been used for politically.
I feel bad for all those who are on visas though and may not have the flexibility to accept the severance offer.
I know people joked about him wanting to destroy it, but I'm increasingly of the opinion that that's the only rational explanation for what he's doing. Even Dilbert's PHB seems mild compared to Musk. Either he's a massive idiot, or he wants to destroy Twitter without looking like he intended to destroy it, and so prefers to look like a massive idiot instead.
For a certain kind of engineer, this version of Twitter is far more attractive than the previous one.
For comparison:
Meta / Facebook:
* React
* PyTorch
* Fasttext
* Their unsung-but-indispensible-for-humanitarian-orgs Data for Good program
Google:
* Flutter
* Go
* Kubernetes
* Tensorflow
* BERT / Large language models generally
* Mapreduce / Hadoop
The much-maligned Uber:
* H3 Geospatial indexing
* Kepler.gl
* Manifold
Even AirBNB!
* Airflow
* Superset
I use most of these products (or their descendants) every day in my work. When I think of Twitter, all I think of is how they arbitrarily shut off humanitarian access to their APIs (and earlier, the Twitter firehose). There's not a single Twitter-supported open product that I use.
Am I the only one? Is there a great Twitter-supported project that I missed?
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/17/23465274/hundreds-of-twi...
based on his actions to date, the only explanation I can think of is he wants to destroy it
He has no STEM degree at all!
He said several times he wants to make it into a western Wechat equivalent, very dystopian with overall negative value to society and positive value for him and the government agencies.
What is 'social debt' and how is it (objectively) measured?
He was pretty clear. The bar kicked out the Nazis, and he wants them back in.
I personally don't like how negative everyone has been since EM took over. The 44 billion wasn't 100% his money, he got funding, so he's still liable. And since Twitter is known for being hated, very few people have something positive to say about Twitter. I think EM making changes is good.
Of course losing your job isn't fun, but I don't think that this amount of negativity is productive or good for anyone.
Don't get me wrong, EM makes mistakes, even if he doesn't address them, like HyperLoop, which is not only practical but also not his idea. But like why not wait a bit too actually see what's his vision for Twitter, beyond just saying that he's trying to serve his ego.
"Twitter hasn’t responded to requests for comment, likely because its communications staff has been included in the layoffs."
https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/04/twitter-faces-a-class-acti...
Last week a tweet said Elon had shut down the microservice responsible for 2FA. 100,000 upvotes on Reddit/twitter and 1000s of shouting comments. The story was nonsense of course. Depressing to see such discourse gets posted here too.
Elon has offered no vision for twitter 2.0, only the promise of hard work towards a nebulous goal.
He then offered no equity in return for that hard work rebuilding the platform.
Why would anyone stay? “Hey, do you want to work triple the amount of hours for me for the same pay?”
I wonder if seeing Chinese companies and Chinese factories work has warped his judgement.
Without a vision of “this is how we’re going to change the world” and the shared commitment of “whoever helps me will get a big piece of the pie!” How does he expect people to stay motivated exactly ?
I finally understand why brilliant people like Karpathy leave Tesla.
Probably even less pay. No more stocks (and if: limited ways of selling ... unless Musk manages to execute a massive pivot and then go public again)
Reuters reported recently that Tesla plans to start exporting cars from its China factory to the U.S. (Tesla denied the report, btw, but this an Elon-run company we're talking about so that means effectively nothing):
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/exclus...
Elon Musk has publicly praised the Chinese work ethic of "burning the 3am oil"[1], and dunks on the idea of a 40 hour work week[2]. He's made it abundantly clear where he stands on labor norms.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/may/12/elon-musk...
2: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-says-80-hours-per-...
It's going to send a message that companies are more overstaffed than we thought. This may explain an underlying fear driving even some engineers to put their reputation on the line with confident declarations that Twitter is going to fail. Some were saying it wouldn't survive the night. It's now morning. Others saying it won't last the weekend or coming week. We'll soon find out. I would expect some bumps along the way. Twitter Blue was a bump.
