Elon & Twitter

[ElectricIAC]

Cry babies will complain that their cushy and great feeling job has now vanished.

And a collective REEEEeee was heard.

 

[Dikkie Dik]

Hotz on board

https://twitter.com/x/status/1593867741559070720

 

[Bouba]

So do I, my wife, and 2 sons. I started a consulting company and grew it to nice size, then sold it and stayed on for a decade running one of the offices. I still do independent work and even at my age I am contacted multiple times per day for opportunities. I dont think Elon would be interested in a gray hair like me. He would be after my sons. They now wouldnt even think about working for him. They were interested in working for Climate Change fighting Elon. Not this Elon. Now I am about to get people on here to tell me that my sons are liberal snowflakes. People like to point out that like 98% of Twitter employees voted/gave to Democrats. That same chart says 94% of Tesla employees did as well. Oh also my oldest did get contacted for a 2nd interview from Tesla a few years back, but Tesla recruiting was to slow and he was starting a new job the following Monday so he turned it down.

I think the point is that the political affiliations of Tesla staff don’t affect how they implement FSD (I hope) but it can at Twitter....of course I am not for a moment suggesting that people should lose their jobs for the way they vote...but it is reasonable that they leave their politics at the front gate and those that can’t shouldn’t get past the front gate.

 

[wdolson]

This is the way to use Twitter, follow the right sources, you get information not available elsewhere.

Time will tell if Elon can keep it financially viable, but his ambitions to turn Twitter into a payments system/bank are not modest. Should it work it, will make a lot more money than advertising. Yes, he is intending to compete with Banks, Paypal. YouTube, etc.

So far I have not seen any evidence of a political "move to the right" on Twitter, all of the valuable posters I follow still seem to be there.

I don't doubt that new "right leaning" posters are joining, but nothing that they post comes up in my feed.

If he wanted a Swiss army knife application like he had originally envisioned x.com to be, it would have been much easier and cheaper to start something from scratch. He's spent $44 billion for a platform that may end up getting burned to the ground before this is over. He's also generating a lot of ill will throughout this which won't help draw users to his new platform.

A long thread from someone who has had to keep a site like Twitter running and the sort of problems they need to deal with

https://twitter.com/x/status/1593541177965678592

 

[MC3OZ]

If he wanted a Swiss army knife application like he had originally envisioned x.com to be, it would have been much easier and cheaper to start something from scratch. He's spent $44 billion for a platform that may end up getting burned to the ground before this is over. He's also generating a lot of ill will throughout this which won't help draw users to his new platform.

A long thread from someone who has had to keep a site like Twitter running and the sort of problems they need to deal with

https://twitter.com/x/status/1593541177965678592

Most of the more technical issues are routine for mission critical IT.

I have supported mission critical software, we had one 20 minute outage in 4-5 years and were in the press for 3-4 weeks, possibly the lead story on the nightly news.

We typically worked back to midnight putting in new releases and checked everything in fine grained detail. No process is perfect, when you do hit a problem, smart people who can think fast are critical.

In IT 10-20 people who know what they are doing can do more than 300 who don't. Evidence tells me there was a lot of dead wood at Twitter.

When the dust settles Elon does need to hire competent staff to plug any gaps. Yes. there are risks.

People grasping at straws desperately hoping Elon will fail, are likely to be disappointed. Many have been hoping that he will fail for years.

I think that he wanted Twitter for 2 reasons:-

1. He had strong feelings about freedom of speech.
2. He wanted the user base,

IMO it started out as a bad idea, and he is working hard to turn it into a good idea.

 

[wdolson]

Most of the more technical issues are routine for mission critical IT.

I have supported mission critical software, we had one 20 minute outage in 4-5 years and were in the press for 3-4 weeks, possibly the lead story on the nightly news.

We typically worked back to midnight putting in new releases and checked everything in fine grained detail. No process is perfect, when you do hit a problem, smart people who can think fast are critical.

In IT 10-20 people who know what they are doing can do more than 300 who don't. Evidence tells me there was a lot of dead wood at Twitter.

When the dust settles Elon does need to hire competent staff to plug any gaps. Yes. there are risks.

People grasping at straws desperately hoping Elon will fail, are likely to be disappointed. Many have been hoping that he will fail for years.

