So there's two options right - the first is that Parag is for some reason making big strategic decisions about the direction of the company despite the fact that we all know he'll be gone if the deal closes. Or he's making big strategic changes at the behest of the acquirers before the deal closes.
Neither of these things seem particularly kosher moves to make. The question is how to figure out which one it is.
It would seem weird for Parag to be following Musk's orders given how Musk has behaved. It also seems weird for Musk to already have the insight into the company to know specifically who to fire. There's not much advantage to making these changes now.
On the other hand, going rogue and making big strategic decisions about the company really has the potential to burn Parag's reputation for wherever he would move next.
I guess there's a third option - that Musk has expressed a specific view, Parag has a different view, but that they both think that this move is necessary anyway so just got on and did it.
You're discounting the very real possibility that Parag is operating as if the deal will not go through, and is making large strategic decisions in anticipation of that being the case.
For Parag, I don't see it "burning his reputation" at all, considering either a) he's right and will face the tall task of helming a Twitter that continues to disappoint its investors or b) he's wrong and it won't be his problem when Elon fires him next year.
CEOs of large companies that are forced out during acquisitions often fail upward. It really depends on how they behave right before the close. Effectively, the CEO has to advocate for the company and get the most out of the acquisition, and if they do, they are often rewarded (with seats on board or choice of next job). realistically, he will be able to retire for life after this if he chooses, and will be able to select a job offer that works well for him.
I'm always curious .. how do these execs negotiate such contracts (where contingencies like getting acquired/fired lead to a payoff). Does this start at the VP or EVP level? I assume there are professionals/lawyers involved in the contract part (representing the exec I mean)?
Smaller orgs VP level. Larger EVP. You almost always retain a lawyer to review these things. Change in control is a very common trigger for a lot of things in most employment contracts of this nature. The downside is you end up with much more ironclad covenants and restrictions. But your comp is often at a FU level if you do get fired so it balances most of the time.
I'd recommend reading "Barbarians at the gate". It will give you a very good idea.
When it comes to levels, those kind of golden parachutes are offered only at top levels. VPs, SVPs, etc. are help and get normal packages when they leave, at least in normal, large blue chip companies.
I'd consider myself easily bored, but I think $42 million would give me plenty of novel ways to entertain myself. (I definitely would _not_ want to run a large corporation though, so I guess it's a good thing I'd never get hired for one of these jobs anyways)
Hell, even if you managed a year or two, you’re still walking away with tens of millions that’s pretty close to financial security for the rest of your life.
I think there's a part of the HN population that has delusions of becoming billionaires one day, so they talk about tens of millions like it's not much. They'll likely never have either.
Financial security in the Bay Area requires a house there ($2-3M, nowadays) plus $COST_OF_LIVING/4%. This is easily $5M net worth. It's in "two Googlers and a successful exit at some point earlier" territory.
Granted, this threshold is less than $10M, but it isn't orders of magnitude less
All of which is to say that it is basically impossible to stay in the Bay long-term unless you make an absolute fuckton of money.
Well, you do have two other options.
One is to commute in 2hr or more every day. Which a lot of service workers have to do.
The other is to share a house or apartment with roommates (if you're single) or with another family (surprisingly common, because what else can you do?).
These are both lifestyle decisions that differ substantially from what most people think of as "normal", past your 20s.
What I'm saying is, merely living a "normal middle class" lifestyle in the Bay requires absurd money. So I can understand why people act like absurd money is normal.
You don't need $5M to be "safe" in the Bay Area. You do need some money - enough to afford to get a mortgage on a place to stay - but once you get past that, things get easier. The thing is, it takes money to start making money. It takes money to start to be able to afford the things that will make your cost of living go down. It does suck, but it's not $5M.
I used to work in car sales in the bay area. Basically every car salesman and every mechanic at a franchise car dealership owns a home. Maybe they drive 30-75 minutes to work, but they are 25-35 and own a home in California. The older ones own a home within 15 minutes of their job.
That they bought themselves? What's the cheapest home available within an Hour of SF, 500k or more? Do you really think a car salesman barely pushing 100k a year can swing that? Or are you implying that car salesman in the Bay are making top 1% salaries?
I wasn't talking about car salesman that work in SF proper. Yes, 1 hour from there is basically still pretty expensive. But if you can work anywhere 30 minutes outside SF, and then live another 45 further, you own a home.
And yes any decent car salesperson is making $100k. I made on average $250k but I was a bit better than top 1%, and I know a few that made more. I suppose you could say I only socialize with high performers. Sure every car dealer also has a few people that struggle to pay their apartment rent.
The industry is setup for an good salesperson to support a family. If you can outperform average by 2x, which is possible if you're really on it, you can make 2x+ that amount.
Same applies to mechanics that are good at their craft.
If you put $5M in index funds, you’d grow it by about $400k a year (8%) on average, to start. It’s hard to imagine going broke with that by doing “normal middle class” things. For added security, one could add in a part-time job.
8% is extremely optimistic. 4% is more like it, maybe even 3.5%. I'll use 4% for what follows. That's $200k. Take out 20% LTCG, now you're at $160k.
Rent is like $3k/mo, so $36k/yr. Say you have modest living expenses of another $34k/yr. Now you're at $70k/yr to break even. That leaves you with $90k to save/compound.
So, ok, you're doing very well as a renter with $5M invested, even in the Bay Area. And, given that you have more than twice the income you need, you'd probably be ok with only $2-2.5M. As in, breaking even with passive income.
Which would work so long as you don't want to own a house, and so long as markets don't melt down. That extra security seems to cost extra.
Sure, but if you retired in 1997 to live off the interest on an investment in the S&P 500, by 2008 you'd have made an annual return of... 0%.
If you used cromd's figures of $5M in funds and lifestyle expenses of $400k/year you'd have spent ~80% of the principal (although you'd probably have reigned in your spending unless you were mad)
A boat doesn't just need to survive the harbour's average water level - it needs to survive low tide and high tide.
4% is the historical number you could take out for expenses in the worst case scenario. IMO it’s not pricing in modern existential threats, such as a war that crosses the ocean, or existing regulatory differences that make it more difficult for larger firms.
Yeah, maybe 4% is all one could manage to withdraw to survive the longest downturns. I haven't dug into that much. But, people are maybe debating different things - some are likely talking complete early retirement whereas my comment was more about "financial security" (or at least the claim it's "basically impossible to stay in the Bay long-term unless you make an absolute fuckton of money").
For me, financial security means something more like: money will be low on my list of problems. I could get more money by turning my attention there. I might have to work, but it could be some low-stress job, and losing it isn't a big deal. I could afford extra care for an elderly parent. I won't be knocked out by most random things that pop up, specific to my personal life, though I can't control what happens to my country etc.
For some, it means they don't have to work at all, and can't be ruined by market downturns that last decades. And further for some others, it means they can survive wars and societal collapse.
I think both are valid to wish for, though at a certain point it's a burden on yourself to control things you can't control. If there's a 1.1% chance of widespread nuclear war in our lifetime, and you want to be 99% certain your lifestyle won't take a hit, one needs to save and spend a ton to be able to weather it all.
Come on, do some math on this. Any engineer at FAANG, even excluding their stock grants, will probably have close to 10M in retirement accounts by the time they retire given max contributions and historical returns.
Oh I agree 100%, personally it’s more money than I’d know what to do with, but I’m also aware that there’s a chunk of users here who’s respond with “well after tax this that, etc etc” with some justification as to why it’s not quite enough, so I thought I’d attempt to cover all bases hahaha.
Most people spend proportionally to what they earn, so I don't see why one year salary should necessarily provide the lifetime of financial security, regardless of what that salary is.
There comes a point where it becomes increasingly difficult to "spend what you earn." I mean, you can do it with dedicated effort, of course, but even if you're very in-the-bubble, it's hard to think of buying ultra-expensive commodities (boats, art, highly expensive cars), or your third or fourth house, or other things that can plausibly eat up tens of millions of dollars in a year, in the same category as, like, "Well of course I want to send my children to a swanky private school instead of public."
Depends on the people. If you want to be safe to retire early, it is a good idea to keep living humbly while you are making a lot of mone and not adopt the Jet Set life.
I've seen example of people selling their company, retiring early and stay low-mid budget. One particular example is very wealthy but live in a small house, drive a 10y old compact hatchback car. You wouldn't know his fortune just by looking at his habits. He enjoy more a BBQ with his neighbors than going to expensive places to eat and help around when someone in the village needs an additional hand. He is still probably spending a lot more than I do traveling on holidays and he has nicer furnitures but he is still doing it like most people do, only a few weeks a year when the kids are out of school. What he has is the ability to justify buying expensive but sturdy stuff that last, instead of things that break and have to be replaced on a regular basis.
But it’s a bit ridiculous to get 42 million USD and not be satisfied. And the original comment is ridiculous to suggest that it’s not sufficient compensation.
If your salary was $25k/year (a respectable amount for the majority of world population), would $1M seem like a lifetime financial stability? I think so. Yet if your salary is $250k/year, it probably wouldn't, and this would sound ridiculous to people who make $25k/year.
If you make 25k/year getting 1M is almost as good as getting 42M, because you are not used to thinking about anything you can do with 42M that you can't do with 1M. However, if your salary has been 10M/year, you most likely can easily see many ways to spend 42M, which are not something you think about often when you make 250k/year.
Most people on $250k are just trying to “survive” (as in, have a house and a family) in a high cost-of-living area. If a house costs $2M then $250k is only just sufficient after deducting taxes and living expenses. Their spending is not so different from someone earning $25k in a low cost-of-living area.
There’s nowhere in the world where the cost of living requires $10M/year. To spend that much money you are forced to spend it on high-end luxuries. Of course there are people who could easily consume that amount of money, but most people on that income would put it into investment instead of consumption.
Financial freedom is supposed to cover more than just some standard "cost of living" in a given area. It should let you maintain your lifestyle without having to work for it. Maintaining the lifestyle includes keeping your spending habits, so if you have been spending 10M/year, then achieving financial freedom would mean you can keep spending that much for the rest of your life.
It's a different question how many people actually spend 10M/year - I have no data about that, but I can easily see myself spending that much if my income has been 40M/year for several years. To me personally spending that money would not necessarily mean buying some high-end luxuries. It would probably involve trying to make some changes in the world and influence things. But yes, luxuries and interesting experiences too. If you're interested in this question, try finding more information about lives of famous rich people.
not almost nothing. He's a bit of a tackling dummy at this point. That being said, he's the world's best paid tackling dummy. Even if Musk purchase does not go through, not sure how he stays as the board basically said when they agreed to Musk's offer we have no current plans to create anywhere near the value Musk says he can.
$42 million is a pittance for a man at his level. VCs with a tenth of the risk have taken home more money than that over the years from several deals. He has also been at the company for a very long time. I’d be enraged at a $42 million exit when I’m a child prodigy who has worked his ass off to finally helm one of the most publicly visibly corporations on the planet.
Huh, it's just a job even at position of CEO. To think he has taken risk while doing his well paid job is freaking hilarious. He did not build the company,nor is he some A level tech celebrity. So 42 million is BIG FUCKING DEAL.
Yeah I was like, wtf is GP talking about this guy is an employee who climbed from SEng to 42m exit in a decade. At no point was he even remotely close to missing a credit card payment; what a sweet deal he's set for life now.
Most child prodigies and most people that work their ass off don't become millionaires, much less ones that can earn a million a year from interest. Also he did receive compensation for all the years he worked, no?
Why are you being intentionally dense? Compensation in the valley comes in the form of stock options more than anything else. This is like saying someone slightly less consequential to google than Jeff dean or Sanjay ghemawat should be happy with $50 million for giving a large portion of their lives to the company. Are you guys smoking something?
Most child prodigies don’t even work in corporate America and a lot of them don’t care for wealth. They’d rather go into theoretical physics or pure math.
The initial ideal of capitalism is, the people who make good decisions capitalize more “decision power” (=money) because it will be good for the future economy to concentrate power in their hands. Those who hold power are the best ones.
It’s just a fun theoretical thought exercise, in which there’s no limit to how much one would accumulate, if their decision making is good to the infinite. He didn’t tank Twitter into the ground, therefore he deserves a good share. In practice, they use this money for themselves instead of reinvesting it into other endeavours.
You need more than that if you want to set up a steelworks or a silicon fab. I understand that you probably mean no human being needs $42 million in pocket money to spend on gigantic houses and medium-sized yachts, but c'mon.
There's a possible difference here between "doing things that Twitter and its owner(s) will profit from" and "doing things as Musks wants them". If the two diverge, the first is the winning strategy, burning far fewer bridges than the alternative.
If it's unclear, people who don't particularly care for Musk (aka people who know Musk minus people who want to be Musk) may well start from the assumption that the current CEO was right. And if Musk-era Twitter doesn't succeed as wildly as some (one) person predicts, they stand to look even better in contrast.
I'm not saying that Musk will necessary fail––he's had quite a bit of success compared to, well, anybody. But he's been involved with a few duds, as well, and has set rather high expectations. It's an almost classic case of decision-making under uncertainty and I'd guess a Twitter CEO has seen a relevant case study or two.
I worked at a big company that was being acquired. The bigger acquiring company needed our company to sell off some divisions to avoid regulatory issues. So we were in this "going to be acquired.. one day" phase for like 18 months.
In the meantime our company actually had to tell the a subsidiary of bigger acquiring company.... to sort of shove off on a partnership we had with them.
This subsidiary was crap and they were not holding up their end of the partnership. It was reiterated many times that "while we will likely be acquired by their parent company our job is to operate in the interest of our current stockholders and that best interest is to no longer work with <subsidiary>".
No word if the acquiring company ever responded negatively. By all accounts they understood (and really had a bigger picture in mind).
The probability that Elon is margin called by year end is roughly 40% according to option prices.
- 60% chance you get fired either by Musk or investors if you don't turn the ship.
- 40% chance you Musk is margin called and doesn't take over, but still might be fired by investors or acquired by someone else who may in turn can him.
> Tesla has plainly kicked the ass of the European and Asian auto giants
Tesla had 1.4% of all cars sold in 2021, by number of units. Going by revenue it's somewhere around 1%. It is kinda hard to see that as kicking the asses of the competition.
Kicking ass would be more like what happened with smartphones, where iOS + Android went from 0 to >90% market share in the space of five years, leaving Nokia, Palm, Blackberry etc. as brands nobody would assoviate themselves with. Nothing like that is happening in automotive.
You're comparing apples to oranges.
"iOS" market share is iphone market share, which is still very small but with a huge profit margin, android market share is the market share of dozens of phones brands.
Nokia and Palm both sell android phones in 2022.
I don't see how that's comparable to Tesla VS old automakers
1.4% is massive for a car manufacturer built from scratch in just over a decade. You can’t really scale car manufacturing the way an existing computer megacorp could scale phone production.
I don't like a world where the only way to assess someone is by how much money they make for investors. That's a bleak reality, so I prefer to act as though a person's behavior matters in the hopes I might create it by force of will. You can recognize the negative with the positive. Anything else is revisionism.
Other countries and economies have chosen not to reward value-creators for the value they create. So far this has not worked out well for these countries and economies.
The question is not whether he's been successful. He has been, the question is whether this is the peak valuation akin to Cisco during dotcom and whether he is over leveraged at this point.
Some of that depends on whether Twitter can partially self-fund the acquisition itself over time.
Most likely it can, that much more so if Musk negotiates a lower price. Debt is very inexpensive right now, especially for large corporations with a strong balance sheet. If Musk owns all of Twitter, he gets their $6 billion in cash and their balance sheet has no consequential debt issues.
Twitter is operationally profitable, despite being very poorly run in terms of cost structure. Their margins on sales should be far greater than at present; they have a bloated employee count and have for a very long time. There's no reason Twitter can't spit off $1b in operating income on $5b in sales.
Further, Musk has ~$9b in cash (per Bloomberg), lots of very rich friends (eg Ellison, Google founders, VC billionaires, etc etc) that believe in him, and lots of assets in Tesla and SpaceX he can borrow $10b-$20b against if needed.
That said - I don't think levering himself to the moon is wise and I don't think paying $40b+ for Twitter is smart. Particularly at this point in time (with the global economy shaky, the US economy contracting in real terms, China's economy shaky, and financial markets sinking).
Survivorship bias is a hell of a drug. The real test to see whether it's wisdom or luck is to predict the next Tesla. I don't think many people who point to their Tesla stock performance as vindication could come up with a repeatable theory of investing. If they could, their TSLA gains would be nothing next to their next investments.
That's how I know people who make that argument don't actually know anything. It's like someone still talking about that great touchdown in high school at 50. Where's the next one?
You don't see Elon Musk bragging about his $22 million from Zip2.
Those companies don’t come often, but you don’t need many winners to be all set.
I saw Google before the rise, Amazon, Apple, Bitcoin and Tesla. I only acted on Tesla after seeing all the other ones before but didn’t put my conviction into action.
It’s not very hard: you read HN daily/weekly and listen to the trends. Pick one that keep coming and interest you and dig deeper, you are not in a hurry as HN is way early in the cycle, the danger is being too early and giving up before it catch up. (Bitcoin)
Pick one big potential winner, calculate the expected value as good as you can Good/Bad scenario, place your bet, let the time do it’s thing.
An example of a bet I didn’t do: Bitcoin was 1$, I knew that if it worked very well it could go to 1M$. Let say you think that the probability of success is 20%: (1M$/1$)*20% = 200 000 to 1. You then place let say 5k$ on bitcoin and forget about it for 10 years.
At the moment, I don't see a trend that catch my attention beside AI and for the moment I think Tesla will be the winner in that trend.
For the same sort of consideration for which one would buy a newspaper in the third millennium: there is something to gain from directing a powerful megaphone, even if it doesn't make money directly.
I don't have any background in finance, but it seems like there are a couple of possibilities.
First, given the recent precipitous fall in the NASDAQ, there's speculation that Musk will lower the offer (which seems quite reasonable).
Second, I'm not sure there's any reason to assume these new equity investors are paying the share price Musk is paying. If Musk pays $54.20 a share, and needs to raise 25% of the acquisition cost by issuing new equity, he could sell 49.99% of the new company at say, $30 a share to his partners and still raise the required capital.
Leveraged buyout at an inflated price in the short term. Banks backing the loans will get guaranteed interest payments on the loans plus a lucrative contract debt servicing and consulting fees in the medium term. Long term they'll IPO again and/or find a fool to acquire them.
Well I bought TWTR at it's peak... I'm voting my shares against a buyout (won't matter), mostly because it locks in a loss that I feel would have been recoverable in the next 5 years...
I cunningly bought TWTR at the top too and thus was hoisted by mine own petard. basically as a retail investor I have no leverage so all in all I'm happy to just get my money returned.
Right it seems unlikely to believe that Twitter is undervalued but that nothing else is equally undervalued to invest in after getting a small profit off of the Twitter investment.
The more likely scenario is that some of the financial backers like Larry Ellison will ask Elon to renegotiate the buyout price due to current market conditions and the deal will fall through.
Twitter is worth a lot less than what it's trading for. Musk's bid is rather idiotically high. Twitter's shareholders will be desperate if they start to see the full mauling that other prominent, hyper overvalued tech stocks have enjoyed lately. They will take a lower offer accordingly, whether that's from Musk or other. The stock is going into the $20s if they don't take an acquisition offer from someone.
> The probability that Elon is margin called by year end is roughly 40% according to option prices.
The way tycoons frequently do this involves putting collars around a significant portion of the margined stock (and for a sizable position like this, the trade would flow through to option prices on tesla and the stock itself via delta hedging or whatever the trade desks are doing as part of the trade)
> The probability that Elon is margin called by year end is roughly 40% according to option prices.
This sounds like “two more weeks, MOASS, trust me bro” level of analysis. How can you possibly have enough insight into Musk’s financial holdings to make such an assertion? Nevermind the structure of the Twitter deal itself, which doesn’t exactly require him to fork over $40 billion in cash.
Musk has published his margin loans backed by tesla stock. Those come with a clear margin requirement iirc.
It is then easy to calculate 'at this price, the loan will face a margin call'. Options pricing implies a probability of a certain price being hit by a certain time. So they imply a probability of the margin loans Musk has getting a margin call.
Ofcourse, getting a margin call wouldn't mean the loan falls through. Guessing that would require deep insight into Musks personal financials.
His wealth is mostly owning 20% of Tesla, plus some extra few billions from owning significant fractions of SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Neuralink. Presumably there’s some cash in there as well, but on his scale a hundred million is a rounding error.
It still confuses me that being part-owner of an old dot-com payment company, part-owner of a mid-sized car company (by number of cars sold), and part-owner of a (very good) rocket company make a person richer than anyone has ever been in the history of the planet, but that's probably because I just haven't looked into it enough.
It's confusing because wealth in this case is based on valuation, which in the case of Tesla is based entirely on what some people think the company will do, monetarily, in the future. In my mind, Bill Gates is truly richer than Elon, because he has a diversified portfolio and could convert more of his holdings into other, different holdings, with less friction.
Bill Gates would be straight up wealthier than Musk if he didn't donate half his wealth to his foundation. If you consider that part of his wealth (in the sense of total lifetime income so far, not figure spending power, so subtracting off personal consumption/spending), you don't have Musk being suprosinly more wealthy.
Considering the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is essentially chaired by the two directly, why wouldn't you consider that wealth (that they get nice tax treatment for donating to) isn't theirs?
Once he has donated it to the foundation, it is no longer fully under his control. It is a charitable organization, and subject to many laws about how the money is spent.
So it's never included in any measure of his total wealth.