Perhaps Twitter is just the first to go lean before the recession. Elon merely the first dancer who is willing to look dumb. Now who's going to be the first follower to transform the lone nut into a leader?
Watch this 2 minute to see how this works, you may have seen this before:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8amMCVAJQ
Now here's a counterbalance to the fear with an optimistic take: This is a correction. A small number of tech companies have been hoarding talent. The talent gets a 3 month severance and made available to the larger ecosystem.
This is just a masterclass in how not to do it. He doesn't look dumb because he's reducing the headcount. He looks dumb because he's going about it like an absolute lunatic.
But yeah, for that little bit at the start, everything "looks" fine.
Point being: it's way too soon to say twitter is surviving.
What will be the true test is the world cup. If it can survive the final game (estimated 1.5 to 2 Billion viewership), that will be impressive. Historically, that's been a major engineering challenge for any "public" social network. With 90% less staff, it might not be possible to monitor, triage, test, fix, etc. on the fly.
Consider the FTX news, where the new CEO appointed to clean up the mess called it a complete failure of corporate governance.
There is a huge amount of work that isn't directly related to keeping a website running that is required to sustain a large corporation and keep it legal. You can ignore all of this for a while, but not forever.
From various reports it seems Twitter has fired everyone in security, privacy, media relations, regulatory compliance and we probably haven't heard of everything.
That said, a lean company requires strong leadership, technical depth in management, and specific types of cultures. I don't believe that most companies are up to such challenge.
Now, I need you to consider the following proposition: that eyeballs are to codebases, dashboards and telemetry as floss is to tooth and gum.
Then, I need you to go to your phone and uninstall Twitter.
Also, when you do visit it, visit it in Firefox.
Use a Firefox Container.
I’m terrified!
I do not trust Elon to use my posting history responsibly, period.
I've added https://raw.githubusercontent.com/JackCuthbert/pihole-twitte... to my pihole and flagged this in our security forum at work.
My Twitter friends said Twitter has been having large exodus. CSL(core systems lib?) team, blobstore team, graph platform team, and revenue forecasting team seemed have all quit. I'm not sure how robust and autonomous Twitter's infra is. Hopefully Twitter will continue to function.
What a sudden turn of events and destruction of this magnitude.
Personally, I believe that the crash and burn of Twitter and the rise of a better SM in its place has very low probability, but one can hope.
Surely an outage is right around the corner.
When I first heard about twitter I thought 1) that’s a dumb idea and 2) it won’t last long.
I was of course very wrong about #2 but feel increasingly right about #1 the more time goes by and the more (IMO) it provides net harm to society and social discourse.
So I’m sympathetic to the employees stuck there but hoping my timeline for #2 was simply way off and it finally goes away.
>Twitter loses payroll department, other financial employees as part of mass resignation under Elon Musk
https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-payroll-finance-depa...
> How do you make a small fortune in social media?
> Start out with a large one.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593455727611215872
> And … we just hit another all-time high in Twitter usage lol
> Let that sink in …
He literally cannot distinguish between good and bad attention. He still thinks he's winning this.
> Elon, there's a bunch of us in SV who will come up tonight to help on the infra side to keep the site up.
> If you need help just ask.
As if you could just drive over to the Twitter HQ, grok how all the infrastructure works, and make/provide meaningful contributions/tweaks/upkeep.... tonight
That's either a level of delusion that I can't imagine and/or someone who has no idea what they are talking about. I also can't imagine carrying water for or "simp-ing" for a billionaire, especially one who treats people so terribly (this "work yourself to the bone or resign" ultimatum was one of the more disgusting things I've seen in tech, I'm appalled at the people defending it as some genius move).
Really I feel bad for the people who have no choice but to stay at Twitter, the H-1B's and the like. The brain drain is going to be (/already has been) massive and all that will be left are the people who have no choice, can't find a better/different job, or are true sycophants. None of that makes for a healthy work environment and isn't conducive to making good products.
