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Twitter and the Chief Twit
- Thread starter Mr H
- Start date
EVer Hopeful
Active Member
Really? - a lot of questionable [1] decisions seem to be made on those numbers. One in particular comes to mind . . .
[1] I was being polite there
I think that may not be accurate given what I've heard other people (eg Andrej Karpathy, folks from SpaceX) say about him.
My take is that he's exceptionally clever, but does not really understand small-scale human interactions very well, nor his own limitations. His strengths worked well for Tesla and to get the M3 into mass production, but since then those same characteristics seem to have more harm than good.
Take The Boring Company for example - a great idea on first principles, but then you get into the squishy human requirements like "safety" and "escape tunnels" and then the whole idea falls apart. Tesla's recent choices have been great on first principles (reduce complexity, thereby reducing risk from the supply chain and lowering overheads) but then us pesky human customers get involved with our preferences for steering wheels, turn signals, and the features that were advertised when we placed orders, and his decisions look less good.
Thinking about it, I may have just realised a quick way of summing up Elon's success and limitations.
He builds things he thinks humans should want. The first couple of times in his career (PayPal, Tesla) this lined up with what people did actually want. Less so now.
He builds things he thinks humans should want. The first couple of times in his career (PayPal, Tesla) this lined up with what people did actually want. Less so now.
With reference to the title of this thread and I appreciate I may well be in a very small minority but I'm going to ask the question anyway, 'cos I'm genuinely interested: Is there anyone else on the forum who just couldn't give a toss about Twitter or whether it survives or not?
That would be an easy one to spot given that design applies to some existing tunnels (Channel tunnel). The Hyperloop wouldn't be needing batteries of course. More of a challenge for tunnels that EVs use if they are very long ... though EVs already drive through some long tunnels, along with all the toxic emissions from ICE vehicles.
ACarneiro
Active Member
I would be positively chuffed if it disappeared and took Facebook and most other “social” media platforms with it…
I don’t care about Twitter persay, but I do care about it being a constant distraction for Elon. I also care that he has really leaned into being an edgelord since he took over. Pretty much every decision he has made has attracted wide opprobrium.
Pretty soon the way this is all carrying on the association with him will bleed over into simple Tesla owners, with us getting flak for “supporting his regime”
Was this a poll that was run when all Twitter personnel were locked out of the offices? Convenient.
As for whether you’re bothered about the thread or not, just scroll past it if you’re not interested. Is it relevant to Tesla? That’s a valid question and I personally think it does in the sense it is detracting for Musk and you could say the same about SpaceX, the Boring company etc.
As for whether you’re bothered about the thread or not, just scroll past it if you’re not interested. Is it relevant to Tesla? That’s a valid question and I personally think it does in the sense it is detracting for Musk and you could say the same about SpaceX, the Boring company etc.
Leeclanual
Member
I just find it interesting how triggered people are on how Musk has decided to run a company he owns. Employees demanding the owner to do X, Y, and Z is laughable… they deserved to receive the ultimatum to get to work or quit. These workers apparently never heard the “There ain't no such thing as a free lunch” saying.
ACarneiro
Active Member
Whilst I agree with you in principle, people are allowed their opinions. I very much doubt he listens to them anyway…
MrBadger
Badger out
Hardly. But they heard the saying "“long hours at high intensity” or receive “three months of severance,”
Musk is showing himself as a bit of a bully.
And I say this as a workaholic, by choice, not because someone throws their weight round threatening me the sack if I don't work unreasonable hours.
From first-hand experience*, I'd proffer that developers are absolute divas and are pandered to.
I worked at a place where the:
- daily free cooked breakfast
- free lunch most days
- free snacks, drinks and alcohol 24/7
- free table tennis, meditation room, showers, toiletries
- free weekly barista, masseuse and smoothie bar
*ran a cloud computing consultancy for six years
ACarneiro
Active Member
I worked with (not for) a company called Pivotal, which was bought out by VMware. The catch is that folks pair-program (two people working on one computer, with two keyboards and two mice) which is really, really mentally and socially demanding but leads to higher-quality code. So there was an element of compensating for the high demands.
There were like 6-10 choices of beer, 3-4 wines, and different teams maintained their own cocktail bars.
There are very good reasons for all of this, from a management point of view. It was always fun showing people around, and they'd be utterly flabbergasted (one of the intentions when showing clients around, truth be told). It was funny when people would ask "don't people take it all home?" To which the answer is "they don't need to when there are never-ending supplies at work."
Pivotal wasn't the most indulgent of tech companies in this way though. Facebook were way worse, or so I'm told. I gather they and Google do everything that they could to make sure you had no reason to leave campus if you didn't want to - 24 hour cooked meals, laundry service, you name it.
The salaries were getting silly when I left the industry. It seems like there's been a correction now, but we had Uni grads expecting £60k in a first job, and people with four years' experience asking for £100k.