(GP's point is that if it were, and also all the past charitable spending was, then Gates works be richer. (
I'm really confused how you're confused. What is a better way to become the richest person than by owning and growing a series of hugely successful companies that provide products and services to people?
To my knowledge, none of these companies were run at a profit during Musk's involvement. While this is a normal part of growing a business, it leads to a bias on what people think could happen - rather than what does happen.
How much money did musk really make? how much of it is an artifact of monetary policy.
80% of Musk's wealth is either confidence in Tesla's future, or memes, depnding on your perspective. It's not even pretending to be about completed work.
It's on free fall.
Btw I just did an overview of the current EV market and there isn't even one car maker that is able to make them under ~35K$
VW and a few others will sell in huge volume next year (VW 1.2 million in 2023 actually, much more than tesla) but I see currently no validation from the car makers that they will reduce the costs. The main bottleneck is apparently the price of the materials and I don't see why they would get lower considering demand is exploding.
That's why I studied the hydrogen market and it looks like a lot of hydrogen cars are coming in the next two years, they will have greater range than EV and to be seen but are likely to be cheaper to significantly cheaper.
It's true that the availability of hydrogen is an issue but it will progressively be solved, California is already covered for example.
So yeah current bet is the démocratisation of carbon neutral cars in massive volume will be via hydrogen, unless EV materials price find a solution.
I think that's the big difference that causes confusion here: Musk is wealthy, not rich. The companies are worth a lot, but generally not producing dollar bills for him. His ownership in companies worth a lot is why he's valued so high, rather than strictly how much money or cash leverage he has.
The majority is due to the fact that Tesla's valuation skyrocketed in 2020-2021. The second-largest car maker by market cap is Toyota at 217B. (They're about double VW group, the next-largest.)
Tesla's market cap is now 740B. For a while there it was over 1T. Here's a fun visualization:
That "mid-sized car company" has revolutionised an ~120-year industry while still managing to remain at the forefront, that's why its valuation is so high (even though I also do believe it's over-valued).
I'm not saying this as a Tesla-lover nor as a fan of Musk, in fact, as a lover of gasoline engines and of cars in general I see this as a tragedy (I regard EVs as refrigerators with some wheels attached), but it is what it is.
Tesla produced the first ICE-equivalent EV sedan that was not merely a "compliance vehicle" in decades.
Then, it turned out, people bought them by the hundreds of thousands, single-handedly recreating the market for EVs.
Then, other manufacturers noticed, and started realizing they might be left behind if they didn't take EVs seriously.
Now, sure, there are many competitors, but even still they have only been built in small quantities.
How long Tesla's edge will last is an open question, but there's no question that Tesla has single-handedly exploded the demand for EVs in the consumer vehicle market.
The real ace was releasing an EV sports car, the Tesla Roadster. That's what caught people's attention. They were able to see how EV drivetrains were actually better than their ICE counterparts and that electric motors can do much more than drive golf carts – despite having powered everything from submarines to locomotives, people still thought they were weak.
Otherwise, Nissan would have been Tesla. They have produced some of the first practical EVs, way before Tesla did. Unfortunately, they made them for the Japanese consumer, not for the average american. At least not initially.
You’re right that the Tesla Roadster led the charge — no pun intended — for EVs as uncompromising vehicles.
But I don’t think Nissan would’ve been Tesla: they didn’t think people would pay for a full-range EV (and still don’t, looks like?) and didn’t prioritize it. For many Americans that means the LEAF could not be their only vehicle.
The supercharger network also played a huge role in normalizing EVs, in particular in making the Tesla Model S the first car you could convince yourself was a great car that “happened to be an EV”. The S isn’t perfect, but it doesn’t have any huge, obvious EV-related deficits, like the LEAF’s range and charge time.
Nissan would never have been Tesla. They might have been the largest producer of EVs if history had run a different way, but that's a million miles away from being Tesla.
I am not an expert in cars and yet I know the Renault Zoe was commercialized in 2012, the year of the model S, for a reasonable autonomy and a much, much cheaper price. I believe tesla were the first to sell low volume, pricey EV cars.
Their range and timing advance is only because of choosing the rich over the middle class, aka a lesser impact. Although it's true EV were and remain not cheap but it's getting quickly much better and it's definitely not tesla that will lead the dance of democratisation
If you took the badges off, I think most people would have a hard time telling the LEAF (EV) and a Versa (ICE) apart. The LEAF is no 911 or Jaguar E-type, but it's not a "hey, look at me; I'm electric!" clown car either.
Didn't the Zoe have a 22kwh battery? I don't doubt that it was practical for some things, but that was exactly the kind of car that many (especially in the US) used as an example of the "impracticality" of electric back then.
Don't forget the importance of charging either. When the 3 came out, GM was considering the Bolt a direct competitor. They had the mindset that people were only buying these as city cars.
To this day, GM sells that "direct competitor" with a ~55kw charging limit.
Tesla is what made the other manufacturers realize that people were willing to wait 15-25 minutes on DCFC while road tripping electric cars.
The Leaf that Nissan sold while the Model S was Tesla’s only sedan (ie 2012-2017) was not an ICE-equivalent vehicle. It was explicitly a city vehicle with a < 75 mile official range, an effective 40-50 mile range, and no fast charging.
If “high-performance” means “can handle the daily driving needs of > 50% of the population” then I guess you’re right, Tesla only created that market.
The daily-driving needs of 95% of the population are incompatible with a 100k$ car. The Leaf fit the needs of more people simply by virtue of having an acceptable price.
The Zoe also had a 150km+ effective range, which is more than enough for most people (maybe less so for Americans).
The Model S was the first EV that “happened to be” an EV. You didn’t have to compromise on range, power, comfort, or anything else to own it. That’s why it succeeded. It was a great car, and happened to be an EV.
Tesla’s chief designer himself: “We are past the idea of an environmentally friendly vehicle needing to look different. People don't want to sacrifice anything, including style, to own an efficient car.”
You definitely needed to compromise on range power and comfort. The 60kWh version was more expensive than an BMW M4, S5, or A6, all in more powerful, comfortable, etc...
You definitely had to compromise to own it, on almost everything aspect. Despite everything else, people were buying it because it was electric.
Every $100k vehicle is different, that’s not what “compromise” means. And the Model S had comparable power and comfort — not for everyone of course — to the cars you mention. Obviously people were buying it because it was electric, that added $30k in battery cost alone, you wouldn’t do that if you didn’t care about it being electric.
But my point is that could do everything an American expects a baseline car, like a Honda Civic, could do - it worked as a car in addition to being electric, which is more than can be said for the Leaf and Zoe, on range and charge time concerns alone.
The Model S had far inferior comfort, especially the 2012 version. It got better. You had to compromise on everything in exchange of getting an electric car.
> But my point is that could do everything an American expects a baseline car, like a Honda Civic, could do - it worked as a car in addition to being electric, which is more than can be said for the Leaf and Zoe, on range and charge time concerns alone.
Sure, at 100k$, which is too much for what an American expects of a baseline car. I am sure Renault and Nissan could have done it to if they had multiplied the price by 4, but then it would defeat the entire purpose of a practical everyday car. It's like saying that Ferrari makes practical every day cars because of the GTC4Lusso.
I can't tell if either I'm doing a terrible job making my point, or you're deliberately misunderstanding me.
Let me ask you this: The Model S outsold the Leaf and the Zoe, and helped launch a new car company that has now sold more BEVs than any other manufacturer. Why do you think that is?
One possibility is that they made EVs that many people wanted to buy, and people bought them. I'm proposing that this is the case, and the fact that the Model S sold well despite costing $100k is an extremely strong indicator of this.
New EVs, even those from established manufacturers, are emulating Tesla, not the Leaf or Zoe.
Without Tesla, we may have had many Leaf or Zoe-like vehicles, but given how uptake of those vehicles went, it seems unlikely that we'd be where we are today -- in California, in 2021, BEVs were ~10% of all new vehicles sold.
Personal opinions of the cost or style of Tesla's EVs aside, one can't deny that Tesla made EVs attractive in the eyes of Californian consumers, and as goes California, so goes the world (for better or worse).
"The high-end market is only a small part of the numbers" correct, but in a parallel universe where Tesla didn't exist & the typical EV looked & performed like a Leaf, would anyone actually want an electric car? Marketing and psychology are important.
That is quite unreasonable to expect. The Renault Zoe came out at around the same time as the Model S and had over 150km of reasonable range, at half the price a Model 3 sells at today. It was already competitive.
150km of real world practical range is more than adequate. It's only 50% less than what the model S was when it came out, which is more than enough for the majority of people in the world.
At the end of the day you can't explain love and people love Elon Musk. Guys from all over the world are in a sort weird parasocial relationship with the guy. That never happened with the CEO of MySpace and BlackBerry
I think you will find a much bigger 'silent mainstream' of those who Respect him for the significant progress he's brought into our world.
Worship and bashing/hate are the domain of the crazies/extremists/zealots who are a vocal minority, really a small proportion of the world. Most people thankfully are more balanced and rational in their perspectives.
Nissan was selling the Leaf after the Roadster but before the S/X/3/Y.
The Leaf and the 3 basically met in the middle at the same time at about the $45K price point for similar cars.
Tesla was only first in the category of outrageously expensive cars for virtue-signalling rich people who fake-care about evironmentalism. And fake self-driving.
I bought a top-spec 2015 LEAF for $33K before $10K of incentives. If someone paid $45K for a LEAF around the 3's launch, it better have had $10K in cash in the trunk.
Looked at another way, if the LEAF and 3 cost the same, would many people have bought the LEAF?
Similar cars? Sure, they both have four wheels and are electric. I don't see many similarities though.
Tesla's emergence put the world on track to end ICE cars at least a decade sooner. That is a lot of CO2 that will not be put into the atmosphere. Getting people with expendable income to fund it is both a smart strategy and very equitable.
Their recharge network still sets them apart as well.
But why? Did tesla open source key scientific innovations in the scaling of batteries?
Don't think so.
See e.g. The seres f5 from Huawei. I don't know wether it's great but about the main metric, it has a higher range than teslas (1000km)
Zoom out a little and try and think about the bigger picture.
In many industries, you can see these "bar-raisers."
Starbucks didn't invent coffee, but they created a mass market for a more premium sort of coffee in a country that previously didn't see coffee as something more that a thing you chug down in the morning so you can wake up.
Nintendo didn't invent video games, but they raised the bar for home consoles after the "great video game crash" and have repeated the feat several times since despite rarely if ever being on the cutting edge of tech.
And so on.
Tesla did something similar. Previously, electric cars and hybrids were seen as dorky and decidedly uncool by most. Tesla changed that public perception. It's hard to imagine the "luxury" electric car market existing without them. Perhaps another company might have accomplished the same feat, but Tesla was the first one to pull it off.
From a raw innovation standpoint, these advances are huge because by creating new market segments, they ensure a flow of money into those markets. Tesla's expense has paved the way for billions if not trillions of dollars into EV R&D and battery R&D. That matters, a lot.
This is a bit of a "why dropbox when i can rsync" comment.
Tesla brought glamour and practicality to a field stymied by boredom and theoretical concerns. They pledged to build an EV people would actually want to use, bringing all the latest tech to drive UX with no regard for tradition. They set to solve consumer problems, and they are succeeding in doing that.
Great drive UX as opposed to what? Have you driven a modern Mercedes of the higher price tiers? They're pretty damn great to drive or be driven in (comfort and fun wise), but they don't have gimmicks like the door thing and such. If you're talking about those gimmicks I disagree, and if you're talking about "motor/battery/esc technology" I also disagree, they didn't innovate anywhere, they just hit the right market with their product in my amateur opinion.
If they "hit the right market" it means that market had not been hit before, so by definition they've done something new.
I don't have an interest in Tesla nor do I particularly like Musk, but objectively speaking, they must have done something right - they started a mass-car company from scratch in the third millennium, something very very hard; they popularized a technology that had failed to get traction for decades, and have taken the fight to behemoth corporations that had been bearish on the sector's overall future since the '90s. That simply cannot be just marketing or "gimmicks".
Glamor? Sure. Practicality? Eh. Maybe for daily commuting. When the IC companies convert over, Tesla shareholders are going to feel a ton of pain. The novelty will have worn off and the company will still pace at a mere fraction of its competitors. And at the very least, they'll all have vastly better QC than Tesla.
The "supercharger" network is something that no other manufacturer was doing or was seriously interested in doing, and it's an extremely practical concern.
> When the IC companies convert over
... a lot of them they might well end up buying batteries from Tesla. Tesla will also continue to be the benchmark against what EV will be measured, in the same way Ford continued to be a reference for decades after competitors matched them.
The only people who buy a car for their median usage are people who can afford two (or more) cars.
Everyone else has to buy to cover the 99% pctile or they’re screwed when they need to do something somewhat unusual (long drive to grandmas house, move, vacation, family emergency, whatever).
And for those who say ‘just rent!’ - I’ve tried, and most of the times you’d want to, you can’t get a rental, because a bunch of other folks got there first! Rental companies can’t buy enough cars to handle peak usage a few times a year.
Yes, but people don't buy vehicles simply for commutes, and IC vehicles will be around for decades for actual work. Nobody along the gulf or southern east coast is going to be buying an electric car as their sole mode of transportation if they have any common sense.
If 90% of the time one can own a median vehicle wherein they never have to go to the gas station, the vehicle lasts 1,000,000 miles, they aren’t emitting CO2, and gas prices go past five dollars…
it might be common sense to use the savings from the situation to rent vehicles to satisfy the other 10% of your needs.
"Common sense" = "I want to be able to get out of town without being stranded on an interstate when evacuating for a hurricane when traffic comes to a standstill and there's no way to recharge."
But hey, maybe your idea of common sense is to sit around 16 feet in the air with 120 mph winds blowing against the side of your moving brick.
Tesla dragged the rest of the auto industry, kicking and screaming, into the EV business.
EV was, at best, a curiosity and definitely nobody's main focus, until Tesla first showed EV cars are not golf carts (with the rooadster) and then that they can be a desirable higher-class sedan (with Model S).
If Tesla went bankrupt today, we'd still be firmly on the path to phase out ICE cars.
This was totally unconcievable just a few years ago. Tesla did that.
> Tesla dragged the rest of the auto industry, kicking and screaming, into the EV business.
I would say that the advance in battery technology, the laws introduced by state of California and north european countries did more than Tesla ever did.
Also the Renault Zoe, still top selling EV cars in europe, had her first concept car showed in 2005 and was on sale only 5 months after the Model S in 2012. The Leaf also predates the Model S.The 1st generation Tesla Roadster sold poorly like most other contemporary EVs and most of the sales happened in her last year in 2012. It was as niche as all other EVs in the market in its first 3 years of commercial life. The Mitsubishi i-Miev and its Citroën and Peugeot variant outsold the Tesla Roadster by more than a factor of 10. Almost 30000 cars between 2008 and 2014.
What Tesla achieved was showing the wealthy people they could greenwash their way to the same energy wasting life by going EV. A good publicity stunt.
Zoe was a concept car, as was VW eUp. At the time, established car companies were doing concepts that looked like golf-carts and taking about "e-mobility".
Look at i-Miev and the Roadster and tell me which one do you think a typical car lover would love more. If you think that would've taken over the car market .. then you're definitely not in the same circles I am :-)
Other car makers started paying serious attention only when Tesla inexplicably didn't go under and Model S started to be a success.
The first Zoe was a concept car, the second one was a production model and it didn't popup from anywhere. It has been the most sold EV in europe for many years already.
>Look at i-Miev and the Roadster and tell me which one do you think a typical car lover would love more. If you think that would've taken over the car market .. then you're definitely not in the same circles I am :-)
The car industry do not care what the typical car lover love more. They have been a dying breed for more than 3 decades. The i-Miev and derivated counterpart sold 12 times more than the roadster because they are actually usable things and not enthusiast toys. It even outsold the Model-S in all the other markets than USA when they were both available.
The Model-S,X,3 and Y success came much later. The automotive industry definitely had a more cautious approach in the upper end segment but they weren't sleeping.
citation needed. many of these companies had documented plans to transition to primarily electric vehicles over a period of many years. why is it that you are so convinced that this market shift was causes by one brand? is there any evidence other than observation?
To answer your question, they did open source their innovations. In the future you should consider not asking rhetorical questions that you don't know the answer to. Also, when you don't know the answer, you probably shouldn't pretend to know. Other people might make the mistake of thinking you are informed rather than a productive citizen of the society which exists in your imagination.
As to why - ICE dealers didn't want to lose recurring revenue streams and ICE manufacturers didn't want to disrupt the means through which they would service the loans that they took out to build out their present ability to manufacture at scale. The incentives were perverse and in some cases still are perverse enough that the ICE industry has to be forced to help kill itself off, rather than dying willingly because it is right.
People constantly attempt to pretend Tesla didn't spark the EV revolution, because they can't stand to give Musk and or a US company credit.
It's the same reason they aggressively pretend Apple didn't spark the smartphone revolution (when it all very obviously derived from the iPhone and its dramatic impact, right down to the design of the phone and interface being copied by everyone else).
It's the same reason if you say the US invented the Internet here on HN, you'll get confused replies by people from outside of the US that are entirely ignorant of that fact, because of foreign revisionist history and the desperate desire to deny the US credit for its vast accomplishments (the America bad brigade). The same goes for eg the transistor, microprocessor and countless other prominent technologies that revolutionized the world.
It's still a business and it is tiny compared to the big players. Tesla is only a slightly better value than crypto given how insanely overvalued the stock is. If the company had an $80B market cap, it would still be vastly overvalued.
If Tesla had a market cap of $80B it would be trading at 6.06 times Q1 earnings annualized. Having grown revenue 81% and gross profit 147% in the prior year…
It’s currently undervalued at 10x that price.
Re being small: its operating income was greater than Toyota in Q1, and it has two new factories that are yet to ramp production.
Renault were working on the since before 2008 (2005 apparently), yet they only brought a product to market in 2012.
The Tesla Roadster was developed around the same time, yet deliveries started in 2008. By the time Renault got around to actually making the Zoe available to customers, Tesla had been selling the Model S for 6 months. I don't think they were taking EVs particularly seriously if they took that much longer to put out a less sophisticated product despite having vastly more resources at their disposal.
Sure, because the Tesla Roadster is half a car, and cost is no object. They literally took an existing car, and built an EV conversion kit, money be damned.
Making the first mass-market EV was going to take multiple years, no matter what. You need to engineer the entire car, at scale, and you need to hit a price-point. Tesla didn't have such an issue. I can't stress enough how much more difficult it is to make an affordable product than one where price is no object.
The revolution is in manufacturing and vertical integration: you have to look at margins. Tesla’s operating margin was 19.2% in Q1, and is apt to rise. Very few other companies even make a profit on their EVs, and none that do are anywhere close to Tesla’s margins, to my knowledge. This means that nominally competitive electric cars aren’t. In principle Tesla could squash its pure EV competitors by selling below their cost of production, and any legacy auto company transitioning to EVs will be in a similarly dire position.
Incidentally, these margins are also far higher than those of ICE manufacturers. For example, Toyota in Q1 had lower operating income than Tesla, despite having 4x the revenue.
There is no revolution to speak of. Tesla is an evolution in the high-end EV market. In the mid-range market Tesla was late to the punch and faces stiff competition, and in the low-end market they aren't an entity to speak of.
There's no competition in the mid/low cost market - there are no mid/low cost EV's. The leaf rides like a bottom end ICE compact and costs as much as a very nice ICE sedan, and not really that much less than a low end tesla. Honda/Ford/Toyota don't have anything in the EV space. They might have something on their web sites, but no dealer will have them in stock.
Of course there are low end EVs. The Wuling Mini EV (which is the worldwide best seller iirc) can be had for 10,000$ with 200km of range. Also, at price of a Leaf or Zoe, you don't get a high end sedan, you get a Honda Civic, which is one of the cheapest sedans.
iPhones are in the low-end market because you can buy them used at reasonable prices. You can get an iPhone SE 2020 for less than 200$. You can't get a Tesla used for 5000$.
> part-owner of a mid-sized car company (by number of cars sold)
Because the market doesn't, and shouldn't, value things solely based on a snapshot of current business, as opposed to a projection of future business, based only partially on the current snapshot. A phrasing that gets at the market's thinking looks more like "A car company that effectively created the electric car market, right before the entire industry started making credible commitments to switch primarily over to EVs, all while being the most successful company at getting some degree of automated driving into consumer hands and awareness". Your phrasing implies "pre-Cruise GM, but with less sales"; it's no wonder why you're confused.
Note that I'm not claiming that Tesla is appropriately valued right now, and as someone who works in AV, I think their approach to self-driving is misleading and irresponsible. But it sounds like the bulk of your confusion comes from a significant misunderstanding of what the stock market _is_.
The stock market is not about retributing merit though. When the EV market will be very significant, there will be no strong reason to choose a tesla over dozens of alternatives. There will be Huaweis/xiaomis equivalents for cars.
Not to forget much more strong brands outside the tech circles. It is not like all of Porche, Ferrari, Aston Martin, McLaren and so on just drop dead and stop producing cars. And these have much bigger brand value for traditional customers than Tesla will ever have.
As I said, I don't think tesla is properly valued right now (though I haven't looked into their financials rigorously enough to have a strong opinion).
The market is betting on Tesla being "Apple for EVs", with a combination of first-mover advantage and innovative secret sauce. Apple similarly had competitors but an Apple bull in 2008 is a very happy man today.
