Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by kranke155 | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

kranke155

Here’s what I don’t understand.

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.

View on HN

> Why would anyone stay? “Hey, do you want to work triple the amount of hours for me for the same pay?”

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)

It’s very strange. I suppose he must be at least mildly autistic, because he certainly doesn’t seem to understand regular people.

He said he had aspergers when he hosted Saturday Night Live. Someone with aspergers is not the person to run a social network.

If I had to bet Mark Zuckerberg is probably further from "normal" than Elon Musk.

Having essentially infinite money for 20 years is a hell of a drug, I think that is enough to explain it

He could give out stock. Anyone staying by choice (not forced like an h1b), has to buy into the vision that their 'hardcore' work will eventually make Twitter public again. Effectively rebooting the company as a startup.

IMO, given EM's antics, he's making the base pay of anyone he hires go up, not down. I can't imagine what he's going to have to pay the CEO he says he's going to put in place at Twitter.

Yes, he could give out stock, but for that being valued bei the employees they have to buy in into the vision, which currently seems to be missing. (Is there a chance for a payment app (haha, Musk and banking regulation) or the "everything app" like WeChat? Those seem to be his ideas ...)

I get the idea that he doesn’t know himself, which is why he hasn’t explained it? He just seems to have vague ideas on what to do.

I don’t know. But from what I’m hearing, he offered no vision for twitter employees either.

Here’s an example Twitter thread of someone who saw entire teams fired around him, saw that he would have to deal with systems be barely knew anything about, and had no idea what Musk’s vision: https://twitter.com/peterclowes/status/1593458256034275330?s...

So he quit. who wouldn’t have?

> He could give out stock.

But as it is no longer a public company, any such stock is not liquid. Unclear when one could sell it, if ever. So basically worth nothing.

His mentality might be that it's too late to go back and the company is probably going to fail anyway. So he has to radically change the workforce and the culture there. So he's throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks apparently. While that might improve overhead costs eventually, I don't see how it's going to result in a platform that gets the moderation/censorship balance correct while keeping the advertisers happy.

Was the company really on its way to failure? It was rudderless and with no profit, but with him as CEO would he really struggle to keep finding VC funding? He could have slowly attrited the workforce over 3 months, 6 months, while defining a future vision, making sure he’s got everyone he needs and that he’s found the Jony Ives of twitter (exceptional workers who were stifled by the bureaucracy).

Instead he’s nuked the company workforce? I dunno. Seems a bit reckless to me. Why would twitter be under so much pressure?

A social media company that's stagnating typically doesn't have much time to remain viable before they'll give way to the next big platform. I think they only had a few years left before they became the next myspace anyway.

This isn't to say that firing so many employees, trying to quickly roll out a change in the blue checkmark system and scaring off advertisers was the right choice of course. So I basically agree that he should have tried to fix the company over the course of a year or two.

What’s the evidence for your first statement? MySpace was a long time ago now. FB and twitter are “stagnant” but have been around for over a decade, even with other platforms popping up around them.

Sure I agree with you 100%. I really just don’t understand the rush.

> I wonder if seeing Chinese companies and Chinese factories work has warped his judgement.

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...

right? He wants engineering wage slaves, he shoulda bought TikTok. Or maybe he'll just end up moving engineering to China as his big brain billionaire flex.

> I wonder if seeing Chinese companies and Chinese factories work has warped his judgement.

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-...

Always funny how those who have never really worked a day in their lives are the ones who scream "work harder (for me)" the loudest.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe his vision for Twitter 2.0 is to rebrand Twitter as X (I believe he owns x.com) and rebuild it as WeChat for the North American.

Twitter engineers are reporting in saying he gave no indication of how this would be done. See my other comments for a source.

I think that’s it too, but I wonder about it’s feasibility. I’m not sure we need a WeChat in the west. I remember a good article shared here about how the Chinese ecosystem is so different that WeChat makes sense.

oh yes the how and whether its actually a product people want or not are huge open questions that haven't been answered, at least not externally and seemingly not internally as well.

“Karpathy”.. who??

Remember this is a guy who thinks AI is real. His IQ is very low.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com