I think that he wanted Twitter for 2 reasons:-

1. He had strong feelings about freedom of speech.
2. He wanted the user base,

IMO it started out as a bad idea, and he is working hard to turn it into a good idea.

The point the author made is that in mission critical systems, you need a troubleshooting team who knows the system backwards and forwards to have any chance of fast recovery from a problem and those people are now gone from Twitter. They farm out a lot to AWS so some of those problems are on the Amazon systems people, but there are plenty of problems that could be triggered by people within Twitter or by malicious actors hacking in.

I read something in the last couple of days that when Elon tweeted that he should buy Twitter, he was already a 9% stock holder. He may have had his lawyers approach him after that and tell him that he could go down for artificially pumping up the stock if he wasn't serious about buying the company.

I'm not one of those people who have been hoping Elon would fail for years. I didn't really start following Tesla until 2014 or early 2015, but I was shopping for a car and not finding anything they met what I thought was fairly reasonable criteria. I looked at the Model S on a whim and it blew away every point on my list and then some. I've been bullish about Tesla's success since then.

I also think SpaceX has rewritten space flight in many ways.

But something has gone screwy with Elon the last few years. When he made an attempt to take Tesla private and it turned out he really didn't have the financing lined up was a yellow flag. When he accused the diver of being a pedophile I was getting concerned. When he announced Tesla had bought $1 billion of Bitcoin I started thinking he had some screws coming loose. The name of his kid with Grimes was pretty weird, but could be chalked up to eccentricity. Then the Twitter buyout became a definite red flag. Another red flag was his announcement that he was only going to vote for the party of "drill baby drill" who want to eliminate electric cars.

Something is not right with Elon. He's running off the rails.

Most entrepreneur mega wealthy might have some eccentricities, but they aren't in the media all that often. Usually just when they are pushing for something they are selling or doing like Bill Gates' foundation or when Steve Jobs would trot out new Apple products once or twice a year. Jeff Bezos is probably the second highest profile billionaire in recent years. He had a messy divorce and he was briefly in the news with his spacecraft, but he doesn't have much of a social media presence and if he does, few people pay much attention.

Richard Branson pops up in the news from time to time and some people have a low opinion of him, but he hasn't been in the news much since his first space flight either.

Elon is behaving like someone with a drug problem or a mental problem that got much worse for some reason. Maybe it's the stress from some of his grand goals not coming to fruition? The next gen Roadster, Cybertruck, and Semi still haven't entered production (though the Cybertruck is getting close). It's quite possible that full self driving without a driver is going to be impossible. SpaceX hopes to do a manned mission to Mars in 2029, but that may be behind schedule. Or it could be something else we don't know about?

Who knows for sure, he is behaving erratically and I don't think he's making good decisions.

 

[MC3OZ]

The point the author made is that in mission critical systems, you need a troubleshooting team who knows the system backwards and forwards to have any chance of fast recovery from a problem and those people are now gone from Twitter. They farm out a lot to AWS so some of those problems are on the Amazon systems people, but there are plenty of problems that could be triggered by people within Twitter or by malicious actors hacking in.

I read something in the last couple of days that when Elon tweeted that he should buy Twitter, he was already a 9% stock holder. He may have had his lawyers approach him after that and tell him that he could go down for artificially pumping up the stock if he wasn't serious about buying the company.

I'm not one of those people who have been hoping Elon would fail for years. I didn't really start following Tesla until 2014 or early 2015, but I was shopping for a car and not finding anything they met what I thought was fairly reasonable criteria. I looked at the Model S on a whim and it blew away every point on my list and then some. I've been bullish about Tesla's success since then.

I also think SpaceX has rewritten space flight in many ways.

But something has gone screwy with Elon the last few years. When he made an attempt to take Tesla private and it turned out he really didn't have the financing lined up was a yellow flag. When he accused the diver of being a pedophile I was getting concerned. When he announced Tesla had bought $1 billion of Bitcoin I started thinking he had some screws coming loose. The name of his kid with Grimes was pretty weird, but could be chalked up to eccentricity. Then the Twitter buyout became a definite red flag. Another red flag was his announcement that he was only going to vote for the party of "drill baby drill" who want to eliminate electric cars.

Something is not right with Elon. He's running off the rails.