I was narrowly responding to the parent comment's misunderstanding of what valuation is: specifically, the fact that it includes more than simply the current state of the business, incorporating future success as well.
"Tesla's market prices relies on super optimistic assumptions" is a sound complaint. "Tesla is a midsized car company" is a nonsensical one.
> But it sounds like the bulk of your confusion comes from a significant misunderstanding of what the stock market _is_.
I think OP would not be the confused one in 6 months time.
Stock market only cares about the future when people care about the future. AKA when there is optimism in the air.
The 2015-2022 wave of optimism was quite frankly uncalled for and overextended given the reality at the base level. Especially what happened 2020-2022.
> I think OP would not be the confused one in 6 months time
Apologies, but this doesn't make any sense. The OP referred to the current size of Tesla ("mid-size car company"), with no reference to future cash flows, which is what the majority of most stock prices are made up of.
Looking at where tesla will be in six months _is_ looking at the future, which is the exact opposite of what I was remarking on. If the complaint had been "Tesla is overvalued due to irratuonal exuberance that its future revenues are unlikely to deliver on", I wouldn't really have any disagreement.
I'm not sure if the target market will be even the elite, but upper middle class. Which happens to have gotten rich working in semi-associated markets.
Well for one thing you're downplaying several massive, global businesses.
PayPal is a $25b sales, $4b operating income giant in the financial sector (payments / payment processing specifically). They have an $83b market cap and have sales equivalent to Germany's largest bank. Musk doesn't own a meaningful part of PayPal, it plays no role in his present wealth (other than he sold his ownership stake in PayPal to fund the early days of Tesla & SpaceX).
Tesla is very obviously overvalued by a lot (by $400b-$600b at least), there's no rational argument against that. However being a major owner of BMW, which is perhaps what Tesla is best compared to in size and profitability now, is still a rather dramatic financial position to have (obviously). If we (when the market does) adjust Tesla to a more rational valuation, Musk would be a lot less rich, but still among the ~20-30 richest on the planet. Owning 16% of a segment-leading, tech-leading, growing car company that generates $12-$14b in operating income, is a very good business to be sitting on.
SpaceX is a lot more than a very good rocket company. Their connectivity business will likely be worth tens of billions of dollars in the future. No other entity on Earth can presently match what they've accomplished in rocketry and satellites, that includes China, the US Government, Russia, or their corporate peers. The connectivity network they're building is exceptional and very, very difficult (and expensive) for others to compete with. The value of their ability to deploy zillions of satellites rapidly, will increase dramatically as more uses are figured out for such constellations (the US Government in particular).
> Owning 16% of a segment-leading, tech-leading, growing car company that generates $12-$14b in operating income, is a very good business to be sitting on.
Every rational thinking person sees Musk and his behavior and throws any financial statement produced by Tesla straight into the bin.
They are cooking the books 100%. Musk believes in manifestation, self-fulfilling prophecy and faking it till you make it.
In the early days of PayPal he'd order to get parts of old fridges, paint them black in order to convince investors that PayPal had "supercomputers"
Tesla is currently valued at over 20x Ford even though Ford did 13x Tesla's revenue last year. That stock should have dropped through the floor a long time ago.
It is because (some) people believe/have faith in Musk. To some, he is a icon/leader to follow blindly. They trust him a lot.
Which is because, his work/impact as ceo is visible on company and industry levels. contrast that with mba shortsighted ceos and/or ceos who sit on their assess waiting for golden parachute to deploy (thats the sentiment, irrelevant if unfounded). Charisma and beeing somewhat casual/releatable person on tv also helps.
Only makes sense if Tesla becomes something else other than a car manufacturer (robots, robotaxis, etc).
If it's just about EVs they should soon be priced below Ford. Even self-driving is insufficient as long as a driver needs to pay attention. Other companies are catching up - who cares if they need more hardware and can't do just vision, it's becoming cheaper.
The most successful payment company, the top car company on terms of valuation and the top rocket company. We've never seen that profile. Usually it's someone who had monopolized an industry like Gates or Bozo doing under one company.
That's kind of arbitrary because Microsoft is an OS, apps, computer, and peripherals company; and Amazon is a retail, logistics, and cloud services company.
Tesla is a battery-based company, but could also have been a transportation company and included Boring and SpaceX.
And Mastercard and Vida are both bigger in payments than PayPal. And PayPal was mostly Thiel's Confinity, which merged with Musk's X.com bank.
I think Rockefeller probably wins when the contest is 'fraction of available wealth captured'. The world is far richer today than it was in his days. We have wealthier people, even inflation adjusted, but I don't think we've had any one since who owned so much of what existed.
One theory goes that the same people are invested in Tesla and Crypto. If their crypto holdings are wiped out they might have to sell their stock holdings to keep their roofs over their heads. Even if it's not that bad they might become more risk-adverse now one of their big bets has failed.
Not endorsing that, not an expert. Just think it's not as absurd as you suggest.
You’re getting downvoted for no apparent reason, but there’s an argument to be made here that crypto crashing would cause retail investors to pull out of investments altogether, and meme stocks like Tesla would take a hit. Bloomberg, WSJ, etc. are all writing about this potential contagion effect today.
If the deal falls through then Twitter will probably have to announce some big changes to keep its stock price from falling too much. Although this move could have been made after the deal's collapse is announced but maybe he wants to have things in place before that happens.
There are far more possibilities than those two. Here's just one off the top of my head (I assign no probabilities here, just pointing out this false binary): This person is being fired as a result of some investigation or process that began prior to the acquisition process and whose results have only just been reached. There are a whole range of process driving, "my hands are tied" scenarios that could explain this.
Another would be that this person was doing something that could derail the deal (deliberately or not), and the CEO felt the best thing to do was to protect the deal by firing him. Given that he's on paternity leave, and "Parag asked me to leave after letting me know that he wants to take the team in a different direction", that doesn't seem likely.
Although if you were fired after being investigated and the company is keeping it quiet, then surely going with the standard "spend some time with the family excuse" and keeping it quiet rather than drawing attention to that fact would be basic self preservation.
What about the possibility guy was going to be asked to leave regardless of recent events, but the executive team decided the least they could do after he put in good time is allow him to collect some PTO on parental leave before handing him the official pink slip? I don't know what Twitter's benefits are but I imagine they have an, "unlimited leave" policy. Could be they've disagreed for a while and an argument came to an affront similar to, "Look man, I'm going to take leave to spend time with my new child, then we'll decide if it's the right move for me to return." Frankly this is a pretty boring conspiracy regardless, people leave jobs all the time. All I have to say is I hope dude enjoys a nice Summer with his family without worrying about this dumb product that for the most part narcissists use to trick themselves into thinking anybody gives a shit about what they have to say.
> So there's two options right - the first is that Parag is for some reason making big strategic decisions about the direction of the company despite the fact that we all know he'll be gone if the deal closes. Or he's making big strategic changes at the behest of the acquirers before the deal closes.
It's conceivable that he already had a backlog of changes in his mind that he wanted to do at some point, sooner or later. But due to acquisition coming, sooner or later has turned into now or never.
If he legitimately believed these changes were best for the company before, he might still believe so.
In other words, yes, there's a reason, but not necessarily a nefarious one. It could be, or maybe it's as innocuous as urgency.
Seriously? Having been on both sides of a number of acquisitions I can tell you that these kinds of personnel changes are made typically at the (possibly indirect) request of the acquiring company. Things like "We've got a really create CMO that we're bringing on, we don't need any headwinds to them getting traction quickly" means "Get rid of the people who think they are in charge of marketing so that our person can set the table they want to set it." Or, "Some of our team is uncomfortable with Bob in the role he's in, he just doesn't seem like a good fit you know?" or any number of ways to communicate what executives they want moved out so that there will be spaces to be filled when the new team moves in.
And in a deal like this where there is no "plan B" the CEO's exit compensation is entirely predicated on their ability to "set the table" well for the incoming executive team. So yeah, Parag is doing what Musk or Musk's team told him need to be done prior to starting there, and if he told them he wouldn't do it then no big package for him.
I understand the 'normally' part as in "this is how it should be done." And yet in the roughly ten or so acquisitions I've been on the "inside" for (which is to say was at one of the two companies and was related either peripherally or intimately in the transaction from start to finish), every single one of them had some executive shuffling (aka separating) prior to the close.
Clearly, it is biased to Silicon Valley and my experience is probably different than someone who worked in non-tech companies, but if I put it into a rule of sorts I'd say; During a fund raising round executive positions are the most secure and individual contributors the least, during an acquisition these are reversed.
I think there's also the possibility that Parag is vying to keep his job as CEO, and so he's trying to guess what he thinks will impress Musk, and executing on it while he's still in charge.
> On the other hand, going rogue and making big strategic decisions about the company
Parag isn't a strong character like that. He's someone who plays by the rules and only says empty conventional things, without any personal opinion or feeling, couched in formal modern US corporate/tech language, with the required progressive veneer. I'm pretty sure he only thinks things along similar lines.
Others provided a bunch of alternative options. I'll throw another one in the mix. Parag has been a CEO a few short months. If he's about to be out, he won't have much to show for his time. Bold moves now can show potential future boards of directors that he has what it takes to take on this role elsewhere.
There's a third option, which is that Parag is doing what he things is in the best interests if the company under the circumstances.
Because regardless if whether the acquisition falls through or not, this whole thing has underscored the need for changes at Twitter. The top two execs may need to go in order to move forward no matter what.
Your options are reasonable guesses as well, just not the only two possibilities.
There is also a simple possibility that these two executives would have been fired anyway. Average executive tenior at a company is only about 4 years, and executives leave or are asked to leave pretty frequently.
As for the hiring freeze, new funding sources are essentially cut off until the purchase either goes through or officially fails. New loans or lines of credit requests are likely to be reject due to the uncertainty around whether Twitter will be acquired or not, and addition sales of stock would be seen as a bad faith act because it would essentially lose the company funding if the sale goes through. Increased spending could cause liquidity issues for Twitter for this reason. It is a known fact that Twitter is not a particularly profitable business, and given all of these facts those executives may have been let go purely for financial reasons.
Trying to read into this without more knowledge regarding internal motivations is purely speculative and cannot provide reliable information. What's more, every major company would be aware of these likely motivations and would see his actions as ordinary under the circumstances even if it turns out his motivation was to keep Musk from having access to those employees.
In short, there would have be extremely compelling evidence of intentional malfeasance for this to impact his reputation or future career prospects any more than Musk acquiring Twitter.
Also my first thought - you'll probably get a better severance from your long-time coworker than the new guy who came in with the stated belief you've done everything wrong.
Isn’t there usually some sort of removing of the skeletons from the closets before a deal closes? Yahoo revealed there massive data breach while
their deal was closing and such.
Look at the tweets of these guys a few months back. Both have several positive mentions of Tesla, Starlink and/or Musk himself. They may actually be Musk fanboys....
It may be that they are fired because Parag and the other leaders are concerned they will (or have already) share(d) information or otherwise cooperate(d) with Musk in ways Parag wants to prevent.
Fourth option is that the deal doesn't go through. Deals fail to go through all the time. If you just sit around and the deal doesn't go through you're fucked. The CEO's job is to manage the company as though the deal won't go through, until it actually closes.
My own guess is that this is doubtful that Musk drove this.
That said, he is a very large shareholder already, and so if he, as a large shareholder, communicated something to the board, and they acted, then the claim that isn't kosher rings a bit hollow - large shareholders communicate with boards and some activist ones go further.
Internally I suspect there is some concern about Musk. The head of legal was reportedly crying regarding this buyout. They've got their misinformation management efforts around the biden laptop story and other issues (vaccines etc etc) that musk may not back as fully as Gadde did. So they could be moving some deck chairs in advance of Musks arrival. Be interesting to see how it shakes out, may not be smooth - Twitter is HQ'ed in San Francisco.
> It also seems weird for Musk to already have the insight into the company to know specifically who to fire
If in his viewpoint (he wouldn't be alone thinking so) Twitter recently became less appealing - booting the Lead of Consumer Product team seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Despite "we know he'll be gone" Parag may as well want to try to keep his chair when Elon takes over and is making changes that would be favored by the new leadership. And if the deal doesn't pass - firing the team leads (possibly) responsible for company's recent bad press and maybe Elon's move itself seems justified.
Third possibility is getting Musk to withdraw his offer. The article comments on missed intermediate growth targets. Musk has put the deal on holding pending proof that the user count is not inflated by fake accounts. So I see this all as an attempt by Parag to "save" the company from Musk and his goal to make it an open "free speech" platform.
Not weird that he's doing things at behest of Musk which I think is likely. It may be part of acquisition agreement either implicitly or explicitly. Musk most likely has people he knows in company (he is friends with Jack) that are advising him and suggesting changes. Much easier to oust top execs before coming in then later.
Was there a time in the past few years where Musk wasn't actively investigated by the SEC? Hasn't hindered his business ventures much, so far at least.
Imo mostly likely scenario is they’re removing evidence / firing people as if the evidence is discovered.
If you saw their prior earnings they were over reporting by at least a million users. The people they fired would have potentially known that, or at the very least should have.
Further, due diligence will be done prior to sale. At which point items such as the above can / will be discovered.
Finally, there have been a lot of political decisions made by Twitter (banning a sitting president, etc). If that was done at the behest of government (as some claim) or advertisers (others claim). The result is the same, they made a decision which strategically let Trump start a competing and growing platform. Not good for business.
In any case, I suspect that’s the reason for firing.
> Twitter deal temporarily on hold. Elon Musk wants to evaluate if spam and fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of the platform's users base.
I've been using Twitter since it's main novelty was that it was a successful Ruby on Rails app, and honestly I've been trying to figure out where the exit is for my personal use of Twitter lately. If the acquisition goes through, Twitter won't make enough money to service it's debt, and the things they will do to fix that are pretty much guaranteed to lower the quality of the platform, which frankly has never worked very well for me anyways. The fact that they're doing a leadership purge right now is not helping my opinion on this.
I also think the proposal to have Twitter allow all content that is "legal under US law" is a dangerous idea for the platform being a healthy community that most people actually want to participate in. Content moderation debates have never been so ham-fisted as they are online so I won't try here, suffice to say there's some pretty horrible, disgusting things that are "legal under US law" (and as a content moderator, I've seen them all). If Twitter allows people to do them, it will make it difficult for Twitter to maintain a healthy community, and the platform could quickly devolve into a scarychan-style sewer that only the craziest people on the internet will want to dwell in. To say nothing about whether advertisers will tolerate some of it, or even Apple's app store.
> I also think the proposal to have Twitter allow all content that is "legal under US law" is a dangerous idea for the platform being a healthy community that most people actually want to participate in.
This is key. If @dang suddenly threw up his hands and said "anything goes on HN within U.S. law" this wonderful virtual discussion forum would die and most of us would sign off forever. I say that as someone whose been here for ~15 years.
I've used Twitter for the same amount of time. Despite Twitter's many faults and loopholes, the things that keep me going back day after day is there is enough good discussion, news tidbits, and photos (for me, mostly local nostalgia, birds, and retro computing) that it's a worthwhile place for me to hang out. I won't stick around if it gets too negative and my people start to leave, as they surely will under such a policy.
That only works because HN is, mostly, politics-free.
I'm not a regular Twitter user but afaik that platform is pretty heavy on politics, more than that, it's pretty heavy when it comes to a certain political spectrum, the other side has been mostly de-platformed by now. I don't consider that as a healthy platform to comment on for the general public (even though, I agree, it might be ok for people who happen to share the same political opinions that have not been banned by the Twitter higher-ups).
> but afaik that platform is pretty heavy on politics
Twitter is what you want it to be, topic-wise, based on who you follow and what they like to talk about. Further tuning is possible using blocks and muted keywords.
However, there is bleed because people you follow and Twitter's recommendation features can't help themselves (and not just about politics; anything "newsy" pops up).
What happens when Elon's "anything under U.S. law" approach kicks in is toxic behavior and arguments will get so extreme that it will drive millions of people away, and those who are left will see the quality of their feeds decline. Then many of them will bail, too.
> That only works because HN is, mostly, politics-free.
This place holds together because the signal:noise ratio is so high and @dang and the community work to keep it that way. Toxicity and low-value contributions kill communities, regardless of the topic at hand.
> Twitter is what you want it to be, topic-wise, based on who you follow and what they like to talk about.
I've tried this. It's false. It's a myth that Twitter users tell themselves, AFAICT.
Even disregarding the trending topics and explore interfaces, all it takes is for one of the curated members that you follow to retweet something you're not interested in seeing.
> What happens when Elon's "anything under U.S. law" approach kicks in is toxic behavior and arguments will get so extreme that it will drive millions of people away, and those who are left will see the quality of their feeds decline. Then many of them will bail, too.
But that's contradictory to your claim that Twitter is what you want it to be, based on who you follow, isn't it?
Because Twitter _isn't_ what you claim it is. Twitter is optimized for outrage-oriented engagement. It _wants_ to show you things that will encourage you to engage, to return, and there's nothing quite as engaging as content that upsets you.
So I have I. I currently have about a half-dozen accounts, each following different types of accounts with limited overlap. So, what I get on the genealogy account feed is limited almost entirely to genealogists and historians posting about those topics and very little else. People that stray too much get unfollowed.
That said, my personal account has overlap with a separate startup/media/tech account because of some shared interests in the tech space. But there is also a lot of very different items I see in the personal account because of local accounts in the city I live in as well as topical news accounts relating to Asia and Europe that interest me. Naturally, anything relating to current events in those areas also touches on U.S. politics, foreign policy, and military policy, so I get that too, despite some muted keywords.
> But that's contradictory to your claim that Twitter is what you want it to be, based on who you follow, isn't it?
You missed the part in the paragraph that followed:
However, there is bleed because people you follow and Twitter's recommendation features can't help themselves (and not just about politics; anything "newsy" pops up).
And not everyone knows how to filter it, or they only have one account. Those are the most likely to leave.
Not disagreeing with your point about outrage, though. Like you said, there's nothing quite as engaging as content that gets lots of responses/RTs/shares/"likes," and this content tends to be negative.
> I currently have about a half-dozen accounts, each following different types of accounts with limited overlap. So, what I get on the genealogy account feed is limited almost entirely to genealogists and historians posting about those topics and very little else. People that stray too much get unfollowed.
> And not everyone knows how to filter it, or they only have one account. Those are the most likely to leave.
You're describing how you have general views into twitter, but which are imperfect and require _active_ maintenance on your part to retain utility.
My experience is that _while engaging in that maintenance_ Twitter rapidly depleted in utility and value for me, because the dark patterns that encourage outrage engagement infected all those that I follow. It's simply not possible, AFAICT, to actively filter Twitter for strong content and not eventually either recede into accepting outrage or reducing one's feed to uselessness.
> My experience is that _while engaging in that maintenance_ Twitter rapidly depleted in utility and value for me, because the dark patterns that encourage outrage engagement infected all those that I follow. It's simply not possible, AFAICT, to actively filter Twitter for strong content and not eventually either recede into accepting outrage or reducing one's feed to uselessness.
I reached the same conclusion. It’s garbage, and I quit. Occasionally I’ll get a text from a friend linking to Twitter and I regret following the link, every time, within 60 seconds or so.
I also quit it and whenever someone links to it, I get a physiological reaction, like nauseousness and just have to close the tab. It's toxic fumes all over. Not possible to curate. I have blocked some words and mostly follow researchers but the controversial politics are shoved in my face. Everyone bending over backwards regarding Ukraine-Russia, some are still ranting about masks pro or contra, performatively being very concerned, some gender stuff, people at each other's throats regarding privilege and inclusivity, people bragging, humblebragging about their careers, self-claimed gurus telling their communities off, hot takes, then people complaining about too much bragging and calling out hustle culture and toxic positivity, others one upping these in some way or agreeing and fuming together. People only seeing other people as caricature stereotypes, like ah you must be a techbro, you must be an sjw, everyone assuming the worst, everything too serious and no lightheartedness.
It's pure monkey emotions and it brings out the worst of otherwise intelligent people. I've lost respect for several highly regarded scientists through this.
> What happens when Elon's "anything under U.S. law"
> approach kicks in is toxic behavior and arguments
> will get so extreme that it will drive millions
> of people away, and those who are left will see
> the quality of their feeds decline. Then many of
> them will bail, too.
But that's contradictory to your claim that Twitter is
what you want it to be, based on who you follow, isn't it?
What? It's not contradictory in the slightest.
Nobody is claiming that Twitter would somehow magically somehow continue "be what you want it to be" if most of the quality contributors leave.
Because Twitter _isn't_ what you claim it is.
Twitter is optimized for outrage-oriented engagement.
I have a few accounts and I simply don't see what you describe.
I don't follow or engage with controversial crap. My follows are people in my hobbies, and funny people. My feed is pretty close to 100% strife-free.
Either it's really easy to avoid the hellscape of outrage that you describe or I'm extremely lucky/talented.
Good point. Although, I don't think it's the case: mine's essentially zero.
Don't misunderstand: I've seen that stuff on Twitter. I've reported a few people. And political topics and other controversial topics are absolutely rife with it. I do not excuse it in any way.
I don't see this happening. I see the opposite. With free reign to post "anything under U.S. law", content on Twitter will become even further optimized to get the most eyeballs. You'll see things that make you so mad that you just HAVE to reply. And on and on it goes.
Surely you've seen those Twitter/Youtube/Insta ads that would show a trivially easy puzzle (like, toddler-level easy), and show a person somehow failing it. "Can YOU solve it"? the add entices. Obviously. Of course you can solve it. It's designed to be brain-dead easy to cast the widest net, and to give you just that brief moment of discomfort while you watch someone ELSE fail (as scripted). And you want to dispel this discomfort, so you click on it (or, more likely, you scroll on, but you better believe that other people click on it).