[0] https://twitter.com/MichaelGuimarin/status/15934156421110456...
But seriously, how can someone burn down something he just bought for 44 billion so fast and consequently?
Surely, something to be remembered for...
The fan boys would say: It’s Elon, he is playing 3D chess and no one is smart enough to understand his end goal.
No, the way I think a frozen codebase will rear its head is when things that haven't been restarted in too long start to misbehave. When new updates are being pushed out frequently by a busy team, every machine (container, process, whatever) is being restarted regularly. People don't even realize what they're avoiding each time. Resource leaks, deadlocks, and timer issues can remain undetected a long time in that environment, then surface when the longevity increases. Even worse, some things tend to fail after a predictable amount of time, i.e. across most or all machines at once in a cluster.
I first saw this in 1990 at Encore, when our shiny new SMP version of UNIX became capable of staying up for a whole month at a time. Because of problems like those mentioned above, getting from one month to two took almost as long as getting from zero to one. I've seen the same scenario play out on many other systems since, and there's no reason to believe the systems within Twitter are immune.
Stasis is not the same as stability.
I'm pretty sure that that's the plan Elon Musk is executing. It's simple, brutal, nasty, and probably not very well thought through. And yes he's not being very nice about it (to put it mildly). But it's not completely crazy if you can get over how obnoxious he's being.
He's clearly not interested in keeping the current team. He's never going to win them over at this point and from his point of view they were part of the problem, not the solution in any case. He bought a company that was basically not profitable, bleeding cash, and fresh out of ideas on how to fix any of that for many years. And he's now on the spot to keep that train wreck going. So, first order of business is to just cut the cost. That means decimating the team to a fraction of its size.
The Twitter team is basically rage quitting at this point so that's solved. Again, I don't like how he's doing it but undeniably, there are going to be vastly less people on the payroll very soon and cost will be a lot lower. The law suits that follow will be interesting though. But my guess is that he'll just buy those off and that will be it.
Of those that remain, he can cherry pick a team to salvage/build whatever he needs and then re-enforce it with some outsiders. Building a micro blogging platform is not rocket science and Elon Musk is actually deeply into rocket science. So, I actually get his gut feeling that this simply should not require thousands of engineers obsessing about all sorts of arcane software bits and pieces that somehow implement Twitter. It's a micro blogging platform with a fairly simplistic feature set. And he just called bullshit on how that was done at Twitter. And we're talking about a person with a long track record of having absolutely no tolerance for bull shit.
Again, not liking his methods but I can see his line of reasoning here. He has no respect for the Twitter team and he actually wants them gone. He wants to rebuild Twitter in a way that is cost effective and interesting to him. And he is not a risk averse person. So, in his mind that means a small team that can execute fast. I kind of agree with that part.
Will this work? I don't know. I see no technical reason that this plan could not work. But the big question is if the Twitter brand name will be worth anything by the time he's done or if he's just going to shut down the whole thing and walk away from it. He can certainly afford to do that. But letting this thing coast along just never was going to be a thing.
He did.
Jason Calcanis and David Sacks will surely save the day.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/16/23462668/elon-musk-trial...
Sr engs: ...
(Because you're an a.h.)
People without equity should refuse to work like indentured servants for peanuts only to be told "they're not working hard enough". It's the only way to teach EM a lesson about hubris. $50 says Twitter will die down to a skeleton staff and be kept afloat by third-rate MSPs. No one will want to work on that creaky, steaming pile of poo for a billionaire jerk.
I'm sorry but are you reading what you're putting down here? These people are making ridiculous swathes of money doing piss easy work, let's not go overboard with the hyperbole here
I do hope Twitter dies a painful death, however, so I'm with you on that bet
In these large companies, to make changes to a lot of systems, you have to have someone else also sign on to the changes (eg. code review).
If your aim is sabotage, you would have to find a like minded saboteur to work with you. In normal times, at most places, this is risky, because most others would not want to assist you, and would likely report you.
