robertvg
Extremely Well-Known Member
Indeed, he might want to be in just to satisfy his curiosity and need for intellectual challenges but that's it.
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Elon & Twitter
- Thread starter Buckminster
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He still has HR staff and recruiters working for him at SpaceX and Tesla. And both of those companies are likely to be able to afford to pay employee salaries in three months. Twitter, by contrast, is facing a mass exodus of advertisers in an era when advertising dollars were already declining, and thus will likely just be paying a minimal staff of minimum-wage employees to wipe data off of machines and tag assets for Chapter 7 liquidation in three months.
Musk canned 61% of the company, and if rumors are correct, ~75% of the employees that were left decided that the company was so doomed that they would rather not have jobs than waste their time continuing to work in such a hostile work environment. Assume that out of the 25% that are left, every single one is actively looking for employment elsewhere, so they'll put in maybe 75% of their normal workload until they find another job, followed by zero. In another month or two, the only people left will be the ones who are too incompetent to find another job.
So ultimately, it doesn't matter whether he "knows how to identify and retain great talent". Nobody in their right minds is going to apply for a job at a doomed company. He might as well have just set the building on fire and written off the entire company as a business loss.
Let me put it more bluntly. As a software engineer who has worked at two of the top four companies in the world by market cap, I wouldn't agree to work for Twitter if he agreed to pay me $3 million a year and gave me a 5% ownership interest in the company. The ownership interest likely wouldn't be worth anything in a year anyway, and I'd expect the paychecks to stop within a month or two. It will take two or three years of the company showing that it can provide steady employment before anybody will take a chance on applying for jobs there again, and there's almost zero chance that the company will be around that long. It would take a miracle.
IMO, there's essentially no chance that Twitter will still be around in a year at this point unless Musk sells Twitter to some other company that already knows how to run web services and can temporarily throw thousands of workers at keeping it afloat, and most of those are in sufficient trouble financially that they can't afford to do it.
Apple isn't good enough at running web services to pull it off. (Sorry, just being brutally honest here.) Amazon is slashing teams left and right, and won't want to absorb somebody else's screw-up. Facebook is bleeding so badly that they can't afford it. Google could do it, but Musk would probably have to pay them to take the company off his hands, given that the first thing they'd have to do is gut the entire infrastructure and move it off of AWS. I literally can't think of anybody who could bail him out at this point.
Stick a fork in it. It's done. At best, Musk spent tens of billions of dollars for a few hundred future Tesla employees. At worst, he spent tens of billions of dollars for a domain name and a bunch of people's email addresses.
So, that‘s like what Microsoft did with Nokia and LinkedIn. Like Microsoft, Musk can afford to lose billions. So what.
I guess one positive thing is that if Twitter dies, Elon will have one less distraction and can turn his focus back to Tesla, SpaceX, etc.
Unfortunately, the human cost is pretty terrible, so far, all in the middle of a bad time for tech workers. It does sound like many Twitter former employees liked or loved working there until Elon came and started this dumpster fire.
Unfortunately, the human cost is pretty terrible, so far, all in the middle of a bad time for tech workers. It does sound like many Twitter former employees liked or loved working there until Elon came and started this dumpster fire.
Good God guys, our little baby had just started to gain some real weight and stability in life and take off the training wheels and then the father had to go and make a full of himself with some social media platform.....I just want EVs for everyone, not tweets.
130k likes:
130k likes:
They definitely loved working there. When working means gaming, attending yoga class, having long lunches and taking care of your kids at home while being paid on average $227k per year.
It’s ridiculous that it took 7,500 people to keep one site online, with the occasional tweak. A few dozen in programming would suffice, plus a hundred for the network, a few hundred for acquisition and a maybe a thousand for moderating. Including overhead no more than 1,500 to 2,000 people.
Well I just checked in and Twitter seems to be working.
On what date do you predict that it will stop working?
I think that your headcount numbers are in the right ballpark.
JupiterMan
Active Member
Not great optics, and full of falsehoods, but it does neatly demonstrate why he had to sack some of them
The one about Elon Musk buying Twitter. I mean he’s eccentric but not an idiot.
I think Elon will know how to get George to contribute.
Comma.ai seemed to work fairly well. I agree that he was over confident and could be difficult to work with. But if you need to track down a very tricky software bug, network or performance issue, George will be first to pinpoint the problem a lot of the time.
In the end I think George knew Comma.ai didn't have the resources to go much further.
Biased thread of course, and it's not the whole story, but the base line is definitely true.
AlanSubie4Life
Efficiency Obsessed Member
Kind of wondering whether people will be right about Twitter falling apart short term. I feel like they’ll be wrong but then again they have been right so far.
Anyway I am sure it will be fine eventually.
I keep on saying he needs to go to zero leverage. He needs to sell ~$20B of Tesla stock and then pay off the loans and all will be well. Just takes care of the problems. Easy Mode.
Sooner the better. He has so much money it’s no big deal to spend many billions more. Just move quickly and don’t borrow money. The more quickly he moves the less money he will waste.
Anyway I am sure it will be fine eventually.
I keep on saying he needs to go to zero leverage. He needs to sell ~$20B of Tesla stock and then pay off the loans and all will be well. Just takes care of the problems. Easy Mode.