It's like cigarettes. Everyone knows they kill you in the long run. But boy do they tickle those neurons that make you want just one more.
I also think HN survives bc rules are short and clearly set from the beginning, with examples and references. When an argument regarding moderation pops up, dang is quick to communicate, clarify, etc. this beats any “you violated our policies bye” strategy.
> That only works because HN is, mostly, politics-free.
It's only politics-free because it's heavily moderated. There's nothing magical about the people here that make them apolitical. Political posts are often removed outright, and comments that are political have to be pretty fact-based (or at have the appearance thereof) to not be removed.
I'd add 1) that HN also didn't start politics-free, that was something that was consciously imposed on it well into its life, and 2) that HN post politics-moderation is far less influential than HN was pre politics-moderation.
> That only works because HN is, mostly, politics-free.
I have to disagree with that one. This discussion -- content moderation-- is one of the most political topics possible. More things are political than most people realize.
However, I do think that the quality of the political discourse here is much better than other places; it is often just based on ideas, and even if they're plainly wrong, they're not usually presented in an inflammatory way. That is what sets things apart, rather than the lack of politics.
I was going to say.... HN is full of politics. Not always the Red vs Blue kind, but there's political discussions constantly. At any given time several front page stories are explicitly political, and several more are implicitly political (e.g. cryptocurrency).
Discussions without politics are a bit like science without the mathematics field: If you take the larger definition, there's hardly any way to avoid it. Especially if you define things like crypto currency as political, it's basically impossible to have a tech discussion without scratching it.
What people mean when they say that is that political topics are usually a side concern to the technical topics at hand, not pure political discussions. The off-topic, angry and/or ad-hominem comments are also quite rare - yes, they exist, but compared to (most of) Reddit and Twitter it's very relaxed. And policy is almost never the primary topic, unless it directly affects the tech field.
Richard Stallman once said that "geeks like to think they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone." When people imply that there is such a thing as an a-political take on the world we live in, what they're saying is that they cant identify the mainstream ideology that they themselves are adherents of. As such things which adhere to it look "natural", without "bias", or "non-political."
> political (“about how society ought to function”)
I feel like this is a technical definition of political, but that's not how the layman uses the word.
I tend to hear the word political used as a synonym for the current arguments within a society, especially those that professional politicians feel the need to weigh in on and/or there is a significant chance of legislation around.
So, for example, a passionate essay about a Georgism and a land value tax might be political under the technical definition, I don't think it would qualify as political under the layman definition. There's not a sufficient mass of people trying to institute a land value tax for a society wide argument to occur. I don't think the average person would describe aforementioned person as political, I'd say they'd be more likely to be written off as a kook.
Could also be a regional difference. I'm not intimately familiar with all the dialects of the english language.
Right, it's an equivocation that often comes up, when people try to tell you that basically almost everything is political, ergo you are already allowing politics, ergo you must allow all politics, ergo I must be allowed to spew the generic mindless stuff on your platform too.
Orwell introduced the term duckspeak in 1984, and it best describes the way how people understand "politics". “Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all.”
People usually don't have a problem discussing societal issues, most discussion topics somehow relate to how we live and work together and is political in that way, but more people have issues with the sort of partisan politics where the point is to score points against the "other team" over all else, painting the other side with vile adjectives, generalizing them, considering your own side as obviously, axiomatically good etc. You know it when you see it.
> I'm not a regular Twitter user but afaik that platform is pretty heavy on politics, more than that, it's pretty heavy when it comes to a certain political spectrum, the other side has been mostly de-platformed by now.
Please. Despite the howls of protest this is far from true and that would be obvious to anyone who's spent much time reading political discussion on Twitter.
Everything is politics, but most of HN's comment section is sufficiently homogenized around Silicon Valley libertarian ideology that political conflict is rarely at the forefront of discussions. A much more practical reason HN survives is there are no images or videos. It is profoundly easier to filter, downvote, or ignore someone's text ramblings than it is to curate media.
Completely inaccurate. No one side has been deplatformed in aggregate. A few individuals have been suspended permanently for violating TOS. They should have been removed earlier, but were considered special cases due to their prominence. It amounts to Twitter removing its own inhibition on enforcing its TOS for certain prominent users.
If you want a hard-right-wing heavy experience, you can certainly get that on Twitter today (and two months ago) by following the hard right wingers. Most of them never left. The subscriber count jumps you heard about when the emerald scion announced his Twitter purchase? Very small percentages.
I'm also surprised that there hasn't been more strident push-back against the "conservatives are being banned from Twitter" story from conservatives themselves. If I were right-leaning I would certainly not want to be associated with the q-anon advocates for violence that are being kicked off the platform.
Right, he was kicked off for fomenting an attempt at revolution which included urging QAnon people (who need medical treatment) to attack the nation's capital in an effort to illegally reinstate himself as POTUS and using Twitter in his effort to do so.
Much worse than just promoting QAnon conspiracies IMO!
>the other side has been mostly de-platformed by now.
This is probably my biggest peeve when it comes about discussions on Twitter. The media has made it seem that Twitter just routinely bans conservatives voices for "a difference of opinion" when that is not the case. Twitter's high profile bans are on Wikipedia, and they weren't banned for simply saying "abortion should be repealed".
Banning is one thing, but what about full or actually partial shadow-banning, or deleting selected specific posts which is called moderation, and the overall balance of the biases in the moderation.
>but what about full or actually partial shadow-banning,
Of all the big social networks, Twitter has been the only one to keep the use of chronological feeds. What does "shadow banning" mean when all your tweets are chronological for everyone you follow? Do you actually use Twitter?
>or deleting selected specific posts which is called moderation
Every platform moderates; but now we have moved the goalposts from de-platforming to moderating. Twitter has a few isolated incidents where everyone will beat their chests (namely Hunter Biden and COVID), but those two incidents have failed to signify that Twitter has a systemic issue or bias.
When you actually dive into it; the problem of conservatives being "cancelled" on Twitter comes from the Twitter Mob, aka, other Twitter users. What most of these people want is to post without consequence, "free speech for me but not for thee".
> pretty heavy when it comes to a certain political spectrum, the other side has been mostly de-platformed by now
That's what right wing has told you via sensational anecdotes. The actual studies I've seen shows that the algorithm boosts right wing stuff more than left wing stuff.
> That only works because HN is, mostly, politics-free.
That not accidental, but the result of firm-handed and aggressive moderation. My account is rate-limited because of getting into political arguments on Hacker News.
There are pro-Russian accounts on Twitter. I don’t know about right wing US but I follow Marco Rubio. I don’t know how you’d get removed just for being right wing.
I also have a reasonable expectation that HK is FOCUSED and CIVIL. I do not have that expectation on Twitter.
Twitter is just a raw society fire hose and I'm fine with that. I think the future is to give SUPER clear power to individuals to manage their own experience. Freedom of speech is both the right to speak, but also the right of the listener to hear (or not hear) as an individual.
I would also love to see twitter evolve to become more substack-ish where communities are more "owned" and moderation is delegated to communities to determine rules based on trust and shared goals vs. just blanket twitter safetytism.
> I think the future is to give SUPER clear power to individuals to manage their own experience. Freedom of speech is both the right to speak, but also the right of the listener to hear (or not hear) as an individual.
That's the road to filter bubbles and radicalization because people never realize how obnoxious they are to real society. You can always find a few hundred other extreme fringe and deranged people from all over the Internet, while if you tried saying that stuff in real life, your community would slap some sense back into you. Online you can just block and move on and never face consequences, so you develop this righteous attitude that you know it all and you get validated by other loners from all over the world.
I think the only good way forward can be a return to physical spaces. People will realize this more and more and there will be some sort of hybrid approach. Actual real life communities are important.
Sure, niche hobbies may not sustain a large enough community in each little town, but do we really need to specialize so much? Does that really improve our affairs? Couldn't people compromise and get into some slightly different but still adjacent hobby?
The difference between Twitter and Reddit, hacker news, or 4chan, is that on Twitter you ostensibly only see content from people you follow. If you don’t like the content someone is putting out, you just unfollow them. Twitter is more like email than Reddit in that sense, and no one is arguing for email to be moderated.
> on Twitter you ostensibly only see content from people you follow
But that seemed to becoming less and less true in recent months. I was often seeing tweets from people I wasn't following because the algorithm was starting to recommend them based on other tweets I had clicked on. I deactivated my account this past weekend and moved over to mastodon - it seems so much more chill.
Reddit home now shows me repulsive “suggestions” that are very toxic. The popular tab is almost unusable.
The only difference is you don’t see the toxicity in arguments as often, because any dissent is downvoted and effectively squelched. It’s more toxic righteousness, consistently.
I don't think Twitter is more like email than Reddit. Twitter is built around increasing engagement via increasing what you see and who you interact with. Which makes sense: it's a centralized platform for speech and it needs to grow its user base and their level of engagement to make money. You need to fight against that system to curate your feed so that you don't ever see something you don't like. I don't think Musk has any brilliant ideas to 10x Twitter's revenue and somehow change this characteristic about it.
Considering that, there are also many different ways you can experience harassment on Twitter. Are these ways solvable with technical solutions? Perhaps. But these are people we're talking about here, not 0s and 1s. You can't solve all people problems with technology. And as parent comments have said, anyone who's been in a position of having to guide a community knows this to be true.
I've never once thought to myself "I'm happy that the people I follow are only allowed to express some views" or any similar thought. If someone is too rude, I block the person. If I don't enjoy reading a person's Tweets, I unfollow him.
One major benefit to HN is that it is text only. There's a lot of 'legal, but horrific to look at' imagery which gets moderated out on other platforms but here is not possible in the first place (excepting external links).
I'm not sure the comparison holds up. Twitter right now doesn't moderate content, really, it only does anything about outright scams, misinformation, etc. Toxicity can mostly run wild and free. Whereas HN has various moderation mechanisms that seek to decrease the amount of low-quality interaction.
I.e., I think dropping all moderation from HN would have a much bigger effect than doing the same on Twitter
Twitter absolutely does moderate content. If you say something that the algo interprets as being a suggestion to commit suicide, you'll get an instante 24-hour ban. A tonne of really awful toxic accounts are soft-blocked and their tweets get stuck in the "more replies" box.
And if you're overtly and explicitly racist or sexist, there's a good chance you'll get straight-up banned.
Musk’s idea of “anything that is legal” is a terrible idea, it comes from someone who’s clearly never moderated a community.
Generally any unpleasantness and lack of civility needs to be moderated out in some extent, or the platform gets completely taken over by trolls and normal people leave. That’s just the end result. Anyone who’s been involved in online communities know this.
I see this in subreddits. The subreddit of my own country is poorly moderated and virulent in trolling and insults. But you look at something like AskHistorians and you see academic level content. NeutralPolitics is the only politics subreddit that isnt instantly toxic. Why? Moderation and rules.
It’s astonishing how far you can move the content with moderation.
A rule I’ve learnt recently and really loved is - every community can be judged quickly by how comfortable women are in it. The first sign of lack of moderation is male sexual harassment - because that’s the first thing male assholes do. You have to deal with the assholes. Assholes exist and are relatively common. If you allow assholes, women leave, and when women leave, you can tell something went wrong.
There's an extremely wide chasm between moderating trolls and banning subject experts and even the former president of the USA. It really doesn't matter what you or I think of the president, he was a democratically elected leader of arguably, the most influential nation in the world.
Musk claims to be all about freedom of speech. Moderation and freedom of speech are not antithetical to one another. You can downrank or make trolls more convenient to block and not stifle their ability to say something. If you solve the bot problem you make a lot of other moderation problems much easier to solve.
Essentially my point is that we don't know what Musk will do, exactly, and any speculation proposed as an understood fact is simply spreading FUD and it makes me question (not a strong concern, mind you, but a concern none-the-less) if your concerns are sincere or if you have an agenda.
> At really doesn't matter what you or I think of the president, he was a democratically elected leader of arguably, the most influential nation in the world.
And a beautiful thing about America is that we can build systems and institutions here where even the most powerful person in the world can be excluded for inappropriate behavior.
Wholehearted agree that it's beautiful that twitter has the freedom to ban anyone, including the president. I disagree with the ban, but I don't really care what social media platforms do at all, to be frank. Musk buying twitter or banning everyone from twitter has little impact on my life.
> he was a democratically elected leader of arguably, the most influential nation in the world
This aspect of the discussion around Twitter constantly baffles me. They have no obligation to offer service to anyone, and they have no obligation to ensure freedom of speech, balanced representation, or any other thing you can think of that would ensure everyone gets a voice.
General, universal freedom of speech in the US is not a right we have. We are protected via the 1st and 14th amendments from Federal or State governments (respectively) passing laws restricting our speech, which is not the same thing. Even with those amendments, some speech is restricted (hate speech, etc.). There's nothing preventing Twitter from moderating someone off its platform.
You've misunderstood me. I don't believe twitter has an obligation to be a platform for free speech. You're arguing against points I never made which makes me believe you may be misunderstanding other arguments as well.
Musk wants twitter to be a platform for free speech, that does not mean he or anyone else is legally obligated (or in my opinion even morally obligated) to make their platform a place for free speech.
The way you wrote your reply certainly read to me like you believe Twitter should act as if it has that obligation.
You start by drawing a line between moderation and what Twitter has done, which is ban the former President. You then point out that he was democratically elected and that the US is influential, neither of which are relevant to the discussion but are often brought up as reasons why it's astonishing he was banned (with the implication being that he should not have been).
You continue by stating again that moderation and freedom of speech don't have to be at odds, and describe a scenario where accounts you would normally just ban can continue to post, instead.
You then finish by suggesting that another commenter may have an agenda, when they were pointing out the need for moderation.
So. I am definitely open to the idea that I just don't understand what you're trying to say, or even that I don't understand what anyone is trying to say. If it's the former, perhaps you can help me by restating your concerns more clearly. If it's the latter, I suppose there's no helping me and you can just ignore this reply.
In short: yes, it's a good thing. As written, the amendment is designed to prevent me from being arrested or killed by the Federal Government for speaking my mind, disseminating my thoughts on paper, or congregating with like-minded people.
I don't agree that this should be expected or required of businesses, because the dangers and incentives are different. Twitter is not going to have you arrested or killed for criticizing Twitter.
I agree that it's reasonable for Twitter to try and get as many users onto its platform as possible, because that earns them more money (I guess?), but if they are faced with having to choose between two groups of users to support, and they like one group better than the other, they should be able to choose to withhold service from the other group to keep the first. Even if it means a group of users loses the ability to speak via Twitter.
> In short: yes, it's a good thing. As written, the amendment is designed to prevent me from being arrested or killed by the Federal Government for speaking my mind, disseminating my thoughts on paper, or congregating with like-minded people.
You didn't say why. You restated the law. There are all kinds of arguments for free speech. I'll quote Mill:
> First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.
That has nothing to do with required and there's no mention of a government, federal or not. People should be allowed to say what they think. That used to be a bedrock of American culture and I continue to find it sad that we're living through its recession.
_Why_ is that the American colonists were very familiar with life in contemporary England, which had recently had a civil war over (among other things) religious freedom; the Pilgrims were mostly people who had fled England because of religious persecution. I believe you were risking a charge of treason to run your mouth about the King or members of the royal family. I guess I just assumed that the framers wanted to try and design a government where that wouldn't easily happen.
Come on now. It is clear what you believe, and it's fine that you believe it. I'm just personally tired of reading people whack Twitter, Facebook, etc. with a stick that doesn't exist. When we pass laws or ratify amendments requiring the Twitters of the world to platform everyone, the people crying about free speech on Twitter will have a legitimate gripe. Until then, they just won't.
Your inability to come up with a solid reason why free speech is good is very telling. You don't think it's good!
And I'm tired of reading comments written by people trapped in a legalistic fiction where the only thing that people are obligated to do is follow the law.
How is it legalistic fiction? What are people obligated to do, that is not required by law? I hope you're not talking about stuff like breathing. I'll also say that I haven't been thinking about morals, which I would agree cause people to feel obligated to do things that they aren't legally required to do.
Also, what is a "solid" reason? Is it just a reason you agree with? Does it have to be a purely original reason no one has uttered before? What was the right answer, so I know for next time?
I'll remind you that you specifically asked whether I thought the 1st amendment was "good." I answered that, but you didn't like my answer, so you asked me why while pivoting to free speech in general (which I've already asserted I don't believe is granted by the 1st amendment). Then, when I provided a why to the original answer, you followed up with this. You've moved the goalposts, basically dismissed my answers as not good enough, and now you just want to I guess unmask me as some sort of anti-speech person.
>It really doesn't matter what you or I think of the president, he was a democratically elected leader of arguably, the most influential nation in the world.
The United States is not a monarchy, theocracy or autocracy. The President of the United States is a citizen like any other, with rights equal to any other. Being "a democratically elected leader of arguably, the most influential nation in the world" does not entitle one to a Twitter account, or to carte-blanche rights to endanger and undermine the legitimacy of the peaceful transfer of power of one's own nation, which is why Trump was banned in the first place. Not because of his beliefs, or his political views or because of some radical globalist agenda, but because people were legitimately afraid he was going to trigger a civil war.
The President having to play by the same rules as everyone else, even to the degree that he can be banned from social media like anyone else (even though Trump was still given far more leeway than most people,) is a feature of American democracy, not a bug.
This is just silly, do you know which tweets twitter cited as reason for Trumps ban?
> “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
and
> “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
> To my friends in the LGBTQ+ community—the Supreme Court is coming for us next. This moment has to be a call to arms.
> We will not surrender our rights without a fight—a fight to victory!
and believe me, I wouldn't have to look hard at all to find much worse examples of things that could be interpreted as calls to violence from heads of states.
The big difference being that Trump's two tweets came 2 days after an actual large scale violent event at the Capitol, where it was essentially invaded and trashed by a large mob almost certainly comprised of the same people Trump was speaking to via his tweets. Trump also was arguably the most powerful person in the entire world, at the time.
The LGBTQ tweet is from the Mayor of Chicago. An important person to be sure, but at ~150k followers, does not have nearly the reach as Trump did (~88M followers at the time). And I don't really know what to tell you about the tweet content; I can read that and realize she's not actually advocating for armed violence, and more importantly, I don't believe the people she's speaking to would interpret her tweet that way.
I know for a fact the people Trump was speaking to have interpreted things that way, because a lot of them showed up and trashed the Capitol on January 6th.
I would be careful using this rule. Women are, in general, most uncomfortable around weak/strange (but totally harmless) men.
Bring your average woman to a Richard Stallman meet-up and then to a UFC match and ask her which setting she found most uncomfortable. I can guarantee you that Richard picking his own nose in a room full of sweaty needs will be more disturbing to her than being close to thousands of jacked-up men cheering while two combatants almost kill each other.
Note that I was describing communities and not individuals. Some properties get fuzzy when you scale down.
But, also, I have faith that most women have a very good intuition about which strange awkward men are harmless and which are not. If you're not a women or haven't talked to many of them about this, it's hard to really internalize how profoundly important it is for women to be able to make those calls correctly many many times throughout their lives.
Aren't you just exemplifying basic laws of attraction? Our lizard brains want to pair with the strong, even if the modern day equivalent of strong is a good paycheck and a maxed out Roth and 401k
> I also think the proposal to have Twitter allow all content that is "legal under US law" is a dangerous idea for the platform being a healthy community that most people actually want to participate in.
I'd counter that platforms like Reddit, Youtube, or Facebook grew into institutions with extremely light content moderation, and it's only after they were successful and were targeted by politicians and media panics that they moderated heavily, and with that moderation their growth slowed.
Reddit always has had community moderators which ensured that the subreddits were respecting the rules of their communities. For example, on LGBTQ issues subreddits telling people that they are groomers is not tolerated. If it was, people would quickly go away. While on some other subreddit, it might be tolerated but the targeted people are not present and will not see those messages.
It is similar on Facebook where people will gather in groups that have their own moderation.
This is different on a public platform like Twitter where everyone can see everything. If users can hate-speech each others within the confines of the law, it will not take long until a lot of people leave.
I use hate-speech as an example because the "groomer" as a slur issue is at a peak right now and is fresh in my head. But the same concept applies to a lot of topics.
>I use hate-speech as an example because the "groomer" as a slur issue is at a peak right now and is fresh in my head.
Mm. I think the problem is that censorship advocates like you try to add words like this into the lexicon of "hate speech" and try to have it censored. It's not, and it shouldn't be, and you should be ashamed of even thinking it.
It is not other people's responsibility to stay up to date on what may or may not be triggering you on any particular day.
> It's not, and it shouldn't be, and you should be ashamed of even thinking it.
I didn't see the OP advocating for censorship, but for the enablement of moderation for unacceptable content within a community. Do you think LGBTQ spaces on reddit - for instance - should be prevented from banning users that compare them all to child molesters? Is that "censorship" that the OP should be ashamed of? Must all spaces be entirely laissez-faire about all user-generated content legal within the confines of the law? I do not think so.
You may quibble with a segment of our population being derided as "groomers" as "not hate speech", but at the very least it is received as hateful by many. We're not talking about legal statutes in this conversation, we're talking about community moderation.
Frankly, I think you should be ashamed of your own comment. It was incredibly aggressive, presumptuous, and built on a straw-man argument.