The equation has changed. Musk has turned nearly every employee against him. It is now much less risky to explore your social graph now to find people who are of like mind. The defenses that software companies have are completely inadequate to deal with this sort of situation.
Employees interested in sabotage should not do anything stupid, they should just join the exodus.
Fantasizing can be fun though.
Or forty-four billion dollars.
There's no need to actively sabotage the site from the staff position. Even if there isn't a single critical disk slowly filling up somewhere, there is a lot of dependencies in there that will eventually have a CVE.
Some time ago (when multiple accounts tweeted some crypto scam) it was revealed that at Twitter no such protections existed.
You are thinking active sabotage like git-committing a bug. Passive sabotage is trivial. I recommend skinming the CIA saboteur manual on the topic.
Sabotaging by resigning is just perfect and enough.
Elon's primary failure with Twitter was joining a behemoth and arrogantly assuming he knew better than the existing leadership, sacked them all and pushed sweeping changes in a nonsensical time-span.
At his other ventures he already has strong leadership in place that he's worked with so he just assumes everything's already great rather than second guessing everything. In practice he doesn't run them on a day-to-day basis. He's more like a chairman with an interest in engineering than a CEO.
I guess he will use something like - Twitter was broken before I got in and I could not save it anymore.
Being Elon, I would be more worried about the fact that Saudi's are supposed to be as one of the investors in Twitter and they already have trace of killing people. If Elon won't be able to spin the story as somebody's else problem and instead of it will be presented as his managing failure, well could be interesting.
'chief creative officer' sort of thing with a sandbox
always wondered if he bought twitter to boost spacex IPO; for now, good thing that it's private or it would be getting hosed to mortgage twitter fail like tesla is
tesla build quality and self-driving snafus may get assigned to him as well
It’s over. Dead site running. Such a horrible loss.
Glad the stockholders are happy. This was clearly better than the lawsuit. /s
"We'll send humans to Mars!" is something that I can feel good about working 80 hours a week on.
"We'll help trolls spew hate!" ... maybe, not so much.
Even if(when) we do - what's there? We are progressively failing a perfectly habitable world that even has a magnetic core. Moving to another planet will not solve anything for the humans.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/17/23465274/hundreds-of-twi...
I think the best tweet on that thread is [0]:
"I was laid off from Twitter this afternoon. I was in charge of managing badge access to Twitter offices. Elon just called me and asked if I could come back to help them regain access to HQ as they shut off all badges and accidentally locked themselves out."
I'm not sure if it's true or not, but... sounds about par for the course.
Edit: As someone else pointed out, it's a parody account. Amazing that I couldn't infer that immediately.
[0] https://twitter.com/JWeber988/status/1593423235252723715
> Thanks for helping out. You’re a lifesaver! [0]
No one with any sanity and a U.S. citizenship. Visa holders under Twitter's sponsorship are trapped.
They win the war of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th coalitions. For the first time, they find that things are going fine. All they have to do is nothing. Pull back and consolidate. Maybe refine some things, tinker a bit. But it's not enough. It will never be enough. So they invade Russia.
In his life, Napoleon had success after success after success. Every step of the way, critics told him that he'd fail. But he did it anyway, and won 38 battles. 17 at near impossible odds.
How can someone like him be satisfied with sitting at home, ruling France? How could he be satisfied with puttering around in the countryside talking about his code with random farmers?
And so he decided to invade.
People warned him against invading. Armand de Caulaincourt staked his reputation on it, went with him on the campaign, and kept warning him. Warning him against wintering in Russia. He kept telling him to turn back. But Napoleon didn't listen.
They'd been wrong every single time. And he'd been right. Let them babble, his path was one set at a different level than theirs.
Except, that one time they were right.
It seems that when you are touched with greatness, you end up believing that you can do anything. And far more often than not, you can.
Right up until the moment you can't.
When the revolutionary politicians in France submitted to Napoleon, during his coup (1799) and his subsequent coronation as an emperor (1804), it was under the implicit premise that he would be the one who would be able to militarily keep Belgium, because the Revolution had seized Belgium but wasn't able to hold it.