Most entrepreneur mega wealthy might have some eccentricities, but they aren't in the media all that often. Usually just when they are pushing for something they are selling or doing like Bill Gates' foundation or when Steve Jobs would trot out new Apple products once or twice a year. Jeff Bezos is probably the second highest profile billionaire in recent years. He had a messy divorce and he was briefly in the news with his spacecraft, but he doesn't have much of a social media presence and if he does, few people pay much attention.

Richard Branson pops up in the news from time to time and some people have a low opinion of him, but he hasn't been in the news much since his first space flight either.

Elon is behaving like someone with a drug problem or a mental problem that got much worse for some reason. Maybe it's the stress from some of his grand goals not coming to fruition? The next gen Roadster, Cybertruck, and Semi still haven't entered production (though the Cybertruck is getting close). It's quite possible that full self driving without a driver is going to be impossible. SpaceX hopes to do a manned mission to Mars in 2029, but that may be behind schedule. Or it could be something else we don't know about?

Who knows for sure, he is behaving erratically and I don't think he's making good decisions.

I don't know who left Twitter and who stayed, but it only takes a small percentage of people with some knowledge to stay.

Don't forget Elon had some of his best staff review how things were run a few weeks ago.

IT people can read the code, look at the configuration and come up to speed relatively quickly. I doubt that Twitter was doing much that is exotic or innovative.

 

[EverettRuess]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/18/opinion/twitter-yoel-roth-elon-musk.html

 

[Raisin45567]

I do see the parallels between Jobs and Elon (especially the brilliant-but-an-a-hole dimension).

Jobs should be given credit for his visionary work on computers, music players, and of course the iPhone.

That said, Apple soared into the trillions long after Jobs was gone. It was at less than $20/share when he died

One of Jobs’ strengths was messaging. It actually would have made sense for Apple to buy a messaging app.

 

[Bladerskb]

The Military takes raw recruits and tears them down to the basics, then rebuilds them to become soldiers. Perhaps Elon is doing something similar with Twitter. He has an end game he wants to achieve. Getting there will be hard work and challenging, but Elon has show time and time again, that his techniques are effective. Ends up with World Class companies. Cry babies will complain that their cushy and great feeling job has now vanished.

Yeaaaa force everyone to work to 2am everyday and come in on weekends.
Make sure they have zero lives other than to serve and do the owners bidding.
Slave away to make your owner trillions.
Anyone who says no is clearly a loser,low life, cry baby.
That's the way, every company should follow suit!


Talk about modern-day slavery.

 

[bkp_duke]

This is factually untrue of course.

A 10b5-1 plan would allow him to pre-plan sales for ANY period, even periods he otherwise would not be allowed to sell during without one. So it literally IS an exception to your "no exceptions" idea.

How useful that might be for twitter might vary depending on the expected need for funds and the conditions he sets in the plan- but it's a thing he could do.

A 10b5-1, as you point out is PRE PLANNED. I specifically said "sell on a whim". If Elon wants to call his broker up and sell TSLA and a 10b5-1 is not in place and he's in the black-out period, he's SOL.

 

[bkp_duke]

Forgive a small nitpick.

There are a couple exceptions. For example he could leave instructions with his broker to sell given some criteria. Or schedule stock sales. For example he could sell 1000 shares every Tuesday if he wanted to.

Need to be exceptionally careful with that because it is an instant red flag and a quick way to get regulator attention, but it is definitely possible.

Selling to get cash to prop up Twitter? Not so much.

/pedant

Yes, apparently I was not precise enough in my language, although the general meaning should have been clear to most here. But a 10b5-1, if memory serves me correctly, has to lay out pretty specific DATES and terms for stock sales and purchases. As you point out correctly it cannot be used to circumvent the black-out dates with vague language like "if I call you up to sell, sell during this period".

 

[elasalle]

.How to run efficient orgs.
.fight entropy in an org

TWITr needs them in spades. cheers!!

(if you are ex-TWITr employee, best of luck in your future endeavors)

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

Another red flag was his announcement that he was only going to vote for the party of "drill baby drill" who want to eliminate electric cars.

Tesla is the dominant US EV manufacturer and
(1) Hasn't had the Federal tax credit for years
He doesn't want a Federal tax credit
(2) Builds its own charging infrastructure
He doesn't want subsidized charging infrastructure, especially if his company can't have any subsidies. I've written before that Dieselgate was bad for Tesla and I still think so.
3) Doesn't have union workers
He doesn't want an administration that favors companies with union workers.
(4) Had its Fremont factory shut down during COVID by a state employee in a Democrat administration.
He doesn't think that factories should have been shut down during COVID.