Your argument for "spaces" and "communities" goes out the window when moderators of subreddits are forced to make sure their space adheres to what Reddit wants. That's not your space, it's Reddit's. No one is stopping subreddits from moderating how they want, the problem is when they are forced to moderate how Reddit wants. Furthermore, your "communities" and "spaces" are nothing more than an excuse to create echo chambers, which are not productive for free speech either, but that's just Reddit for you.
Forgive me, but I'm copy-pasting my comment from elsewhere.
----
I can't quite get a clear picture of what you actually believe. Come down to my level and talk specifics vs. generalities:
1) Do you think that individuals or communities creating a content-specific space for user interaction should not have any right or ability to moderate the content?
2) Do you think individuals or communities creating a space dedicated to specific interest, hobby, or lifestyle should have no ability to moderate that content?
3) Abstracting a level higher, should all space for user-generated conversation and content necessarily welcome all contributions? In other words, should everything goes, everywhere, in all communities where user interaction is invited? Or are you just arguing the point semantically?
I truly, sincerely understand the point you are making but I also have no idea what you're advocating for.
>I didn't see the OP advocating for censorship, but for the enablement of moderation for unacceptable content within a community.
This is the same thing. Facilitating and encouraging the use of moderation policies which prohibit speech of users is censorship. I've often found that Americans confused "censorship" with "violating the Constitution." Most of us are not given Constitution protections because we don't live in America. Further, the Constitution only covers some kinds of free speech, not all. Censorship is much more broad than the Constitution, and covers private companies censoring citizens.
> This is the same thing. Facilitating and encouraging the use of moderation policies which prohibit speech of users is censorship.
You are using "censorship" as a big scary word when talking about generalities. I can't quite get a clear picture of what you actually believe. Come down to my level and talk specifics vs. generalities:
1) Do you think that individuals or communities creating a content-specific space for user interaction should not have any right or ability to moderate the content?
2) Do you think individuals or communities creating a space dedicated to specific interest, hobby, or lifestyle should have no ability to moderate that content?
3) Abstracting a level higher, should all space for user-generated conversation and content necessarily welcome all contributions? In other words, should everything goes, everywhere, in all communities where user interaction is invited? Or are you just arguing the point semantically?
I truly, sincerely understand the point you are making but I also have no idea what you're advocating for.
> It is not other people's responsibility to stay up to date on what may or may not be triggering you on any particular day.
The internet moves fast now, if there's a growing trend of a slang-word to get around hate speech laws without actually breaking any, and everyone reacting to it understands it... then it's hate-speech right?
"groomer" is only used in the context of hatred towards a particular group without technically violating any hate-laws. It's quickly becoming a way to say "fagg*t" without saying it...
We wouldn't have any words left to use if it was up to you I guess.
And what "hate-laws" are you referring to, in regards to speech, that people are "getting around"? You do know Twitter TOS is not the actual law right?
> We wouldn't have any words left to use if it was up to you I guess.
Good point, that's a bit of an extreme though and context/intent does matter.
> And what "hate-laws" are you referring to, in regards to speech, that people are "getting around"? You do know Twitter TOS is not the actual law right?
True, I meant the Twitter TOS I guess. But Musk wants to model the TOS as anything within the confines of the law right?
It is 100% hate speech to call all LGBTQ people groomers, to imply ones sexuality is because they were groomed.
It's hateful and a disingenuous political argument to use that cast that term on anyone who objects to DeSantis' banning of discussions of LGBTQ topics. Which is why we are discussing this.
Not knowing that is triggering is gross.
If you have certain distasteful beliefs, at least have the respect not to say it in public.
This isn't perception. it is the reality and factual that a large amount of people / politicians on the right are saying this exact slur. re their counter response to critique of FL and TX laws, and book bannings across the country.
You should see the comments we get on FB. I run ads for political campaigns. It's insanely effective how much this has seeped into that electorate. And very very sad.
Well, it depends. I've never heard this term "groomer" before. I don't even understand the term but it sounds like there's a community or subculture out there that takes it very seriously. So, if I were in public spaces where people from that community where known to communicate with one another I would absolutely want to know if something I said was offensive or hateful. I would expect to have the issue brought to my attention if I inadvertantly said something problematic. I'm not trying to hurt anyone, I just want to talk with people. I don't feel like my free speech is being impinged upon either.
The term originally referred to an adult gradually influencing a child to make them vulnerable to sexual abuse. Now it's commonly used to refer to teaching children progressive values, which I think is hateful.
It's also generally used in extremely low signal comments. For example, a person might talk on Twitter about how they think teachers putting up posters saying they support gay students is helpful. They'd then get tens of replies with only the exact phrase "Ok groomer".
>The term originally referred to an adult gradually influencing a child to make them vulnerable to sexual abuse. Now it's commonly used to refer to teaching children progressive values, which I think is hateful.
The problem is, you seem to be intentionally misconstruing the definition of the word "hateful" in order to categorize words you don't like as "hate speech".
There is no other way that the thing you described meets any reasonable definition of "hate".
Hate speech is usually full of euphamisms, indirect language, and inference. It also often depends a lot of context.
In the specific case of the use of "grooming," I can see how it is not obvious that this is hate speech, but once you connect the dots, based on the context, it becomes quite obvious.
For example, teaching books that feature any LGBTQ characters has been called "grooming." What is the usual definition of grooming? Preparing a child for sexual abuse, which is morally reprehensible -- a behavior that is, frankly, deserving of hate.
However, when the only reason "grooming" is brought up is specifically because a book feature a gay character, we are expected to "hate" the "morally reprehensible." Why is it morally reprehensible (hateful), in this context? Certainly not because children are being groomed for sexual abuse. The only reason is that the gay character is in the book.
Now, some people might think that presenting characters that are gay is morally reprehensible. They might think the same thing about featuring Black characters, Asians, Jews, or some other group. It's all hate speech. Even if it's not using the most blatantly obvious inflammatory language.
Saying teaching a child progressive values is similar to teaching a child to be vulnerable to sexual abuse is accusing progressives of being like sexual abusers of children.
That's hateful. (I deliberely didn't say hate speech)
We aren’t talking about lectures extolling high marginal rates.
Some parents object to exposing children to inappropriate sexual themes for the purpose of conditioning them to accept the same as normal, i.e. grooming.
That is not generally occurring, and even it were, it would not qualify as "grooming." Grooming is when an adult tries to gain the trust of a child so that they can manipulate and eventually sexually assault them. If a teacher showed furry porn to kids in class to teach them that it's normal to be a furry, that would be extremely inappropriate, but it would still not be grooming unless the teacher also planned to have sex with them.
I wasn't talking about that. When that happens I find it alarming. I've yet to see the snide throwaway line "Ok Groomer" used in a case of actual child sexual abuse.
The only reason it's up for discussion is because it's being used as hate attack against queer communities and those standing up against censoring of teachers, students, and banning of books on lgbtq topics and gender.
We are talking about it because Republicans are using it as a slur in political arguments. There is strong pushback against DeSantis' Don't Say Gay Bil, there has been a mass banning of LGBTQ books in schools, and plenty of other attacks/laws on the community (mostly in just a couple states whose Govs are running for Pres...)
The response of the proponents, which sadly seems politically effective, is to label anyone who objects to these laws groomers.
Implying/whistling that queer people exist because they were groomed, e.g. sexual predator turned them gay.
It is aimed at queer people.
* And ironically those of us who are standing up against, you guessed it.... free speech. *
I did not want to focus on the example as it was but one example of common user behavior, but let's do it anyway. I should preface this by saying that I have been a moderator on online spaces for the last two decades. First starting on BBS, IRC, and more recently social networks. Social networks contain some of the worst behaviors I have ever experienced.
It is not words that need to be banned, banning words would be useless. Users could simply call people "gr00mers". Another way people use to talk about trans people in a hateful way is "troons", which is defined on Urban Dictionary as:
Troon, Noun. A transphobic slur referring to a trans woman.
The word Troon used to mean "an ugly woman who looks like a man." However, over time the word has been co-opted and turned into a particularly nasty slur against trans women.
This word was quickly identified in groups and people would get removed from groups for using it in an abusive way by setting that word to trigger an moderation warning. The people using it quickly adapted, proving that banning words is useless. This changed to "trains", which was added to the watch list. The little dance kept going on, right now the way it is written is by using a train emoji. So you would see "Look at this filthy[train emoji]".
Banning words is useless. Words are not hardcoded constants that cannot be replaced, they are descriptive and evolve in meaning. Banning "groomer" would simply lead to people using another word. Most slurs are just that, words that are borrowed and then infused with hate. Just take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_slurs, you will find that a lot of the terms are harmless when they are not weaponized or used in a hateful context. Even one of the oldest word used to indicated an intolerant position toward transgender people was simply a way to write "[a car's] transmission", or "bundle of sticks" towards homosexual people. This list is not exhaustive at all and only community websites such as Urban Dictionary is able to track slurs as the list grows constantly.
What I am talking about is seeing through the thing veil of false politeness and banning harmful actions.
Adding to the previous example: people often come ("raid") in private Facebook support groups. To enter those groups, you need to answer several questions. For example, "Are you transgender?/Do you understand that this is a support group and that confrontation is frowned upon?/Do you agree with the rules of the group?". Every single day, people lie to those questions to enter. Upon entering, they quickly drop all false pretense to quickly find the most vulnerable of users and spam them with hate via their inbox (where moderators cannot keep a watch). On threads about depression, they leave comments encouraging the person to end their lives through words that are absolutely legal. Imagine the worst 4chan has to offer but directly in your inbox. Many users are not web-savvy and this type of content will be absolutely crushing. Worst of all, trolls gather in groups where the only purpose is to list the profile of the vulnerable users they find. Some of those groups that I am aware of have up to 25k members. This is worrisome to me. Since they only contain links to profiles and are worded using legal ways, Facebook does not shut them down. They result in users receiving hate and thinly veiled threats from up to a hundred users a day. Since those message are worded in a way as to avoid reports from sticking.
Trans issues are a hot and controversial topic, so let's take a step back and use another community as an example.
Imagine you ran a community of people with anorexia gathering to talk about treatments, solutions and review doctors. One facet of anorexia is body dysmorphia where the person sees themselves as very overweight even when dangerously underweight. The hateful person or troll can find someone on door's death and convince them that they are fat. Is it ethical? Not at all. But if worded by someone skilled at trolling, it can be done in a legal way. They can send that person image of fat people and tell them that they look the same. Another way they go through that is by undermining the authority of doctors and hinting towards false and often dangerous treatments. This kind of trolling will go on for weeks, even months. With people advocating strange concepts under a false account with a false profile photo. Some of them even staying undercover for so long that they manage to gain a high standing in those community only to then use the insider information they have gathered to nefarious purposes.
Often, the trolls do not even hold a grudge or hate towards the targeted communities. To them, it is a game. Many are very young teens acting under the impression that they are great hackers for managing to infiltrate support networks and destroying them.
We can all agree that those behaviors are not only hateful, they are dangerous and target the most vulnerable of individuals. Worst of all for the corporations running those websites, they result in huge exodus of users. One I can think of is a 40k strong Facebook group that moved to Discord due to the constant abuse their members received.
Can Twitter decide to accept the behavior described above? Absolutely. It is a private entity. However this kind of "everything is allowed" at all cost mindset comes with a cost. Often, this cost is the migration of users to other platforms. What happened to Tumblr is a great example.
> This is different on a public platform like Twitter where everyone can see everything.
Aren't subreddits public, too? You can also ping people; T_D famously enraged /u/spez enough for him to start editing the comments of other users. I don't think anyone argues that filter bubbles don't exist on Twitter, either. Now, Twitter groups aren't as clearly segregated as subreddits, but I still don't see visibility as a big differentiator, to be honest.
They can be public but there are also private invitation-only subreddits. Often they have websites as a front to manage new users. Some use forms, other are managed through emails, Discord bots, etc.
But even the public ones, usually they are so distant from each others that they might just as well be different websites.
People interacting in a right-wing one will not encounter the posts of left-wing users unless they directly seek those posts and vice-versa. On Twitter, you could be scrolling your feed and see "The far left hates everyone, themselves included!". As a left-wing user, this could be distressing and put you off.
Meanwhile on Reddit you would have to go out of your way to go on a specific subreddit. This lessen the impact of having people at different extremes of the political spectrum being together in the same platform. I think of it like a house. If I do not enjoy my uncle's political speech at Christmas, I can simply move to the living room and gather with people who share similar beliefs as me. However if I feel like having a debate, I can stay in the room where the uncle is and talk through our differences (similar to going on the "all" page or going directly on the subreddit of the opposite party). On twitter, it's a single large room.
Not sure what you're talking about because this kind of hate speech is very common on current day Twitter.
The "grooming" remark typically coming from right-wing accounts is very common and as far as I can tell, not moderated. Likewise, left-wing "woke" accounts openly hating whites, men in general or white men specifically is also "just another tuesday".
> and it's only after they were successful … their growth slowed.
Could this simply be because it’s easy to sustain a high rate of growth when you’re small, and harder to sustain that same rate of growth when you’re large?
See Apple, as another example of a firm who’s growth rate has slowed, as a natural result of their scale.
Correlation doesn't imply causation. They didn't /need/ to moderate heavily because they didn't attract legions of bad faith actors when they were small, and they stopped growing because growth isn't infinite. And the Internet is a lot different in 2022 than it was in 2007.
It's interesting that a lot of people who are on twitter just don't like twitter already as it is. I imagine that's only going to get worse under a "no moderation" regime. I'd been wanting off of twitter for quite some time now as I'm pretty sure it was negatively impacting my mental health. Just this past weekend I decided to pull the trigger and commit twittercide - it's interesting how hard it is to push that 'deactivate' button. But I realized that that's an indication of addiction so I pressed the button and now I'm free of twitter.
How much of the DAU do you think is bot driven? I suspect it's larger than a publicly traded stock company is willing to admit and that some of that cesspool rhetoric is Aktive Measures to provoke unrest. Perhaps taking Twitter private and removing the chorus of machines will actually make it a more pleasant experience. Content Mod is never easy but expunging the bot armies is a big first step.
Bot removal is going to grind to a halt if it turns out that bots were also clicking on ads though.
Researchers identify bots by anomalous clustering behavior - there's probably some human accounts in there, but bots follow bots because they're a quorum which is optimized for "followers" in order to try and lure in real human users.
But AFAIK there's no data from Twitter (for obvious reasons) on whether suspected bot accounts have ad-revenue activity: and they might. If a crackdown happens the first defense mechanism will be for bot operators to add more human mimic activity.
I suspect at the moment they probably don't - after all why do more work - though conversely this is the sort of thing I personally would implement if I was trying to stay ahead of anti-botting measures.
> which frankly has never worked very well for me anyways.
> The fact that they're doing a leadership purge right now is not helping my opinion on this.
These two things don't seem compatible to me. The leadership created/perpetuated the twitter that didn't work well for you, so getting new leadership seems like a potential positive.
I hope you’re right. I hope Elon takes over and turns into a cesspit . Burn it to the ground once and for all, let the public stare into the abyss that their fellow humans.
After yesterday's UST/Luna crash, the main Luna subreddit has stopped all posting because of the volume of suicide threats. Only a few of those posts remain and are at the top, with automated messages linking to helplines.
r/terraluna
The average person doesn't realize how manicured the social media experience is. People that want zero censorship are in for a nasty surprise.
I know many people share your view if social media platform x allows content y, then it will be reduced to anarchy. I never understood that. Reddit used to allow some pretty insane sub-reddits, but I never knew that until it was on the news that they banned them. I used the platform daily and only looked at what interested me. Vegetarians and Keto(atarians?) both go to the same grocery stores. They just pick the part that works for them and don't worry about the rest. Could you explain how you would imagine that Twitter "could quickly devolve into a scarychan-style sewer?"
I think the only real way to do content moderation is to delegate it to users. Let people create something like a subreddit, and then be in charge of content policy for it. Different communities can have different standards, and kicking people out of a given community doesn't ban them from Twitter entirely. There's even some informal version of this already as you can see with the "this part of Twitter" meme.
It's ridiculously easy to get banned from some subreddits for saying truthful things. And if leftist groups make a land-grab to secure the popular sectors of this new twitter-verse (read: the portions the news will report on), then Musk is going to look very silly.
> I also think the proposal to have Twitter allow all content that is "legal under US law" is a dangerous idea for the platform being a healthy community that most people actually want to participate in. Content moderation debates have never been so ham-fisted as they are online so I won't try here, suffice to say there's some pretty horrible, disgusting things that are "legal under US law" (and as a content moderator, I've seen them all). If Twitter allows people to do them, it will make it difficult for Twitter to maintain a healthy community, and the platform could quickly devolve into a scarychan-style sewer that only the craziest people on the internet will want to dwell in. To say nothing about whether advertisers will tolerate some of it, or even Apple's app store.
Yeah, I feel like this theory has been repeatedly tested. Anybody remember when Voat was going to overtake Reddit? Turns out people actually don't want to read a forum for people who were so noxious Reddit was embarrassed into banning them.
> it will make it difficult for Twitter to maintain a healthy community, and the platform could quickly devolve into a scarychan-style sewer that only the craziest people on the internet will want to dwell in
Twitter is the furthest from a healthy community I've ever ventured. It's full of nutters.
Realistically, I'll go where the conversation is happening. I mostly use Twitter to follow municipal politics and YIMBY activists in my city and province.
I also follow a bunch of artists and creatives see their work.
So I'll stay as long as that continues.
But a shitload of those creatives I follow are trans. More, now that a lot of them took the dead times of COVID shutdowns as an opportunity to transition in private. And if Twitter abandons its policy of blocking users that engage in hate-speech, I think a lot of those trans artists will be exiting the platform.
Seems unclear whether Musk actually wants it to go through, doesn't it?
The presidency didn't fix Trump's relationship with his deceased father, and whatever ails Musk won't be fixed by purchasing Twitter and having to deal with all of the attendant headaches.
And it will distract him from Tesla and SpaceX. SpaceX can probably get along without him; Tesla clearly cannot.
Unclear what the end-game is. But paying 3x the annual NASA budget for a social media app is clearly too much. Users have value, but it's too inflated.
If he broke the contract (and lost one billion), added another billion to create a new social media platform(that's quite the funding!) that measured up to his standards, spent an additional 6 billion dollars in advertising in the US (putting him in the number one ad spend – ahead of Comcast), it would still be a bargain. Heck, he could pay for people to switch from Twitter to his platform and still be ahead.
Why bother? Torpedoing Twitter (by blaming the deal going south on them not wanting 'free speech') could energize his supporters – and people in the sidelines – enough to switch away from the sinking ship. And he also gets to sell TSLA shares high (ostensibly to finance the deal) and rebuy low. So, win-win?
If the deal actually goes through, he gets the users, but he also gets a huge mess that he has to clean up.
You'd have to be pretty naive to assume Musk would let trolls run Twitter into the ground.
The most likely upshot of Musk's hints is that Twitter will stop censoring or adding warning labels to "misinformation", the classification of which is highly subject to partisan biases.
twitter is the successor of irc, it's one giant channel with a firehose of information. in the same way #yourfavtopic on your fav $irc_server, community can be the point or the problem
> Twitter won't make enough money to service it's debt
This isn't (necessarily) true. While buying Twitter seems like a stupid investment if you want to make money, it's financials[1] very obviously point to streamlining which would make the debt serviceable.
In 2021 Twitter spent USD$1.2 billion on "Research and Development". Think about number - when did Twitter actually substantially change the platform? In their financial report this is recorded as essentially all salaries, and is separate from their server/operational expenses and salaries.
So right out the gate, the roughly $1 billion interest payments you take on buying it the way Musk is can be handled by essentially dropping that department which observably seems to have produced nothing Twitter needs to operate (you can even keep 15% of it to have some R&D). Stories like this tend to support the idea that their R&D is a drag and should go: https://twitter.com/n8agrin/status/1518860754757189632?s=21&...
Now, all that being the case - it's still a bad purchase, because every single one of their user acquisition graphs show that Twitter is very near saturation - their user growth has been slowing in a conventional looking sigmoid curve where they've probably hit the maximum market size. This is not a company you'd want to buy, because the purchase price doesn't justify any reasonable expectation of future growth (Twitter's 30 million US users are pretty much all they'll ever have).
Except: it's probably not a bad purchase if you happen to own a vastly overvalued car company which represents a huge amount of on paper wealth, and would like to liquidate that somehow. And this is (I suspect) Musk's actual goal - or part of it. Twitter is well-established and not going anywhere - I'm embedding tweet's in this very post! It's just not growing. But if Musk were want to sell say, 40 billion of Tesla stock, the likely outcome would be that it would turn out to be worth half or less of that number and the valuation would collapse. Whereas using Tesla stock to buy Twitter - key to supporting Tesla's valuation anyway via it's memestock status (price goes up based on him, personally, tweeting about stuff).
Using Tesla stock to buy Twitter doesn't look like you're selling out of Tesla because you think it's overvalued, it looks like a crazy billionaire buying Twitter so he can keep posting and "oh lol how funny". But buying Twitter, saying you'll "fix Twitter" (which you can - firing a 1000 people suddenly means other then the debt, Twitter looks profitable now) - and then liquidating your stake in Twitter, let's you cash out without necessarily burning Tesla (as it is, Tesla holders are concerned anyway - acting/being crazy has its own drawbacks).
tl;dr Musk tends to look crazy, and might be crazy but his actions have plenty of rational underpinnings.
Twitter has 7500 employees. There have been no major changes in the UI or functionality since its original release over a decade ago. What exactly are those people doing? You could cut 7000 of them and nothing would change.
Although banned in most states, sexual abuse of animals isn't prohibited by federal law.