So Napoleon's power was tied to keeping Belgium, although England would never allow any continental state to be that unbalancedly powerful.
Thus Napoleon has no choice but to subjugate England. To that end, as his fleet had been hit hard in Aboukir (1798) then smashed in Trafalgar (1805), he could not rely on an old-school invasion: thus he tried to subjugate all of Europe and cut commercial links with England to besiege the island at a continental scale. This was called the Blocus Continental, and it was bound to fail as long as Russia wouldn't participate. Thus the desperate attack in 1812.
---
[1] Les conséquences politiques de la paix_, (https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Cons%C3%A9quences_politi...) is a book in which Bainville predicts, in this exact order and in the year 1919, that Germany will annex the Sudeten, then Austria, then Poland, then attack western Europe, and that Italy will be their allies.
[2] In his biography of Napoleon.
Pull back and 'consolidate' as Britain keeps propping up Russia to attack the French from both sides. Meanwhile making use of the aristocrats and their still present economic and political power inside the continent.
That wasn't a viable strategy.
As an aside, Napolean is not listed on the the Wikipedia page of Pyrrhic victories.
TheVerge was already reporting on getting no PR access after the team was fired, like one or two weeks ago (damn that feels like a long time in this timeline...)
IMO there's no way those profits last more than a quarter until everything breaks. But yeah, maybe it is technically profitable tomorrow.
It all looks pretty crazy. It seems like he's going to fail.
But he might succeed. You never know.
I'm no industry expert, but I wouldn't trust EM with my mom's bakery.
Elon just phoned me to ask if I could return to assist them in regaining access to HQ after they disabled all badges and locked themselves out.”
Maybe he's trying to burn it to thr ground to hide something ... pardon conspiracy theory but it's just weird that someone goes and spends $44 billion and takes negative action after negative action against your new shiny toy.
Though maybe he knows what and who is needed only to run Twitter and all the others were just sitting at home or on the beach working an hour to two a day yet getting paid $150 to 500K a year for a full time job they far from worked.
Are these first signs of erosion?
Talking about this Tweet: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961
It's marked as "unavailable" when I view logged in to Twitter, but it's there in incognito mode.
Edit: Actually I just tried refreshing a couple times and it seems to be stochastic as to whether I can see the Tweet or not. Sometimes it's there, sometimes it's "unavailable".
https://careers.twitter.com/en/roles.html#team=careers-twitt...
When you then have a leaner organization then you can go nuts.
Musk acted like an impatiant child, all the while being mostly right.
"just"
The presumption here is that 90% of the staff weren't doing anything useful, and that 95% of the infrastructure costs were wasted, and both of those would be extremely surprising?
Also very non-efficient-markets-hypothesis, that a public company would just sit there wasting almost all of its money.
He's basically a twitch streamer in terms of behavior and pleasure response to attention, so expect him to act like one.
https://twitter.com/ZoeSchiffer/status/1593427480051822592?c...
"NEW: The designers leading Elon Musk’s Blue verified project are out, along with the lead web engineer. Many Twitter employees who maintained critical infrastructure have resigned. This is going to look like a very different company tomorrow."
The snowball has gained too much momentum now. Especially with Thanksgiving coming, I don't see how Twitter is realistically going to keep the lights on, quite literally.
I can log in to the website and see no difference; nothing is obviously broken. Maybe he’s right and most people were doing nothing? I don’t know.
This is horrible and destructive. We should be against this on principle. For us to not be against this is making us the ultimate Beta Cucks who are willing to take it WM the throat as long as the pretend Alpha is showing it to us.
This is why the really wealthy own media corps.
He should stick to engineering and let sensible, mature, secure adults run companies.
None of us know whether the tweet is accurate, though.
