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Comment by mod | Hacker News Reader

> Elon Musk's epic flaming death spiral at the helm of Twitter

I keep hearing this, but...is it true? Doesn't this viewpoint rely on a prediction that it's going to actually crash and be unrecoverable?

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The system was built with the assumption that you're going to have SREs, lots of them, with experience babysitting the systems, to keep them working. SREs were cheaper than building a system that can handle lots of unexpected things without any SREs. They have lost 7 out of 8 people, and lots of systems have 0 remaining employees who can be usefully on call for them. With so much institutional knowledge lost, they will not be able to handle the kind of issues they used to handle before with merely hiccups.

This seems like a prediction. It also seems reliant on an idea that he can't hire new people.

It's certainly going to be interesting. I'm very curious about how this plays out. Musk has achieved a lot and his companies have done incredible things.

If you read Reddit or ironically twitter, he is some kind of clueless buffon, yes I get he is making likely a lot of mistakes and fairly crazy things, but it requires somewhat crazy thinking to achieve somewhat crazy results. Of course he could completely crash and burn too.

This is going to be very interesting if things work out for Musk, it will be very telling to look back at all the naysayers, everyone thinks they know better from the arm chair, lets see what results Musk is able to achieve before we jump to anything.

Yes, on the one side, his own declarations sound absolutely clueless, not to mention highly self-contradictory. On the other side, if he does manage to turn back Twitter into a lean and mean startup and retain the Twitter brand, he'll have done something impressive. Plus Musk has somehow become a politically loaded name, so everything you read or hear could have been twisted by one side or the other.

Regardless, right now, I'm having so much fun watching that soap opera unfold!

Seems like the culture at twitter has been screwed for quite awhile. It's not going to unscrew itself in any short time frame, but the mainstream view compels us to think otherwise for some reason.

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