Animated depictions of humans having sex with animals is (probably) legal.
Saying "I hope someone kills misiti3780" is legal. Saying "Next year I will drive to misiti3780's house at <insert correct address> and kill them and their family " is (probably) legal.
You don't care about death threats until they're directed at you, your family, or the pets you love. If you're being dogpiled by extremists, there's a very real possibility that it'll escalate to doxing, swatting, and/or actual attempts. This happens frequently on twitter, even with its attempts at moderation, but it would be considerably worse with no moderation.
People making life-sized dolls of you, then filming themselves shooting it in the head and posting the video is legal. Them doing sexual acts to the doll, saying they're practicing for when they break into your house, filming it and posting the video is legal.
A lot of things that are absolutely terrifying are fully legal. Sites don't allow them because having subsets of users scare away other subsets of users is bad for business. If you have to pick between one set of users and another, usually the one posting hateful, threatening content are the ones to (rightfully) go.
Why would firing someone who's on paternity leave be an issue at all? We're talking multi-millionaires who will get multi-million dollar severance.
It's pretty hilarious to see the pearl clutching of techno-bourgeoisie over something like this, pretending other tech-lords are getting mistreated over some supposed breach of decorum. The mere fact that he gets to take parental leave puts him head and shoulders above most workers in the country.
Parental leave, high salary, severance... where do I sign up for some of this "truly awful" treatment?
HN: "Firing a millionaire on paternity leave—and by "firing" I mean continuing to pay for the rest of their leave, plus probably a bunch of severance—is horrible!"
99% of the rest of the US: "WTF is paternity leave? Is that when your boss generously lets you use some of your annual leave for part of the week in which your kid is born?"
Many states in the US have family leave (including paternity leave). California is more than 10% of the US population and the rules for paternity leave are extremely broad:
- Welcomed a new child into the family in the past 12 months through birth.
- Paid into State Disability Insurance (noted as "CASDI" on most paystubs) in the past 5 to 18 months.
- Not taken the maximum eight weeks of PFL in the past 12 months
Insinuating that 99% of the US lacks paternity leave is disingenuous.
Nice, didn't know about that. Expanded-qualification FMLA-like unpaid leave and more limited provisions for paid leave, for some workers, is pretty good compared to most of the country.
I think the issue is more that firing someone during paternity leave discourages others at your company from taking paternity leave, not that this person is in some way financially devastated from the firing.
It's only through birth? I didn't know that and would have expected CA to do better. E.g. adopting a young child or baby. And does surrogacy count as birth?
Lack of empathy between wage workers, pitted against other wage workers, perpetuates this.
These are people that get taxed at 55% (top california income + top federal income + additional taxes). Not the ones with multiple orders of magnitude more money that get taxed at 4%.
Their boat is so similar that its embarrassing for you to fall for the division.
> These are people that get taxed at 55% (top california income + top federal income + additional taxes).
Since income taxes are graduated, there is literally no one that pays 55%. Instead, you just approach that rate as your income rises (and never reach it since your front income is taxed at lower rates).
> Their boat is so similar that its embarrassing for you to fall for the division.
Sticks, stones. I'm rubber, you're glue. Et c.
I'm well aware of the problem of false divisions distracting from the very real and much more important class war, but the level of concern on this one's still kinda silly, considering the broader context. Besides, I'm with the faction that'd rather get this news during paternal leave, than on the first week, or even month, back. Provided any pay for the leave—assuming at least some portion of it was paid—continued, anyway, which I expect it will unless they really want to risk a lawsuit for little benefit.
Part of the deal with being an executive is no job security. It's part of the trade you make for gigantic compensation. I never really feel bad for executives who are fired, even for unfair reasons -- it's just part of what they sign up for.
>Part of the deal with being an executive is no job security.
I would say that in the US labor market having no job security is the norm rather than the exception, so it seems peculiar to couch it as "part of the trade you make for gigantic compensation".
I don't see the issue either. In a fancy job like this it seems much better to get fired now so he can calmly plan his next move, instead of them waiting for him to return and then firing him, which would just waste everyone's time.
That there is high compensation attached to this job is unrelated to the principal of firing an employee on family leave.
Companies are having to hold the line on what we value in this country, as legislation from environmental to health is not keeping up.
Twitter is specifically of note because the CEO recently had a child and rightfully took paid leave himself.
Whatever your personal opinions are on Elon Musk, he is very influential.
The man has six children and a varying track record on how he has communicated his views and personal use of parental leave and the role of the father following the birth of a child.
I thought they paid him something in the 10's of millions range to bring him on through periscope?
I thought the comp packages were more in the single digit millions range for these folks, and stock oriented. My guess is they've taken bigger losses on just the general stock market decline than most, though for those who hold twitter I personally think Elon is wildly overpaying (as usual, see solar city) and they will make out like bandits as a result there.
Assuming that being fired while on paternity leave is even notable as a tragedy is a very 2022 thing.
People can disagree on whether paternity leave is a good, bad, or indifferent thing, but it didn't even exist as a concept for most of humanity's existence in an official capacity. It went from being an idea, to a right, to something roughly comparable to "fired while undergoing chemotherapy" in a generation. It's odd.
There's a very weird strain of culty utopian-maximalism in our culture right now. It'd bother me less if the entire last century wasn't filled with horror stories about what can happen if this sort of childishness festers too much.
I assume it's yet another consequence of social media's effect on culture: being as hysterical as possible has suddenly become heavily rewarded. The downstream effects on broader political culture (and culture in general) are utterly fascinating to me.
"Fired while on paternity leave" hurts a hell of a lot less when you're a mega millionaire who will be able to walk into a leadership position anywhere he likes, but it still sucks.
Does it really suck? His leave is getting paid and he's getting severance, which is essentially more paid leave. He can spend more time with his child. He might actually find it preferable. Having recently went on paternity leave myself, I would love to have more paid time with my child.
My point is there's never a "good time" to get fired from a job you don't want to leave. GP doesn't like that this guy was fired on parental leave. OK so fire him on his first day back? There's never a time that won't "suck."
When you have enough money to stop working and still be able to comfortably feed and shelter the next few branches of your family tree I'd say it doesn't suck so bad
The only positive change I can remember in the last 5 or so years (besides maybe extending the character count which I'm neutral about) is the toggle to go back to chronological tweets. You used to have to use lists of Tweetdeck, then they added an option but was hidden away or didn't stay default.
For all the hype AI/recommendations algorithms get I don't think it works well on a platform where you already choose who to follow.
Otherwise I've always wondered what the thousand Twitter employees do besides keeping the site running and advertising sales/development. Although I've never worked at a giant tech company before.
Yes. It was once somewhat pleasant to use and less algo reliant, and now it is very unpleasant to use and reading a tweet's thread has become difficult.
Presumably he presided over the only new features added to Twitter, which is more censorship and "adding context" to tweets that have a certain political slant. In any case, it's clear he did almost nothing.
Firing while on paternity leave isn't really that bad as long as they give you severance to cover paternity leave plus some extra - which I'm guessing they did since severance packages for higher ups tend to be pretty good. (As compared to no severance or two weeks that many ICs get)
I strongly disagree. Firing someone while they’re on leave sends a direct signal to anyone else considering taking leave: “watch out, you won’t be able to defend yourself if you aren’t here.”
ICs follow the lead that executives set. A chilling effect like this will cause folks who most _need_ the leave — single parents, people with family in need of care, or those struggling with their own health issues — to second-guess their choice, while those who can just walk away w/o any real risk can go ahead and try taking time away.
It also puts the lie to the idea that employer-subsidized leave beyond the federally-protected time window is an entitlement rather than an easily-canceled perk. We all know that rationally, but a BigCo obviously exploiting that trust is a good reminder that the company (any company) is not there to help you, they are not your family, and you have to be ready for this kind of “switcharoo” whenever the numbers (or politics) justify it.
If you are being fired, you generally do not "defend" yourself. Also, people at this level are very well-compensated, and the comp generally prices in the risk of things like this. Whether you are on leave or not scarcely matters unless you can show that you are fired because you are a parent (and that's an employment law issue).
It is my experience that people taking time off to be parents also take time off from the machinations that will lead getting promoted (at certain levels), thus hampering their advancement, but they are usually not fired, in tech anyway. Now the treatment of women, who already get a pretty bad deal even if they aren't mothers, is another matter altogether...
Totally disagree, primarily because Twitter offers nearly 5 months of paternity leave. I don't know when the Twitter's Head of Product originally left for paternity leave, but if it was a couple months ago, obviously the world has changed under Twitter's feet in that time.
A business can't just stop because someone is on leave. I would expect them to be treated fairly, and the same as if they were not on leave when it comes to personnel decisions. What would not be fair, to both the employee and all of their colleagues, is to say that when someone goes on leave that there is a moratorium on any changes to their status for 5 months.
The ENTIRE point of parental leave benefit is to ensure that your employment status doesn’t change while you are using it. The business doesn’t have to stop in it’s tracks, but the legal expectation is generally that you will come back to the same job you left.
So if the company has widespread layoffs (not saying that's what happened in this case), then anyone on paternal/maternal leave is automatically immune?
> This sends a horrifying message to employees.
Yeah, as someone without kids, your proposal certainly sends a horrifying message to me.
It’s not a proposal. It’s how the law works. If there are layoffs, then yes you can lose your job on parental leave, technically as long as the elimination of your position is unrelated to taking leave. I’m not saying that there is no way to do it. I’m saying that it’s a dumb thing to do.
The message should be just as horrifying whether or not you have kids. The message is: “We made a commitment about your terms of employment. We are willing to break that promise openly and publicly with one of our leaders. Do you think we won’t do it to you?”
Anyone at twitter right now should see this as a red flag at a time when everything is in flux.
Management is in chaos in the middle of a politically contentious buyout, and doing things like firing people on parental leave that will necessarily read badly in the press.
If I were at twitter right now I would be getting everything in writing, and lining up a new job that starts the day my RSUs go liquid.
You have very odd ideas about what this "commitment about your terms of employment" is.
Yes, its true, legally you can not, and should not, be penalized for taking parental leave (a point I made in my original post). At the same time, you should not get some guarantee that because you are on leave you can't be treated the same as if you were working.
If this guy would have been fired had he been working, a parental leave doesn't act like some sort of "get out of jail free" card.
From looking at his tweets, he left just over a month ago. So if he had four months left in his leave, it would have been absolutely unreasonable to wait that long.
This my feeling as well. Maybe I’m thinking too logically about all this:
A) spend paternity leave enjoying your newborn, but in the second half gearing up and remotivating to go back to work, getting back to work and being let go with a “we didn’t want to dismiss you while you were gone, thanks for coming back, here’s the door”
vs
B) you’re on paternity leave and the company lets you go, but still your leave is fulfilled (I.e you get the payout and time off). Now, instead of investing energy on the return to work, you can just move on with a “best to quit while your having fun” attitude.
I fully support paternal leave. As a father of four who despairs at a fatherless world around me, anything we can do to strengthen fathers (and equally mothers) is a great thing.
But there is a sad reality to extended leaves as well. We hire people with 6 month probationary periods, but rarely are people filtered by this. But I have been in meetings where a person on extended leave (medical, parental, whatever) and it becomes group apparent that the individual hasn’t been missed for a variety of reasons, and the consensus emerges that this “individual not being here” is actually a net win for the company and its aspirations. Do we know that that’s not what happened in this case?
I feel like you’re missing the part where I said I was father of four. I failed to mention I recently helped my oldest with newborn twins (if you’re thinking 2 is twice is hard as one, you’re wrong, it’s more like 4x).
I’ve accrued some experience with newborns. It’s a very tired time at times. It’s a time of wonderment. Especially with your first, it’s surreal, after 2 weeks you can barely remember “what was life like before this again?” But despite its otherworldliness, it’s also a lot of downtime. It’s different than normal downtime, because you’re tied to this growing little life, but it’s there. And I did indicate that it is in the latter half where having this project to work on would be ideal. Guess that’s just me and apologies if that seems insensitive. It worked for me.
He's very high up. He's not going to be suffering like the serfs below him. I've seen many let go with no severance or two weeks in a worse recession - including those who don't have a 8+ figure NW...
I mean, he apparently sold $1.5M worth of Twitter stock last week, and is estimated to hold (based on some super basic internet research) ~500k more shares, which is ~$25M in stock[0].
I think he'll be able to weather the financial impact of a recession and having a kid.
[0] Note that this is Twitter only, and wouldn't include any other form of diversified holdings.
The sheer amount of equity, cash and packaging going into Kayvon's severance is going to be princely. Additionally, he's a founder of periscopeco, so he's not without direction.
That he can take tough/unpopular calls and do what is asked or need be done. Just like being popular among techies is good thing in some circles. Being unpopular can be good in other places.
In the enterprise, if someone high ranking is going to be replaced, they're never fired unless there was company-hostile bad behavior.
If the organization is trying to move in another direction, they reorganize and reduce the role of that high ranking leader- maybe to a position where they're alone! and give that high ranking person time to make their next move comfortably.
> In the enterprise, if someone high ranking is going to be replaced, they're never fired unless there was company-hostile bad behavior.
What? Perhaps in shitty companies that are incapable of making tough decisions, but this is definitely not my experience.
On the contrary, for most cases I don't think there is much "shame" for being fired as a senior exec because a lot of times it's just that there are disagreements among senior leadership about where to take the company, and so it's better to have people leave who aren't on board with the company direction than to have those disagreements fester.
You're thinking firing for cause. These two were probably told that they would no longer run their divisions, here's a nice severance package if you want to leave. What are they gonna do, stick around in a lower role?
Pretty laughable, considering Parag as CTO presided over the slowest product velocity at pretty much any major tech company. The product is almost unchanged, except additional censorship, since he started as CTO in October 2017.
With that track record, one must assume his head will be one of the first on the chopping block.
I don't see slow change as a net negative. It's not necessarily positive, either, but not trying to fix things that work perfectly well is a good mantra (looking at you, Google).
Also, he was recently promoted to CEO, which would be strange if the common opinion at Twitter was that he failed as a CTO.
Top management taking Paternity leave, and returning to work as though nothing changed after a few weeks is nothing short of great privilege.
I've seen normal employees take such leave, only return to find others have taken over their work, and by all means they are no longer needed and they have start working their way into the team all over again.
Paternity leave is more or less a kind of paid short term temporary severance already. Sometimes the company does make it permanent.
If you are gone for weeks/months and no one feels any difference, then sometimes its an indication you were never needed at the first place.
If parental leave should legally be counted as "working" (which it is, in many jurisdictions), with pay increase, bonus and promotions being based on virtual work, then why shouldn't firing be just fine too?
Obviously not fire in any way related to parental leave, but if it's to be counted as work then it should be consistent.
100% agree. I think it's bizarre that folks think there is some kind of moratorium on getting laid off or fired if you're on leave, especially since Twitter offers 5 months of paternity leave. So everyone that is not on leave is at risk, but everyone that's on leave is magically protected?
You can't, and shouldn't, be fired for taking leave, bit obviously there are a million and 1 reasons for there to be changes in Twitter's exec leadership given what's happened over the past month.
Firing for someone for taking leave is definitely illegal.
Firing them for unrelated reasons while on leave is not.
This is true even in very progressive places like california.
Fairly specific anti-American jibe gets translated into "you hate America".
Seems you could do with a little more George Carlin in your system.
He fucking loved America....apart from the shitty bits that the rest of the world agrees with him about.
It's so lazy to hate America with a jab that is literally not true. If I get fired for going on paternity leave, I'm suing my company, and I will win - even in cRaZy America.
- Kayvon Beykpour, Head of Consumer Product (3 years, 11 months) [1]; and
- Bruce Falck, Revenue Product Lead (5 years at Twitter, 3 years and 11 months in this position) [2]
Kinda weird that both people were just shy of serving 4 years in their current roles. When I see moves like this my immediate thought is always, it's to save or make money. For example, there could be an options pool in the event of a change of control. Well, you've just fired a couple of people right before a huge vest (probably; I have no concrete information) and increased your share of that options pool.
It just reminds me of Skype firing executives at the Microsoft buyout to avoid payouts [3].
Otherwise making these moves before an acquisition has closed doesn't make a lot of sense. My money is on this having everything to do with money.
EDIT: Updated comment as the link was updated from the original Twitter thread by Kayvon Beykpour about his firing.
The vesting / payout theory makes no sense, firstly Twitter vesting at that point would be quarterly, so the company would be saving at most 1/16th of what those employees had already vested from their initial grant.
Secondly, it's the employees who would have the incentive to leave, not the company to fire them. Assuming a typical 4 year vesting period, it's right at this year when their compensation would have _dropped precipitously_.
Thirdly, the second individual had been at Twitter for more than 4 years, and unless they left and came back (doesn't look like they did), they'd still be vesting their original
equity grant. The amount of time they've been at the company isn't even common between the two, so I don't see why you'd use it to establish a theory.
It's true that there's a lot we don't know. Executive employment contracts are bespoke and quite different to peon contracts. There will be various incentives that might be cash or incentivized stock options ("ISOs") as well as regular compensation that might be RSUs, non-qualified stock options ("NSOs") or both.
But we do know:
1. The acquisition is imminent but not closed;
2. Executive contracts often include bonuses on acquisition and/or accelerations for change of control;
3. There are numerous examples of companies cleaning house to avoid payouts prior to an acquisition closing;
4. Generally a company on the verge of a likely acquisition just keeps the lights on and doesn't make any big moves so things like hiring freezes make sense; and
5. The circumstancial evidence that both executives just happen to be shy of their 4 year anniversary (in their current roles).
It's not uncommon for companies to "clear house" right before close of acquisitions, especially on exec level. However I don't believe it's for the reasons you mentioned (saving money). Instead it's likely to better align with new ownership (whether perceived or actual alignment) and ensure the company is well positioned for the change.
An established/relatively healthy org like Twitter will likely not be penny pinching at the risk of more fallout/attrition. In fact, I'm sure the convo went something like "if you leave now, you will keep xyz/golden parachute".
This has at least been my experience based on limited experience of being part of a few acquisitions and working closely with execs.
Thats what I was thinking too. It felt weird that Dorsey was replaced with such quiet low profile thinker in the first place. He has no presence on earnings calls or spaces. I’ve listened to him take questions and he seems to handle them no better with no deeper insight then even I could provide. Maybe he was keeping things close to his chest. However, it just made me think they sort of put a puppet in charge for the purpose of acquisition. Parag would be easy to control as a lever into change within Twitter. Attractive feature for a buyer. I thought it would be big tech. Never thought Elon would be the one buying and controlling him. What a plot twist!
Even if Musk wouldn't fire him immediately Musk's management style likely will be quite involved and no fun if you don't align with Musk's goals and ideas.
Honest question. Would a CEO be that desperate to keep his job? I imagine Parag can walk away with plenty after the buyout and do something else that he likes.
I imagine it's a pretty intense job that takes up most of your life and permeates your sense of identity. Everything you said can be true and I'd still expect a CEO to be very strongly attached to their position.
CEOs typically don't apply for jobs, they can't walk into a company's Career page an apply as a CEO; they are headhunted by specialized headhunter.
Yes, CEO is desperate to keep their job because if they were to let go, they won't score a much higher profile job than their current; they'd be gone to a lower rank companies bidding their luck.
How the hell do you know the vesting period? I get RSU’s at my publicly traded company that vest yearly, in May. This could absolutely been done in order to prevent RSU vesting.
> At Twitter, RSUs are subject to a 4-year vesting schedule: 25% vests in the 1st year (8.33% every 4 months), then 25% in each of the 2nd, 3rd and 4th years (6.25% every 3 months). Every year employees get a new grant that vests over 4 years to bring them up to their target compensation.
it's Twitter, hundreds if not thousands of their employees post detailed compensation information.
Since the company knows the comp will drop at year four, they will give a large grant for the minority they really need to retain. For rank and file employees, those grants are relatively rare and many will stay anyway because they aren’t optimizing their comp. I think at the executive level, not getting such a grant is tantamount to being fired because executives don’t get overlooked.
There's a ton of scummy behaviour with things like this.
Skype was particularly scummy. Not only were executives fired to avoid a payout, their options/shares were bought back at a low price (called a clawback agreement) and the company was incorporated in the Caymand Islands (IIRC) so suting them was going to be incredibly difficult.
Mark Pincus of Zynga fame decided a bunch of people didn't deserve to get rich on the IPO so went to some people to get them agree to a smaller options package than they had in exchange for not being fired.
These two fired suggests they didn't have clauses in their contracts for acceleration in the event of termination and/or they possibly had clauses that would give them a big payout. Or maybe it was just the timing to avoid a final vest (assuming a 4 year vest, which isn't a given).
The two may even have grounds to sue so Twitter may have settled with them prior to this announcement for less than they would've had to pay out. This avoids litigation, the two exxecs get something and Twitter has to pay out less. Win, win, win (sort of).
It's so trivial to fire young people and keep them out of court. Not if they're stupid, I wasn't stupid, more if they don't know the magic words. So in my case a lobotomist deleted all kinds of magic words--well "lobotomy" for one. The intention is to fuck all employees over at least one time. Then they get told the magic word and don't get fucked again (except in my case, I need to get fucked twice to learn the magic word twice, at least so far, knock on wood I only have to learn all the magic words twice).[2]
Similar to college students, same thing, we're talking about harm to youngest adults, the 18-22 age category and ongoing if you get cheated out of your career. Those kids. So I tell college students that if they live on campus they're homeless unless they have a second place to live when they get evicted, which can happen at moment's notice with no accountability[1]. So practically every college student is homeless and might end up on the street unless they suck up to the numerous people around them that have them by the balls.