What I've read some say is that it's a strategy to drastically reduce head count and keep only those people on who really want to be there and are not just there because it's a well-compensated position and they've figured out how to appear busy without doing much. Those people might leave when it becomes a chore to keep up appearances ("this feels like work, if I wanted to work I could've just done my job"), they're self-identifying and you're not paying severance when they quit. Of course, you're probably also bleeding out some talented and productive people. I don't know if "it's a mess, but it's the challenge of a lifetime" and the chance to work for Musk is enough to recruit good people, but it might be, not everyone has a family and needs to be home by 5pm and wants work-life-balance.
Trump was elected president riding on a wave of lots of people hating him and the media covering him 24/7 in a constant scream of GOTCHA and it worked out for him. Musk has claimed that Twitter usage is peeking among all of this. It kind of looks like a Wrestling show with lots of crazy things happening, only that not all participants are aware of what's happening or willing to participate. I have no idea whether it works out in his favor.
OK, so everybody takes Friday off and comes back Monday. Then what?
it seemed to me twitter was doing more or less ok, as a business - never heard any talk of bankruptcy until this robber baron came on the scene.
* Twitter was known for liberal corporate politics, most employees liberal
* Purchased by center-right billionaire in the name of freedom of speech (modern liberals against freedom of speech)
* Twitter employees amuse themselves by making billionaire's life difficult
* Billionaire delivers ultimatum, many employees out
* Unclear if sufficient knowledge to maintain systems will survive
It seems like with the benefit of hindsight, the correct play for Elon would've been to avoid major moves at first, let far left employees quit, replace them with new hires excited by working at a Musk company. Then eventually, maybe, deliver an ultimatum once new Musk-enthusiast hires had absorbed enough knowledge to maintain systems.
I think the hard-charging approach Elon took was likely the correct one for Tesla/SpaceX, since employees at those companies mostly knew what they had signed up for, but Twitter was a much different management challenge since the existing workforce has/had an active dislike for Elon.
I fail to see how a networked system with nobody left tending it is going to last.
Twitter had a permanent WFH policy, and staff arranged their lives based on this.
Musk gives 24hr notice to staff (those lucky 30-40% not already sacked) to return to the office for a hardcore 7 day week, or be resigned.
Musk panicked about sabotage and closed the offices.
But would-be-saboteurs still have systems access, as the people would revoke access have, themselves, been resigned.
Twitter and its ilk don't have their hardest challenges in the technical space; they have their hardest challenges in the same space as the SCA. "You rule because they believe."
> What do people mean when they say Twitter is gonna shut down? Doesn't it kinda run itself? I feel like engineers are for changes not to just keep it running? I also don't know anything. Hey @elonmusk wanna do a Twitter space with me? Im confused. - Dave Portnoy @stoolpresidente
> The best people are staying, so I'm not super worried - Elon Musk @elonmusk
Elon Musk is approaching this in a horrible way though. By using hardcore as a default setting, and quiet firing anyone who doesn't sign on to it, he's signaling hard core must be forced thing. "hardcore" itself has negative connotations.
Think of how different the news cycle would be right now if he had said the following:
* "Twitter's engineers have done an amazing job, and everyone is getting a 2% out of cycle bonus in stock"
* "Those who want to do an even more amazing job and enter beast mode with me (crucial that he work the same hours), will get a 10% bonus in stock each year they do, with the first year's 10% after the first month of beast mode. For me beast mode means 60-70 hour weeks, one or more pushed commits per day, and being on-site at least two days out of five."
* "Those who don't enter beast mode are still Twitter engineers, among the best in the industry, and will not be penalized in any way. We recognize that different people have different needs when it comes to work-life balance, and we value diversity at Twitter."
* "We do need to improve our platform in some ways though. To this end I am putting a 3 month freeze on hiring, firing, and new features. Our focus during this time will be improving performance, improving security, and fixing bugs."
It may be bumpy in the short term, but then all of the supremely confident naysayers are going to look ridiculous and spiteful if it turns out that Twitter can operate with 80-90% fewer employees.
There are incredible aspirational aspects to those businesses, and they have massive support from Big Government, and crucially, people mostly knew what they were getting into aka they went to work for him.
It's the opposite at Twitter.