There are others who would agree with what I've said. Ignoring any opinions he's done some monumentally dumb things, one of which we're all enjoying watching right now.
99% of developers don't work in those kind of FAANG jobs where they get that sort of stuff. Those things only exist to attract the best talent (not to mention the hoops needed to jump through to get in these jobs) and to keep their staff in the office as long as possible. Why go home when you can get breakfast, lunch, dinner, etc. at work, meanwhile you're spending 18 hours there. Some of us don't see this as a perk, or the salaries which require you to live in some of the most expensive areas in the world anyway.
Last place I worked at that had a break room with a pool table, etc. you'd get chewed out if you were caught actually using it. It was just there to show potential new hires.
Tech is well overdue a crash but the best devs will still be pandered to on some level. Suggest you try get a dev job if you're jealous.
This is the crux of why this matters outside the investors roundtable and the only part that is of any interest to me personally, too.
If Musk's behaviour and decisions on Twitter and in the public eye are conscious, and based on business factors then there is a play. Probably because an untapped base / demographic has been pitched to him. In this case, Twitter won't collapse completely, it's user base will just change and those users will be monetised in return for hearing and seeing what they want to hear and see. I guess the hope here would be that the effect of this on the other companies Musk is linked to will be negligible (betting on people's apathy wouldn't be anything new - lots of people don't want to or can't devote the time or 'f's to give' to considering moral or ethical factors in their consumer decisions in certain areas or have long since given up due to monopolies - see: certain banks). If there is a bet on apathy and it pays off, the two may feed one another in a way that is beneficial to Musk.
If this isn't the case, and his behaviour is truly just an outpouring of him as a person at this point in his life, then the immediate potential weakness is that his character is inextricably tied to all of the businesses he's involved with. In this case, and if the bet on apathy doesn't go their way, or he just doesn't care I would expect a very rapid onset of pressure to de-couple his character from Space X and Tesla to protect them.
On the one hand I can well believe that Twitter was massively overstaffed, and the staff that were there were pampered. The fact he's fired 1/2 of them and another bunch have resigned (voluntarily, or under duress) and it's still operational tends to suggest that. I saw it said elsewhere that Twitter has grown massively in headcount in recent years, despite not having grown itself as a business. There was - in my humble opinion - a lot of fat that could be trimmed.
There is also an argument to be made that Musk has never been coy about his approach to business, attitude to WFH, etc. There is evidence of layoffs at SpaceX, return to work mandates imposed on Tesla staff, etc. People working at Twitter had to haved expected this sort of treatment when he took over.
On the flip side I can't see how his managerial style will pay dividends in the case of a company like Twitter. I don't think he can upend the expected work culture, perks expectations and work/life balance in those class of companies, in Silicon Valley, though I don't doubt a certain breed of managers and company owners will be watching how well he does to see if they can recalibrate their own balance of power.
The s**t hot developers and other professionals will have plenty of options available to them if they haven't left already. What he's likely to end up with are people who can't resign - for whatever reason, e.g. H1B visas, dependant family, financial commitments, etc - and career sociopaths. It's debatable whether those people will be the cream of the crop.
I fortunately barely care about Twitter, so all of these goings on is more fascinating than it is troubling. I think it would be fair to say that Musk's star has diminished greatly from how this has all played out, though, and given he has massive debts to service each year due to the purchase price he has a very limited amount of time to do something the company has never achieved before - monetising casual users.
There is also an argument to be made that Musk has never been coy about his approach to business, attitude to WFH, etc. There is evidence of layoffs at SpaceX, return to work mandates imposed on Tesla staff, etc. People working at Twitter had to haved expected this sort of treatment when he took over.
On the flip side I can't see how his managerial style will pay dividends in the case of a company like Twitter. I don't think he can upend the expected work culture, perks expectations and work/life balance in those class of companies, in Silicon Valley, though I don't doubt a certain breed of managers and company owners will be watching how well he does to see if they can recalibrate their own balance of power.
The s**t hot developers and other professionals will have plenty of options available to them if they haven't left already. What he's likely to end up with are people who can't resign - for whatever reason, e.g. H1B visas, dependant family, financial commitments, etc - and career sociopaths. It's debatable whether those people will be the cream of the crop.
I fortunately barely care about Twitter, so all of these goings on is more fascinating than it is troubling. I think it would be fair to say that Musk's star has diminished greatly from how this has all played out, though, and given he has massive debts to service each year due to the purchase price he has a very limited amount of time to do something the company has never achieved before - monetising casual users.
this is very good point.
I always laugh when people say that "oh, we got all those nice perks, like "pool table", nice meeting and private rooms (!!!) and other nonsense".
I always say: you rather just pay me more. I come to work to do my job. and then I leave. Only reason why I wake up at sheet o'clock and spend most of my day there is that I was paid.