Obviously they're homeless if they have no idea where they'll sleep that night!
So Stanford in practice has a gigantic homeless population, everyone on campus is homeless, no tenant rights. It looks like it has a small homeless population but really it has a similarly small non-homeless population.
[1] Did I say no accountability? Let me read this shit I wrote. Yeah, it says no accountability. Surely I fucked up saying that, oh no! Famous last words then. There's no accountability! I've been waiting for my trial since Friday, February 6, 2009, well I guess that trial could be called into order on Monday, or on Wednesday, maybe I'm speaking too soon and it's in the pipeline. The dean of freshman verbally swore I'd get a trial, as a guarantee after telling her I had to drop out without one. She gave me girl scout cookies in that meeting, surely it wasn't a lie if she gave me cookies!
Any day now. Older adults always say to be patient and humble. Saying so is an act of impatience and arrogance on their behalf, it's arrogant to call people arrogant, asking for patience is impatient. Just like it's selfish to accuse others of selfishness. To the extent I'm a fucking arrogant guy, and I am (slave of GOD, the last shall be the first), I'm not also giving self-serving advice too.
[2] Oh a new memory came back, at 17:24 May 12, "vicious cycle." A magic word came back to me as I wrote this! Maybe it's a vicious cycle and I'll be getting cheated, told the magic word, lobotomized, and repeat, forever!
Well, there are clauses saying after condition X is met you get Y. Clauses that would say you can't be fired up to Z days before you reach X are neither common, nor would they fundamentally fix the problem if you think about it. If you can prove that preventing bonus vesting was the reason you were let go, it might be worth talking to a lawyer, though - courts have the power in principle to intervene in such cases.
I always understood that, while it’s frowned upon, it’s definitely allowed.
It’s very scummy yes, but option plans are always a bit of a disguise trick, as it’s seen as part of your compensation, but in reality should really be considered a retroactive bonus you get after staying with the company for N years.
That would be on the executive and the company to negotiate that aspect in the contract deal. Executive contracts almost always have lawyers behind them.
These are highly-paid executives, so it depends on what they individually negotiated with the company.
Being promoted internally, they might not have pushed as hard, but it is very normal for anyone at Director+ level to bring their own lawyer in to negotiate employment contracts. Executives aren't signing the same employment docs you are signing.
As an employee, or potential employee, you can always request a contract that guarantees employment for a certain period, or immediately vests all options upon termination. Most employers would only agree to such terms for the most valuable employees.
Aside from that 3.93 is slightly less than 4, it's odd that both employees were in their current position for the same amount of time. I.e. they were part of the same cohort. What was Twitter doing in June-ish 2018 that resulted in them hiring multiple people in key roles? Was there an expansion, or a re-org, or executive turn-over?
I think your timeline is off, wouldn't executive hires have a much longer timeline from inception to close such that the "event" predicating their hires could have been 5 years, 6 years out?
If the moves were made at 11 months I'd agree. It'd be really unusual if there was some large vest at the 4 year mark. Unless maybe they've recently been granted something for retention.
maybe twitter accelerated their vest, or (at the exec level) there's a clause for that in their agreement. i'd lean that way before i considered this is a money saving move.
They are about to transform the company - and they need the talent to do that.
It's difficult to tell, but it could be that these guys are scapegoats, or they are going to be stumbling blocks to the 'new approach', or they company wants fresh blood there, or might have fresh blood lined up.
Whatever this is - it's in the domain of 'strategic', not likely to due to someone's equity package.
All of these higher up executive firings do nothing but remind me of those lines in Goodfellas "we had to sit still and take it. It was among the Italians. It was real grease ball s*t."
This is mind boggling to me. Kayvon is one of the best product leaders / visionaries I know. It was confusing to me in Dec that he wasn't Jack's successor.
Kayvon was a huge driving force behind all the interesting product efforts of the last few years: Spaces, Fleets, topics, etc. Twitter went from not iterating on product (remember when Twitter's only change in several years was to change the star to a heart?) to starting to take some shots. Behind the scenes he was often pushing against significant headwinds that resisted product change (not the least of which was the internal 'sacred cow' that all things must be built with Scala and only run inside Twitter's on-prem datacenters).
> Kayvon is one of the best product leaders / visionaries I know.
Maybe this person is absolutely amazing and is just constrained by the crazy realities of working in a very large and political company. Maybe they did the best possible job under difficult circumstances. I'm not the insider and can't easily judge that.
But as an outsider, what I can judge is that it's easy to perceive the Twitter platform as basically doing nothing truly noteworthy in terms of design/features to improve the platform other than feeling like a slower and slower site, while at the same time it's increasingly hostile to the open Internet (stuff like blocking viewing Tweets unless you login), and has some significant and growing freedom of speech issues until Musk came along. The stuff that outsiders can judge doesn't feel too good.
Topics, in particular, are actively and significantly harmful to the quality of my experience on Twitter. If there was a way to hide them permanently, now THAT would be a feature!
Agreed completely. All those functions are simple hacks on top of the platform to emulate functionality that is offered in other apps:
* Spaces => Clubhouse
* Topics => Instagram/Reddit
* Fleets => Instagram
Twitter should focus on its core value product: the tweets themselves, and manage that better. This means easier thread displays, better spam control and user management, better algorithm for displaying relevant tweets.
But I would liked an anonymous 'join to listen' feature. Random people stalking your account after they see you in the space is something I find creepy.
Twitter copied all of those features from other apps. Spaces = Clubhouse, Fleets (which was also cancelled last year) = Snapchat. At best, Kayvon was good a being reactionary to competition. Not that great of a track record.
Fleets as in fleeting. I thought it meant “group of ships” and seriously struggled to see how the name connected. Mind you, my use of Twitter is confined to “order by time desc” and Lists.
Why do you think Twitter needs any changes? I would personally prefer if they removed all of the remaining features you listed and went back to the good old plain chronological list of tweets that made Twitter popular.
Spaces is a good feature. Topics is the worst thing I've been subjected to in my life. I have a second account in Japanese and Topics constantly adds posts about trashy American pop stars I barely know to the feed.
Agree. Spaces is good and the others not as much. Though I do use the 'War in Ukraine' topic a lot.
The main diff though is that Twitter for a moment in time started taking some shots. Not that they were all the best shots. But for my first two years there it felt like the company took nearly 0 shots. That shift happened with Kayvon.
personally I'm very sick of the "perma-trending topics". "COVID-19: News and updates for $YOUR_LOCATION" still pops up in the sidebar here and there, and it's on the full trending topics list probably forever now?? like, guys, it's over, you can pull it now, I'm good thanks
Topics for anyone outside the US is completely dysfunctional. I've browsed the list of topics it generated for me (to disable them manually in the most dysfunctional way ever imagined) and half the topics it contained were completely unknown to me. Rappers, celebrities, baseball players, and K-pop stars. None of those are topics I've ever spent any real interest in, neither through searching nor interacting with other people's tweets.
As others have said here, Spaces is a minor success. In my corner of Twitter I see people use it occasionally and I've had a few good experiences with it
As a product person, if the engineering leadership has a personal preference and it impacts the ability to deliver features... I'm not sure why they wouldn't push back.
Err, is the accusation that engineering says “we want to keep Scala but it is slowing us down”? Because i think it is way more likely that product people are saying stupid shit like “well at my last company we used PHP and we churned out features twice as fast!”
> Kayvon was a huge driving force behind all the interesting product efforts of the last few years: Spaces, Fleets, topics, etc
Honestly not sure if you're being sarcastic. Fleets were killed within months of launch because they were awful and no one wanted them. Spaces will die when the nft bubble finishes collapsing. And topics are just a way to shoehorn crap no one wants onto their timelines without asking first.
NFT dudes are the only people I have EVER seen using that feature, and I use Twitter daily. I also follow exactly zero NFT dudes so I don't know why I always see their spaces.
Spaces are heavily used where I am right now as a replacement for radio with plenty of really interesting topic.
Basically, "everyone can open a station" scenario.
Off the top of my head, there is a big trial going on, and people are discussing details and commentary on that (with competing spaces for the defense and persecution sides). Stuff that you don't have the time to convey using traditional media.
It has gotten big enough to have politicians show up and do special shows. Thing about 2+ hours of interacting directly with the public.
Just a spring cleaning that is about a decade late.
Twitter under-performs in every aspect imaginable: financially, product quality, product innovation. Nothing ever gets released and whilst this pace has improved in recent years, those "innovations" don't really deliver. They're barely used, copycats from other apps, and so on. Meanwhile, age-old problems are never addressed, like bots and the extremely hostile mob mentality on the platform.
They're ineffective and lack accountability. They need a reset and mentality change.
They shut down Vine. TikTok is now a billion dollar industry.
As far as I'm concerned, every product manager involved in that decision shouldn't be involved with Twitter anymore, because they display an astonishingly level of incompetence.
Vine was exploding when they shut it down, and some of the biggest influencers of today started on Vine. It's incomprehensible to me why anyone would shut down such an absolute jackpot, bizarre really!
Vine should have been what TikTok is today, it was so close to being a product that I wanted to see and use. TikTok without the close relationship with the People's Republic of China would be so much fun to use.
The fact that vine as a name and at least some vines are still at least somewhat prevalent online, makes me think that vine literally was "already" the next big thing and twitter just completely misread the room.
yeah, people are still reconnecting with vine creators, on TikTok. You can see in the comments, a video came up on the user's feed and they were compelled enough to be like "are you so and so from vine!?" Vine was killed half a decade ago.
And YouTube. Some of the biggest commentary channels used to be Viners.
The fact that it was shut down when it was is testament to how badly Twitter misplayed their hand with it. Every single creator flocked to whatever platform would take them at the time.
I think it's a lot more likely that there are/were a horde of PMs there who thought it was a very dumb and short-sighted decision to shut it down at the time. In my experience, it's usually some high-ranking exec who makes confounding decisions through authority in big tech. Not so much the average IC PM who has to spend time understanding their users for their job.
Wow, never heard of Vine (call me out of touch grumpy old man user persona!), but reading the wikipedia page, what is amazing it was aquired for less than one of today's early rounds - $30m. Maybe they were "too early"? Post pandemic things look a lot different.
Vine was at the peak of internet culture and mindshare when it was shut down. I have to believe there was some kind of personal vendetta or motivation behind the shut down. It makes absolutely no sense.
Vine was not too early by any means. It was exploding in popularity when they shut it down. It absolutely would have been as big as Tik Tok if they got the algorithm right.
Was it, though? My memory isn't perfect, but I seem to recall the days after Instagram copied the video feature, there were articles on tech blogs mocking Vine on how Facebook was going to eat their lunch. You could even refresh your browser on Vine's Twitter page and watch the count of its followers decreasing in realtime. Not pushing back, I just remember it kind of petering out in popularity (in the US, at least) and then quietly going away, and everyone sort of shrugged.
The 6 second limitation was holding them back and their competitors knew that longer formats would be more successful. The vine 6 second format was interesting and kind of "created" the format that turned into tik tok, but there is no doubt that vine would had to have pivoted sooner rather than later. Still, the decision to shut it down was shocking and short sighted.
Twitter is filled with extravagantly paid Product Managers with thoroughly mediocre (at best) results. Vine is a great example, but think about the complete lack of imagination when it comes to Musk's idea of charging users $3/month. I would absolutely pay that to be on a Twitter free of bots. And wow, how bad is the data science team at Twitter that they can't spot the OBVIOUS bots all over the site? When you see what they get paid, that's what makes it pathetic.
Periscope was a brilliant streaming app. And one of the first that you could write messages to people who were streaming.
It was an incredibly intimate experience to write something, and see people in the video you're watching, react to it live. Seems normal now, with so many streaming apps, but periscope was the first I saw on mobile do this well.
Eventually, the big apps implemented it too (Facebook, Snapchat... Instagram). Which killed Periscope...
I've learned that, when speaking with a certain half of society, any narrative other than Twitter's future being bleak, and it current state good, is not accepted.
Twitter has huge monetary potential, and adoption potential (beyond the niche audience it current has), but if the status quo is kept them that potential will likely never be realized.
Honestly I've not heard anyone say that Twitter's current state is good. Yo're literally taling about a company that has somehow managed to stay flat whlist all their competitors are up multiples. Sure, people think Musk won't make it better, but no one thinks twitter is doing well.
I would say twitter threads need robust support and the edit button is sorely missed.
But yes in a way the paralysis that Twitter is in is interesting in a world where everything is being changed always all the time in agile cycles. Twitter feels like it just exists and this is the way it works.
The edit button would only be available for say 5 minutes after posting. Would show that it was edited with a history available to see what was changed. And according to Musk, could reset the like / retweets on it.
What I want from an edit button is just a convenient UI for deleting and resubmitting a tweet with small changes. Right now the UX for that is really bad - if I want to fix a typo I have to copy my tweet text, then reopen the tweet / reply box, paste in the text, edit it, and then re-add any attachments I had included (together with any accessibility text). And doing all this is even more difficult on mobile than on desktop.
> * Bait and switch. Now replies to the original tweet will be out of context
I used to think this could be a problem too... but Reddit has had an edit button as long as I can remember, and bait and switch doesn't really seem to be much of a problem.
Perhaps it'd be more troublesome with the concept of retweets or quote tweets?
> I used to think this could be a problem too... but Reddit has had an edit button as long as I can remember, and bait and switch doesn't really seem to be much of a problem.
Anyone who does it enough to be irritating (instead of funny) will just find themselves banned by subreddit mods or otherwise they're doing it in a subreddit where it doesn't matter and no one will care.
The same community controls don't exist in twitter, so its plausible that it might be more damaging there. But so what? Many of the benefits are clear, the risks speculative. They could mitigate with a history button.
Wikipedia lets arbitrary users edit other users posts and gets by just fine-- not just the encyclopedia pages but the discussion pages too. Part of that is because it has a history so funny business is easily caught, but part of it is that if you give people more way to behaving unambiguously abusively if they intentionally chose to do so, some people will take you up on the offer and you can just remove them from the platform without regret. In that case everyone will be better off than if they didn't have the option to shoot themselves in the foot to begin with.
I see things differently. The number of customer-facing feature releases in recent years has been significant.
Yes, some are irritating (GIF integration). Others miss the mark (endless iterations of topics/explore/algo changes). Still others haven't been attempted but are sorely needed (editing tweets, clear verified account policies).
But a few innovations are trying to solve real problems identified by subsets of users (Twitter Professional, Twitter Blue) or help everyone a lot (photos, doubling tweet length, improvements to RT functionality, reporting tools).
Another thing to keep in mind: When discussion forums try to shoehorn too many things into the feature set, often to compete with other platforms, the results can alienate existing users. I see this with Instagram bolting on TikTok-like features, to the detriment of everyone who just likes to share photos.
(I am thankful most of HN's feature improvements have been restrained. Slashdot tried to do too much with new features, and it hurt rather than helped the community)
Those may help, but I'm not sure what they could do other than breaking the core conceit of their platform (short form, limited space) to really deal with it.
Limited space to express your intent, and the quick response cycle it engenders are not conducive to productive discussion. It's hot-takes and terse replies that people interpret as hostile even if they weren't meant as such all the way down. Take that out and what makes Twitter any different than every other platform? Though, maybe they're large enough and popular enough they could weather that change.
> (e) Make it possible to prevent retweets (including quote retweets) from certain accounts you follow from showing up on your timeline. There are certain people you might like who retweet effluent, and you don't want that effluent going straight into your eyeballs.
There's many good points here. This is the best. They need to assume the content kinda sucks and let people control as much as possible, instead of thinking that AI is doing a good enough job for them.
That's a decent plan. I like how you mention punishing false reports, I wish reputation had more value on social networks though they would have to protect against bots that boost it.
Couple of questions:
1.Normally when you report something as a violation of the rule and the moderators determine it is not a violation that might not be objective. "Hate Speech" for example is not objective even if you provide examples.
- How would you prevent people from being punished unfairly.
- Right now a false report has no consequences. Wouldn't reporting go down since people would want to avoid a punishment?
2. In detecting mob patterns how would you determine if it's not just everyone getting on to tweet about a current event and if you rate limit it doesn't that mean some people would be censored and others not simply based on time?
3. Related to the other limits you mentioned, such as number of retweets. What prevents people from opening multiple accounts or bots?
4. Assume the above three are solved wouldn't this put the business at a disadvantage due to both decreased ad revenue and competitors who don't have these rules?
And for whatever action you do, the majority will usually think you're wrong. But, on the plus side, you're also wrong when you are "providing a platform for it" (aka not doing anything).
I'm always surprised at how well dang manages this, although he definitely receives his share of critic from all sides, too.
All- some of you are clinging onto the paternity leave. I can't quote whether this is true, but at both Fortune 250 companies I worked for, you were paid out for your entire leave even if you weren't coming back after. So I would bet money he is still being paid for the whole leave, but if someone sees something else, please correct me. There is incentive to pay it out since one annoying side effect can be a person gone for 3 to 4 months suddenly calls 2 days before leave is over and says "I think I am resigning." It's better to pay the full leave and have them tell you that from the start so you don't waste 3 months.
The concern is that there could be a chilling effect resulting in people not taking this leave. If people expect to be fired for using this benefit, they won’t use it.
(M|P)aternity leave cannot ever make you immune from being let go. That would be insane. People are let go all of the time without any warning or cause. Especially executives.
There's no allegation from the person fired that taking the leave is why they were fired. But the mere PERCEPTION can have a chilling effect. And I have worked with many people who worry about taking this type of extended leave for exactly this reason.
Why is Parag making any major changes at this point? What "new vision" is he going to execute in his last few months at the company before Elon comes in and torpedoes it anyways?
That's my point though. The board accepted the buyout offer. "Hands on the wheel" means keeping the lights on and making sure everything stays stable until the deal closes. Firing the company's product and revenue leads is the opposite of that.
You're assuming that the deal will definitely close.
The deal can still fall apart for a number of reasons. The risk of this happening is far from remote. This is evident from the current stock price of about $46, which is significantly lower than the $54.20 Musk is offering.
These mergers never are almost never at parity months before closing. This one isn't even so far a spread, 15% rebate on proposed takeout price. Activision, with an offer from Microsoft for which even Buffett is partaking in the arbitrage, sits at 20%. Even back at the announcement in January, before this market turmoil which can threaten these deals, it traded at a like 14% discount.
With that in mind, special situations are clearly still a valid strategy.
If the market was highly/certainly confident the deal was going to go through it would be at ~54.20$ or higher (technically, although not likely much higher).
If you're 100% sure the deal goes through then that's essentially a free 6$ per share guaranteed right now.
Out of interest, why higher? Twitter does not pay dividends, and if you discount it to today, the 54,20$ in the future are worth less than 54,20$ today since no interest is paid on these shares? Even when i take inflation into account, the 54,20 have more buying power now than in the future so again I dont see why you would pay more.
Interestingly if the market was 100% sure the deal would go through I'm not really sure how it would work because that would mess up the options chain IV. The main reason would be speculation other's might push it higher before the actual deal. Call hedging will amplify this but it would be weird in this scenario.
EDIT: Actually it could go higher because of people covering cash-covered calls that are exercised or closing shorts that existed before the announcement - see below.
--
It looks like Twitter actually did go higher then 54.20 on April 5th to 54.57~54.92 [1]
The reason why it did IRL is several factors. One is speculation it could go higher due to volatility/inefficiencies. The biggest reason is most likely hedging against sold call options and closing short positions - which are both essentially positions that the deal won't go through. If somebody sold a share of twitter for 50$ thinking it would go back down but now wants out of the position they must buy the share which increases buying pressure and thus the price. Similarly if somebody sold a cash covered call and is exercised or hedge against it to limit losses they must buy shares at the current price (which is 100x per option). Again this increases buying pressure and thus the share price.
I swear there's a few other reasons I can't think of right now. It's basically from market inefficiency factors. Speculation (of the share value not future company value per-se) and hedging are the main ones in this case. In non-acquisition scenarios other factors include portfolio rebalancing, margin-calls, market orders,
and poor order-book liquidity.
[1] I'm seeing different numbers from different sources but they're all around there - I'm not sure if they used sale price or the quote price etc, quoting a stock is a whole can of worms in itself.
Disclaimer: I can't claim to be any type of expert - some of this may be incorrect, and I'm a bit rusty
Indeed, there's no such thing as free money. You get payed (or burned) when trading on these mergers for bearing the risk of the deal failing or renegotiating.
Yep. Aside from Musk having the attention span of a 6 month old puppy: the margin loan requires Tesla's stock drop less than 40%, otherwise he has to personally bankroll the Twitter purchase.
Right now it's down 26% this month, more than twice the general market drop, and shows no sign of slowing.
Musk has already started trying to ditch the margin loan.
Only reason twitter hasn't tanked is people holding on hoping this deal goes through otherwise it would have dropped significantly with the rest of the tech index. My point is that its market cap is artificially overvalued currently on hopes that elon buys at 54$ (which i doubt he will)
I too believe that he'd be crazy not to renegotiate.
As far as I recall, they agreed on a break fee of ~$1bn if Musk walks away. But if he can lower the price to $40 a share (which is still far higher than market would probably be, at least in this market), he gets Twitter at $31bn instead of $42bn.
And the only reason it’s $46 and not lower is that people are staying in the stock waiting for the Musk 15-20% payout. When it becomes clear that Musk isn’t buying Twitter, Twitter stock will implode instantly.
Could just be that Kayvon Beykpour got replaced by someone better at the job?