He's not crazy. He's just a businessman with a ruthless streak, and a man with a fragile ego who sometimes lets his emotions get in the way of rational thinking.

 

[Knightshade]

Yes, apparently I was not precise enough in my language, although the general meaning should have been clear to most here. But a 10b5-1, if memory serves me correctly, has to lay out pretty specific DATES and terms for stock sales and purchases. As you point out correctly it cannot be used to circumvent the black-out dates with vague language like "if I call you up to sell, sell during this period".

Well... SORT of on the dates, but they don't need to be exact they can be programmatic


There's generally 3 rules it must follow:


The price and amount must be specified (this may include a set price) and certain dates of sales or purchases must be noted.

There must be a formula or metrics given for determining the amount, price, and date.

The plan must give the broker the exclusive right to determine when to make sales or purchases, as long as the broker does so without any MNPI when the trades are being made.




That second bit is the important one.... for example you could specify (using really simple examples but you could be far more complex)--- Sell 0.05% of my shares 2 trading days prior to each Tesla P&D report (when he normally would be blocked from selling at all).... or 2 days after.... or whatever.... you could also do something like "Sell 0.05% of my shares the day following any day that TSLA gains at least 10% from prior days close" as slightly more complex. And you could get much fancier. Heck if Twitter were still public you could even use THAT as a condition... like "Sell 0.05% of my TSLA any day that TWTR drops more than 5%"--- though it's not a route that would be terribly smart, especially more than once... but it'd totally be possible. And you can give the plan as long a duration as you want (and also cancel it at any time to stop it).


So you don't need specific dates (though you CAN use them if you want) so much as specific conditions that can be determined without needing to talk to the guy who owns the stock and which the broker can clearly understand and execute against.

Trump will not come back in the next year, even if Elon allows it. Many trumpers have lost big $ investing in DWAC. The only thing keeping that on life support is Trump being basically exclusive on it. It he goes live on Twitter, DWAC drops.

IIRC DWAC keeps postponing the date for the merge vote because they keep thinking it won't pass and they'll have to refund everyone and shut down.... and their only option will be to keep throwing $ on the fire to extend the deadline-- unclear if they'll KEEP doing that for another year or not.

 

[mach-edriver]

Someone who believes Musk may have a good investment:

The Harvard Business School Professor Who Isn’t Counting Elon Musk Out​

"Wu: I will say, on the upside, what Musk has accomplished so far at Tesla and SpaceX is really unbelievable and impressive and really special, as far as his generation of business leaders in terms of the amount of scale and resources needed to mass-produce electric cars and build commercial spaceships. It’s unfathomable, and he actually got there. The challenge now is that Musk has never been held to a benchmark of actually being profitable.

Nyce: Isn’t profitability pretty important if you’re a business executive?

Wu: We think about growth and profitability separately. When you’re in the growth phase of the business, investors value you on growth, and you can justify growing without thinking about profitability. At some point, inevitably, any business has to shift to thinking about profitability. And we don’t know yet if that’s within Musk’s skill set"

I think you're framing that interview in a way that is extraordinarily favorable to Musk. I didn't see the professor use the term "good investment" anywhere.

"
Nyce: I asked you to grade him earlier this week. What do you give the past 24 hours?

Wu: I would change my first grade—for the choice to do the deal—to a strict F, because I think the mismatch between Musk and Twitter is something that could have been figured out in due diligence.

Assuming the deal is done, and you have to manage the company, I’d downgrade this to a C. There are definitely a lot of rough edges here. This could be done more professionally and more cleanly. But at the same time, it’s not strictly an F for me, because I think there’s still a chance here. And cultural change is hard for anyone.

 

[juanmedina]

Yeaaaa force everyone to work to 2am everyday and come in on weekends.
Make sure they have zero lives other than to serve and do the owners bidding.
Slave away to make your owner trillions.
Anyone who says no is clearly a loser,low life, cry baby.
That's the way, every company should follow suit!


Talk about modern-day slavery.