This is looking more messed up every day, and Elon is messing with other people's money and they won't stand for this for very long.
When he says 'we could be out of business next year' as a bit of a fear/motivation tactic, that's going to make his backers uncomfortable.
If this keeps up Elon will be replaced and it's hard to fathom by whom.
I suggest he will use the excuse of 'need to work on Tesla/Space X', but the terms of his continued oversight of Twitter will be interesting.
Much like the otherwise 'normal' people who worked at the White House during the Trump admin, it's alluring for people to be that close to power, even at the cost of having the wrath of toxicity hanging over them. Any reasonable person taking over Twitter will want to have a pretty big firewall between them and Musk.
I suggest it will be better for everyone: Musk can get a few points in for reform which is his prerogative and there's nothing wrong with that, and Twitter will have a chance at operational performance without the constant contradictions between Musk's populism and the basic operating civil culture at Twitter.
There are so many uphill battles to fight before Musk can even try to get some of the reforms that he wants (which are a bit glib because most things at Twitter exist for a reason), and he's going to spend too much time just getting back on the 'right foot' ... I suggest that it's probably a good idea for him to just step down.
1. Twitter was attempting through out its history to tell this narrative and do this: Twitter's core was citizen journalists and verified journalists and being responsible enough to guide the conversation in what was allowed and not allowed as far as hate speech and misinformation.
Elon bought it and had a new vision that the Twitter product should be a free speech conversation and that advertisers should be ditched as product consumers of Twitter.
The problem for Elon is that he did not do enough of story telling about the new product vision and INVITING people on the journey
Its not a type of journey you can crack a whip to get people to sign up for that journey. And certainly his product adviser, Jason Calacanis does in fact know this from his miss-steps with Mahalo.
Hard to say if I like this idea or not...
Probably won't be, but I can dream.
(Its not like it would affect how much data the govt gets from the platform anyhow)
the press and many people in those comments are making a mistake thinking he is a fool and behaved in a stupid way. that is not donald trump. he doesn’t care about people that don’t buy into its vision and he doesnt care if twitter sinks to lower lows in the following years.
for musk, the last years of twitter are a disgusting and corrupt way to deal with democracy and the way business was handled at twitter was totally corrupt. Wether you agree with the democrat agenda or no is a thing. that you want to push your cult into the minds of everyone on twitter while censoring alternative ideas is the problem and does not align with the vision of what a medium of communication should be in a free world. YOU ARE NOT in the side of good because you repeat the woke things that pelosi and its cult are repeating. and your oponents are not NAZIS. mankind is much bigger than your small conflicts and politics and the vision musk has for twitter is bigger than the beliefs of a few corrupt politicians and your voice should not be more important than the one of another human being.
In five years I am pretty sure many of the people that are commenting here will put a lot of money into twitter stock when musk will make it public agaibn.
Mastodon and Activitypub decentralize which means it is a lot harder to proverbialy whore yourself to the attention of the masses and and those attention whores (politicians, journalists,etc... not just celebrities and influencers) can't have the same reach with them or with truth social and other copycats of twitter.
Mastodon should have let server operators flag other servers but not refuse federation with them, letting users decide if they want to avoid content from trash servers but of course user moderarion by server operators is fine. Also, like many ideology-first solutions, it catered to small disconnected communities. It should have created corporation separate from the main project that hosts a public mastodon server that directly competes with other social media (and ffs, it's 2022, no more email for anything!).
On that note, Matrix can replace twitter and a lot more if they weren't chasing seemingly random features. Not just twitter but email also can be replaced by matrix, the api amd federates architecture allows for it.
If I was Kelon (Karen elon), I would compete with tiktok, timing is great with all the talks of banning it. They mercilessly murdered Vine back in the day as they did Periscope. Those are the types of features where you can charge content creators for content types and for advertising in people's timelines. They made those separate products instead of part of the regular twitter experience. Also, be less crass about it and charge for award tokens like reddit instead of upfront cash and high priced awards make it to the top of the reply chain.
I don't blog so let me know what you all think lol.