Sooner the better. He has so much money it’s no big deal to spend many billions more. Just move quickly and don’t borrow money. The more quickly he moves the less money he will waste.
Yes. But that‘s not the kind of person to built an entire product. Just a super-troubleshooter that you want out as soon as the problem is fixed.
In just two hours, it gained another 37k likes. Most people don't understand what he is trying to do with Twitter by turning it into X.com, but man, he just botched the whole transition.
This entire Twitter deal has seemed like a complete train wreck happening in real time.
Can Twitter function with a fraction of the workforce it previously had? Can Elon turn this now savagely downsized media company into something that survives and flourishes? Will advertisers come back to Twitter? Will Elon's vision become a reality?
Or will this sink Twitter? Has Elon just wasted $44 billion in record time? Did he sell his TSLA shares for nothing? Is Twitter so toxic now that most advertisers wouldn't ever go near it again?
On one hand it's going to be interesting to see how this all plays out, and if I wasn't a long term TSLA investor I'd be enjoying the show from the sidelines with a bag of chips. As a TSLA investor though I am not enjoying the show, as it's curtailing Elon's attention and hurting TSLA (both directly and indirectly). Part of me wants to see Twitter succeed and improve while the other part of me wants to see it go under super fast so this Twitter Overhang on TSLA simply goes away as soon as possible.
Can Twitter function with a fraction of the workforce it previously had? Can Elon turn this now savagely downsized media company into something that survives and flourishes? Will advertisers come back to Twitter? Will Elon's vision become a reality?
Or will this sink Twitter? Has Elon just wasted $44 billion in record time? Did he sell his TSLA shares for nothing? Is Twitter so toxic now that most advertisers wouldn't ever go near it again?
On one hand it's going to be interesting to see how this all plays out, and if I wasn't a long term TSLA investor I'd be enjoying the show from the sidelines with a bag of chips. As a TSLA investor though I am not enjoying the show, as it's curtailing Elon's attention and hurting TSLA (both directly and indirectly). Part of me wants to see Twitter succeed and improve while the other part of me wants to see it go under super fast so this Twitter Overhang on TSLA simply goes away as soon as possible.
If we go into a recession next year and Twitter has job openings they will have record job applicants. There is also always overseas contract agencies that can support that have great software engineers. The USA is so lucky that there is plenty of jobs in other countries people would not be crying because they got a new boss or because they have to come to the office; they would just do their work and shut up. This country is really doomed if it continues like this. This is why Tesla Shanghai produces better cars and has grown so fast. The American Factory documentary is good example of the difference between workers attitudes; we are really spoiled. I am obviously not in favor of companies abusing their employees but there is a middle grown.
Knightshade
Well-Known Member
You appear to have ignored what I actually said and the point actually being made though. Like, entirely. To the point you replied to the opposite of it. Also the fact you replied in the wrong thread for it even though the post you replied to specifically was making that point too.
ANYWAY-
This is the first time Elon is running something that already exists and has been up and running for many years and was 100% built without him being around for any of it
That is fundamentally different than a startup, which is what all his success has been with to this point.
NONE of this has ANYTHING to do with "Can elon find new programmers"
Of course he can. It's entirely irrelevant to what was being discussed though.
Also see wdolsons excellent post a page or so back about the OTHER differences (like the fact all his previous companies were disruptive startups in spaces NOBODY WAS ALREADY DOING ANYTHING.... versus overpaying for a social media site that isn't even in the top 10 in users in a super crowded space)
NONE of this has ANYTHING to do with technical competence or being able to hire smart people.
Except the rockets are already built here my dude.
You can certainly hire people to eventually reverse engineer them and eventually get where you need to- which is where Elon is now. But it's outright dumb to not get that info from the people who built them before you tell them to leave instead of wasting a ton of new hires times doing wire traces on everything to figure out what the parts even do, what metals they used where, what fuel they use, how they interact, and why all that is true.
Lemme try an even simpler example:
The fact you can buy land-mine detectors doesn't mean it's smart to fire the guy with the map of the already planted mines before you get a copy of the map.
You will still be able to get through the mine field either way, and you PROBABLY won't blow a leg off the dumber way, but one way is a lot smarter and faster than the other. Cheaper too in the long run, because time for knowledgeable people to document things will be far cheaper than paying even the smartest new people to reverse engineer and figure it all out from scratch.
FWIW I think short term you'll see random failures that only happen because of the lack of institutional knowledge, and that those failures will be compounded by taking longer to fix again because of that lack of knowledge. Probably not "twitter is just entirely down" stuff, because it sounds like a decent bit of things are hosted externally anyway.... but more things like the broken 2FA Elon caused by randomly shutting down services he had no idea did anything. Likewise it'll now take significantly longer to make improvements and new features a reality until they figure this stuff out, because they will lack a proper understanding of how new interacts with old.
One reason you'll see this in real time is the previously discussed total lack of a test environment, so all that stuff will happen in production.
I agree "eventually" the new people will acquire that knowledge by trial and error, decompiling what others did before, figuring out how and why everything is the way is it, and indeed be able to improve a ton of it.
But there was no reason for any of that to happen if Elon had simply been smarter about how, who, and when, to fire the people who actually had the map of the landlines immediately without at least getting them to write that down first.
Elon told us you'd see twitter doing dumb things in the coming months. This is one of them that's gonna spawn a lot more examples.
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