Cry me a river. They all the freedom to leave and get a 3 months severance. The have the freedom to stay and work a ton of hours if they like and maybe make something special. I bet you love unions .

 

[sleepydoc]

The point the author made is that in mission critical systems, you need a troubleshooting team who knows the system backwards and forwards to have any chance of fast recovery from a problem and those people are now gone from Twitter. They farm out a lot to AWS so some of those problems are on the Amazon systems people, but there are plenty of problems that could be triggered by people within Twitter or by malicious actors hacking in.

I read something in the last couple of days that when Elon tweeted that he should buy Twitter, he was already a 9% stock holder. He may have had his lawyers approach him after that and tell him that he could go down for artificially pumping up the stock if he wasn't serious about buying the company.

I'm not one of those people who have been hoping Elon would fail for years. I didn't really start following Tesla until 2014 or early 2015, but I was shopping for a car and not finding anything they met what I thought was fairly reasonable criteria. I looked at the Model S on a whim and it blew away every point on my list and then some. I've been bullish about Tesla's success since then.

I also think SpaceX has rewritten space flight in many ways.

But something has gone screwy with Elon the last few years. When he made an attempt to take Tesla private and it turned out he really didn't have the financing lined up was a yellow flag. When he accused the diver of being a pedophile I was getting concerned. When he announced Tesla had bought $1 billion of Bitcoin I started thinking he had some screws coming loose. The name of his kid with Grimes was pretty weird, but could be chalked up to eccentricity. Then the Twitter buyout became a definite red flag. Another red flag was his announcement that he was only going to vote for the party of "drill baby drill" who want to eliminate electric cars.

Something is not right with Elon. He's running off the rails.

Most entrepreneur mega wealthy might have some eccentricities, but they aren't in the media all that often. Usually just when they are pushing for something they are selling or doing like Bill Gates' foundation or when Steve Jobs would trot out new Apple products once or twice a year. Jeff Bezos is probably the second highest profile billionaire in recent years. He had a messy divorce and he was briefly in the news with his spacecraft, but he doesn't have much of a social media presence and if he does, few people pay much attention.

Richard Branson pops up in the news from time to time and some people have a low opinion of him, but he hasn't been in the news much since his first space flight either.

Elon is behaving like someone with a drug problem or a mental problem that got much worse for some reason. Maybe it's the stress from some of his grand goals not coming to fruition? The next gen Roadster, Cybertruck, and Semi still haven't entered production (though the Cybertruck is getting close). It's quite possible that full self driving without a driver is going to be impossible. SpaceX hopes to do a manned mission to Mars in 2029, but that may be behind schedule. Or it could be something else we don't know about?

Who knows for sure, he is behaving erratically and I don't think he's making good decisions.

Exactly this. You’ve echoed many of my thoughts precisely.

I don’t want Elon to fail but his actions seem to be getting less and less rational, at the very least they are costing him significant amounts of money. Howard Hughes comes to mind.

I don’t know how many people it takes to run twitter. Hopefully fewer than Elon has left. I’ve seen many people claim that you only need ‘a few good people,’ and most of Twitter was bloat and dead weight. That may be true. The more important question is who stayed. I've seen several credible reports that many of those who stayed were not people who wanted to stay but rather people who had to stay. That's not the best way to pare down your workforce and they may be quite good, but the selection criteria wasn't 'good' it was 'necessity,' clearly not the method you would prefer to use if you need to trim your workforce to the barebones core of essential 'hard core' employees.

As I wrote previously, Elon's actions in the past 3 weeks also don't do him any favors when it comes to recruiting new employees that are top tier. To be sure there are some people who will follow Elon straight into the volcano. (Just look at the posts here on TMC.) But if I were a top caliber software engineer, I probably already have a good job. Why should I risk it to go work in a boiler room environment with an erratic boss known for firing people on a whim all for a project that has a low chance of success?

 

[mach-edriver]

Cry me a river. They all the freedom to leave and get a 3 months severance. The have the freedom to stay and work a ton of hours if they like and maybe make something special. I bet you love unions .

It seems that the majority of Twitter workers have sufficient self-esteem to walk away from Jonestown.

 

[sleepydoc]

Cry me a river. They all the freedom to leave and get a 3 months severance. The have the freedom to stay and work a ton of hours if they like and maybe make something special. I bet you love unions .

...and it appears most of the ones who could leave did.