Baseball fans know of Wally Pipp, who was a solid first baseman for the Yankees for a decade or so. One day Pipp had a headache and was replaced in the lineup by a young Lou Gehrig, who turned out to be one of the greatest hitters in baseball history.
I have no idea if Jay Sullivan is a Lou Gehrig talent, but he's been doing the job while Beykpour is on paternity leave. If you're the CEO of Twitter and you believe the temp guy is doing a better job, why not make the change?
All I know is that Jay Sullivan has tweeted less than 700 times in his life, which does not suggest fantastic engagement with the product he’s supposed to be leading.
if you need an example of "hands on the wheel" look to nvidia's attempted purchase of ARM. all board says ok, all shareholders ok, passed through a lot of paperwork but no deal in the end.
Both Nvidia and ARM definitely needed "hands on wheel" regardless of what happened.
You do realize it's going to be months before the deal closes, and there's a chance Elon walks away from it due to market conditions or other reasons? In this reality, counting something like this as done seems premature. The reasonable course of action is that plans made prior to this deal continue. Elon can sort it out if / when he takes the helm.
Board may have accepted the terms but the valuation of twitter has since tanked as have the equity markets as a whole. As have musks fortunes from an equity perspective so unless all the numbers recalibrate to everyones liking deal is dead imho. The world outlook has changed since this was getting hashed out.
Why's that? There's a significant chance this deal won't close. There's also a chance that the deal will close and Parag will be kept on. And even if it happens and Parag goes, I don't think there's a great business case for just putting everything in amber. Twitter's competitors are moving ahead, so just freezing things will give them extra months of lead that Twitter can ill afford no matter who's owning it.
I think it's somewhere between possible and likely that Parag ran this change by Musk. Who is already on record as wanting high-level changes. So this could be just as easily read as the CEO honoring the board's acceptance and getting started early on the changes. Or it could be both: Something that both the current and future CEO saw as in the bests interest of Twitter.
So there's a few things that could be in play here.
1. The tech market right now is a shit show, Twitter has only been saved from the general market trends because of the Elon offer. Once the Elon offer closes or falls through, Twitter's stock will correct. While Twitter is healthier is the time to get set up for that inevitable correction. The current market is driving fairly drastic action in the Tech Sector, just ignoring it because you're, potentially, a lame-duck CEO would be irresponsible.
2. These firings and changes may have been in the works since Parag took over so this is a course of action that predates the Elon offer.
So…if the deal goes through the stock cannot “correct” because there will be no open market for twitter shares.
Elon is proposing to buy all the shares, not just a controlling majority. Twitter would no longer be on the NYSE.
So twitter can be saved from general market trends indefinitely, as long as whoever is bankrolling it can continue feeding it cash whenever twitter operates at a loss.
Elon isn't going to hold 100% of the shares. He already has a ton of VCs and other outside investors (including some funds) lined up to finance the deal. So Twitter will still be active on private markets.
"Keeping the lights on" isn't enough: to be a good CEO, he needs to keep making progress, especially on shared goals of both old & possible-new ownership.
One guess (albeit not one of high confidence) is that the outgoing head may have expressed some reservations about whatever balancing-of-concerns Agrawal was expecting, or even mentioned a firm intent to leave if/when new-ownership arrives. In that case, it'd be very reasonable for the CEO to say, "I need someone here who at least has a chance of, and can earnestly simulate an intent to, stay through the change-of-ownership."
Elon Musk's networth is a big mystery. Not because its private information (we all know Musk's holdings for the most part), but because in 2 or 3 months, the Fed will meet a few more times and may raise interest rates again.
TSLA's stock price may be $1000 by then, or it might be $500. If its $500, Musk may not have the physical money to finish this buyout offer, even if he wanted to.
This entire deal was made when Tesla was near $900 or thereabouts. But then the stock market started to change severely, the bond market changed severely, and now there's a lot of uncertainty if anyone really has enough money for everything to go through fine.
---------
Twitter's board has to keep both possibilities in mind. If Elon Musk's buyout offer fails (either due to Musk personally, or because of changing prices which rekt Musk's networth), Twitter will still need a plan for a Musk-free Twitter future.
There's a real risk the deal doesn't close. The lower TSLA goes the further away that deal gets. I think keeping the hands on the wheel to me means staying the course - executing on roadmap and vision - until the money is in the bank.
I wonder if he'll try to renegotiate the deal at a lower price. Given the entire tech sector has fallen precipitously since the first announcement, it wouldn't surprise me if Twitter's board accepts a haircut and does the deal anyway.
Knowing Musks shenaningans, it's likely he wanted to sell his Twitter stock but wanted to pump it first with a semi-formal offer. Same he did with Crypto/Tesla.
Not surprising that Twitter board would call the bluff. Even if Musk tries to renegotiate to save face, the Twitter board will look better to shareholders by saying no to even lower offers.
The fact that the stock price is roughly halfway between the pre-Musk price and Musk's bid suggests the market expects roughly a 50% chance the deal will actually go through.
its probably higher than that. Imagine what it would be if it had crashed along with everything else in the market. If the deal breaks the stock is probably worth 25-30$
I think Parag is making decisions that he sees as inevitable, whether the deal goes through or not. The deal, and all of the discussions that have come from it about the future direction of Twitter, is probably enough of a catalyst for certain changes. Twitter is likely not left unchanged even it falls through.
Is the twitter deal actually happening? Elon had to get a loan using Tesla stock and if the price of Tesla drops a lot then the whole loan and deal falls apart. I don't know if we know the exact stock price number where it happens, but it's seeming pretty dicey with Tesla continuing to drop in value IMHO.
As of last week, there is $7 billion in outside funding -- new money and existing shareholders that will retain their stake. That cuts the amount borrowed on the back of $TSLA in half.
That's not how acquisitions work. Elon made the offer, it was accepted. Now the company has to continue to operate without his influence until the deal actually closes.
What's your citation for the notion that post-acquisition changes never happen before the deal fully closes? I grant that irreversible structural changes are rare, and cross-company integrations of course can't happen. But here this isn't one company acquiring another, and it's just changing one exec. Maybe you're right, but I've never seen anything showing that.
There isn't any guarantee that the deal will actually close, especially with tech stocks (and much of Elon's own wealth along with them) taking a dive.
Musk's financing is secured in part by his Tesla stock. Rumor had it that $740 was the share price where the lenders had the contractual right to withdraw their financing. As I write this, TSLA is $716. (Don't remember where I read that; but whether or not it's the actual price, I'm sure such a clause exists.)
If those changes were planned before Musk's offer, wouldn't changing the plans to that "keeping the lights on and making sure everything stays stable until the deal closes" be opposite of operating without his influence?
Operating without his influence means not inviting him into the boardroom and not taking directions from him. They can still make their own decisions on how best to prepare for the acquisition. That's something every company in that situation does.
Are you certain Elon would torpedo anything? What if it the move he would make as well? Would he still torpedo it? I am not sure how anyone can say with certainty what Elon will or won't do.
Elon Musk has no intention of actually acquiring Twitter. He's just using it as a smoke screen to liquidate a huge amount of Tesla stock. The fact that TWTR is currently trading at a 25% discount to the supposed acquisition price shows I am not the only person in the market who doubts the ultimate consummation of the acquisition.
Interesting thought. But if he doesn't go through with it, he will be on the hook for a $1B penalty. Is that perhaps a selling fee that makes sense for him to pay?
Interesting that he co-founded Periscope and they also just removed any mention of Periscope from their TOS. Maybe just an artifact of them considering removing him, or it has no meaning. Just found the timing notable.
Growing up outside of the US, I feel kinda cringed when he said he was "INSANELY proud of our collective teams achieved". Such an interesting cultural difference.
This quirk of dialect should be called the California Superlative.
Everything is awesome, amazing, radical, insane, great, gnarly, not to mention sick, ill, righteous, dope. Californians just love superlatives, use them constantly, wear them out, and need new ones.
This spreads like a fine coating of mold over the rest of the country before going on to annoy the Commonwealth, and then we repeat. It's pretty cool.
Good point, and the place of hella in the dialect is hella distinctive, because it's a superlative modifier: hella sick, hella insane, "I just bought hella strawberries at the market", and so on.
So you have a politeness continuum from very, to hecka, to hella, to fuckin'. Which is dank.
It really seems to me that in American English, every word eventually gets watered down to mean either "good," "bad," or "very." Take the word "terrific" for example. It used to have connotations of terror. Now it's just another synonym for "excellent." Or "fantastic," the old meaning of which is still found in the related "fantastical," but now simply means "very good." Or "incredible," which used to mean "not believable." I could go on.
And when every superlative has been watered down like this, you need to pick a word that's completely over the top to express anything with any strength of feeling. It's good, it's great, it's awesome! It's fantastic! It's incredible!! It's insanely unbelievably wonderful!!!
"Insanely" is just the latest entry in our internal linguistic arms race.
Yep, and people using "absolutely" all the time is the crown jewel.
In the past few years there's been a similar but opposite degradation: the only adverbs anyone uses are "super", "super not", and "not super". I think it came from the infantilized condescending culture on Twitter.
I also believe there would also be a large segment of the US that finds these "job-finding/bragging echo chamber" Twitter posts cringeworthy regardless of context. They appear oddly performative and obligatory. Stay tuned for the follow up "I'm incredibly excited to announce that today I am joining ___" post.
I grew up in the US, and I also found that odd. Not unprecedented, but odd. The literal interpretation of that statement might be more justifiable than the one he meant...
I will expect more people to mock this decade of extreme marketingspeak that was funded with fake money and fat investor pockets. The people doing the mocking will lead the next wave of tech growth
The cultural difference doesn't seem like something to "cringe" over. I also don't think the hyperbolic use is restricted to the US. Pretty much any english speaking country will use "insane" to describe something with emphasis. Certainly normal in the UK and Australia.
> I also don't think the hyperbolic use is restricted to the US.
Strictly restricted? Of course not. But for what it's worth I've been told by numerous Europeans that they perceive casually throwing around extreme hyperbole to be characteristically American behavior. I guess it goes with waitresses pretending to love you.
I agree with the other replies about California Superlative in general, but at least in German it would not be weird for some corporate bro to say he was "WAHNSINNIG stolz..." which means exactly the same thing.
Examples like Digg and MySpace should sufficiently show that iterating on a perfectly fine product is not necessarily a good idea. In fact, being able to stay cool and not steer into a ditch is definitely a rare skill.
While trying to read the Head of Consumer Product's exit Twitter post which was split across 8 or 9 separate Tweets, I was prevented from reading them by the login wall pop up. For me this sums up a lot about the state of the product.
If he's fired now the current board can offer him a severance package that may not be on the table once Elon takes over. Might be a good thing, or strategic?
This is the correct answer, Elon will not be as generous when cutting numbers.
I'll never forget letting go of staff in France and Italy. The employees were overjoyed we were letting them go and got into fights over who would be taking the packages. I learned that they received 1 year of salary upfront tax free with a bunch of additional benefits to help with job training and placement.
An average middle manager friend has had this happen 3 times, each time after a US acquisition. He now has a chateau in the south of france and is very happy with himself.
Severance packages are usually a deal: company pays you $X, and you agree to say (or not say) certain things, and also agree where you might work in the future (i.e. not at a competitor). The current board/CEO may want to keep things stable, and offer generous money to keep things on an even keel; Elon may not care what a former executive says or does.
Why wouldn't it be? The sale hasn't finalized, so unless there's evidence that they're intentionally harming the company they can continue to operate as usual.
First of all, this isn't a diss on the guy who was fired, though it must sting. This is how things go.*
Second of all, for the question "why now?": Twitter's CEO Parag has to "run through the tape": regardless of what he thinks might happen, he has to keep to the plan and in fact can't talk to the potential acquirer. One reason is that perhaps the deal won't happen, but also he's just not allowed to.
If that sounds strange, consider CNN+ which was launched and killed within a couple of weeks. The buyer of CNN couldn't tell CNN what they thought but planned all along to nuke it; the CNN people either didn't understand that, were fanatics, or just didn't give a fuck.
* We don't know the whole story so it's possible he was actually doing something bad. But I think that's very unlikely, as these days those things are usually mentioned rather than being swept under the carpet.
Without knowing details of the severance, non-compete clauses, etc., it is hard to read too much into this. It could be a giant favor, or a giant kick in the balls.
Yeah, but it's the rank and file employees who will now think "I'm not there to defend myself against being fired if I take maternity/paternity leave" who will suffer most. The ones who won't be getting a severance larger than you can ever imagine.
> Yeah, but it's the rank and file employees who will now think "I'm not there to defend myself against being fired if I take maternity/paternity leave"
If an executive is gunning for a rank and file employee, there is no defending yourself except through wrongful termination lawsuits, etc. Being sat in the office when it happens won't help you save your job from an executive that wants you gone.
The severance is on top of the $20M worth of TWTR stock he already holds, according to public records. Plus whatever other assets he holds, which I would presume to be not insubstantial. I think he'll be OK.
yes, they should have waited... paternity leave isn't vacation, it's leave you're taking because you're living in stressful conditions that make it hard to get things done
that said, in this case this guy's likely a millionaire so it's less of a big deal... kind of rude though
Twitter's consumer product team is truly awful and have just made the product more and more miserable to use, so I don't cry too much about the change in leadership.
Having said that, firing someone on paternity leave is terrible and would be rightly illegal in many countries.
Firing someone for being on paternity leave is definitely illegal in most places, but laying off executives and high level business folks before a transition at the top isn't illegal. I wonder if being on paternity leave is a "get out of layoffs free" card where you simply cannot be laid off with others while you're out.
My wife was on maternity leave when Covid layoffs happened at her company. She didn’t get laid off. But at the time we both looked at each other and wondered “did we just get saved by maternity leave?”
She is great at her job so we have no reason to think she would have otherwise been laid off. But plenty of people who were great at their jobs got laid off due to Covid. So it’s hard not to wonder.
Twitter is an engineering for the sake of it company.
Pair that with their actual consumer product being a chaotic scattergun of failed sub-projects, terrible client UI relaunches and the apparent inability to ship anything meaningful given years of time and resources and frankly if I was a large enough investor I'd have been wanting wholesale firings and reorganisation years ago.
The problem is, if they decided they wanted to move on, when would it be "appropriate" "PR-wise"? After he comes back? A few weeks after? They all seem like bad options.
Must have been bad blood if he wasn't even given the opportunity to resign and save face. I can't even imagine the vipers nest of toxicity that building must be at this point.
Might be a severance issue. If he resigns, no severence. I imagine if he is fired he gets some. So he might have forced them to fire him. I know I would.
> Parag asked me to leave after letting me know that he wants to take the team in a different direction.
I interpreted that as he was asked to resign. Which in practice most people consider the same as getting fired. At this level it's rare for someone to actually get terminated though, you would have to do something illegal or highly inappropriate. It's almost always that you're asked to resign and you get a generous severance package to go with it.
Probably a good thing - Twitters product sucks. I feel bad for Kayvon Beykpour since he said he was on paternity leave but I guess that is what happens when you fly high.
I deleted twitter around the time Elon's bid got approved. I was thinking about it for a while, as the app is just another way to get pissed off at the world.
These moves seem odd given that Elon isn't even the owner yet and still has some ways to go to get it all done.
I am getting the feeling twitter will be dead in a couple of years. End up like Tumblr or something. It will still be there, but it will have lost it's place in the top 20 social media platforms.
Looking at this guy's CV, seems as though the industry has decayed into the electronic version of a direct mail operation--one social/video company buying another for its customer list. A thinner ethnic version of Karl Rove has been let go. Forgive me if my eyes remain dry.
Interesting: as a casual Twitter user since 2008, I am completely unaware of Spaces, Communities, Topics, and Creator tools. Probably because I use Tweetdeck (desktop) and Tweetbot (mobile). I never see trending posts or ads, either.
I use the regular app and website as a casual user and am only aware of Topics.
My experience with Topics was really bad, I followed the "web development" topic and it just surfaces tweets of people who took a coding bootcamp and posting the thread emoji a lot. I tried for a while marking tweets in the Topic as not relevant but it didn't change anything.
Musk taking over Twitter can not happen soon enough.
I am sick of woke fascism and Twitter was up until now the prime breeding ground for new age radical left fascists. If the deal goes through the world will be a better place for it.
Good, Twitter has problems worthy of firing people over and in all cases it's ultimately executives that are responsible for all problems, so it makes sense that even if they don't publicly enumerate the specific events that led to the firing, these executives most certainly deserved to be fired.
I may be wrong, but I assume that once Twitter becomes a private company there will be no more board and Elon will be the CEO. Parag may stay at the company in a different role.
I don't think Elon particularly wants to be in the actual driver's seat of Twitter. That's a job and a half, especially when he already has SpaceX and Tesla to manage. I rather assume he will have someone competent at the helm to which he can give incredibly broad orders like 'figure out how to make free speech work'. Though that doesn't mean Parag won't be out - the competent person is likely to be someone who is not soft on free speech like Parag is, and there's a good chance it'll even be Jack.
Don't be surprised if a new company emerges though. There's always some truth behind what he does – even though it doesn't necessarily aligns with what he says.
in the last few days Twitter doesn't force me to login to scroll down tweets anymore. Maybe related to the buy action? Want to show increased engagement in the final weeks for bargaining power?
I've had the opposite experience. In the past few days I've noticed the "login wall" immediately pops up, along with a new feature - it prevented me from navigating back in my browser.
I suspect this was done in part because Elon Musk wants to make some big changes. It would be best for the outgoing CEO to make these difficult firings and then let Elon Musk come in and set a new tone without dealing with this negativity falling on Elon.
I'm not saying this is right, but it makes a lot of sense.
Nothing could be worse than the crap reddit has been doing for the last year or so to force users (or from their perspective, useds, as rms likes to say) to download its app or login. First they outright blocked viewing posts unless logged in, then they disabled that, and now brought it back so that random posts are blocked from viewing with a message "This hasn't been reviewed" whatever that means.
Someone at reddit said, hey we can't be honest with users that we're trying to force them to use our app, we need to lie to them while we're doing it!
I'm kinda hoping that reddit will finally remove old.reddit and the old design, not that I think the new design is good but it would finally make me drop reddit from my social media addiction.
Yeah the new reddit is unusable. Not borderline unusable, but like actually useless. I can't believe they released it and I can't believe people actually use it.
The people that I know who use new reddit, don't even know old reddit exists. They chuckle and say "are you using a website from 2005?" when they see me on old reddit. One of them even works in IT.
Yes I am using a website from 2005. And it's superior in every way.
I ended up buying a blocker to block Reddit on my device because of the pain. It’s a shame I couldn’t stop visiting the website just from willpower though.
If you want just to browse reddit then you can do that through teddit or libreddit front-end instances. And with extensions like Privacy Redirect [1] you can do it automatically.
There are also front-ends for twitter and instagram but these seem to be most faulty - sometimes it takes a while to reach a stable instance and extension tends to overwrite manually selected instances.
Edit: seems there's already a fork of mentioned extension but it's available for manual installation [2]
Reddit is doing this because it works and has real impact on the bottom line, and effectively zero impact on user retention. As long as users continue to behave the way they do it would be fiscally irresponsible to shareholders for the company not to do it, same with Twitter.
If you don't like it the best thing you can do is to bounce and never use the product again. Users doing this en masse is the only thing that will get companies to do anything differently.
This is such a short sighted thinking, aggravating users because it makes some "user retention" metric look good.
You can either remain the central forum hub of the internet, or be replaced when the next big thing comes around. Just think how many major websites came and went during those last short 20 years.
> Nothing could be worse than the crap reddit has been doing for the last year or so to force users (or from their perspective, useds, as rms likes to say) to download its app or login.
They’re doing pretty good… at driving away users. I rarely ever look at Reddit now, particularly compared to a couple years before the change.
That's exactly what got me to use nitter.net to browser twitter. No forced logins. No time limits. No trending section. Most javascript is disabled (you have to click a button to enable it to even play videos). Just tweets.
I would be very happy if it (asking to login) is gone. If that's the case then I can keep being away from social media accounts and still casually surf twitter.
its the reason i completely ignore twitter now. its not a site to reach out to the publicc its a site to communicate to a small subset of logged in users.
I think as far as Twitter is concerned if you never bothered to create an account and your only use of Twitter was being linked to a tweet and then closing the tab you were already ignoring them.
I created an account. I followed some people. They told me it looked like I was a bot and needed to send them a scan of my ID. I laughed and just favorited the few people I wanted to follow. Now I can't even browse their stuff without getting the popups blocking it
A low level IC would not be called while on leave to be fired. But when the company needs a change of excecutive leadership, they aren’t going to wait months because you had a baby. I’m sure he’s being paid through the end of his leave period and besides is compensated in the millions.
I absolutely agree. I don't care what the work email is - even if it's "hey you're fired". You're making them work while he's on leave. The guy is tweeting all these bullshit, empty "my incredible journey" tweets for Twitter damage control.
Maybe they would like to focus on their newborn, their wife, the new family dynamic - you know: important things - and not some stupid web app - which is what I would assume, since they're on maternity leave in the first place.
OT but one thing I've noticed is that Twitter has scaled back its aggressive modal/login prompt when viewing the site without being logged in. This seems to have occurred recently. It seems like it would have nothing to do with the acquisition talks but, curiously, it coincided with them.
It's gotten a little worse, AFAI can tell. Every few days I have to re-load the Twitter tabs I've got in private browsing on my phone (without private browsing, the modals have always come much faster, basically as soon as I scroll down) because they start throwing modals. Then they're fine for a few more days. I didn't used to have to reload the page, ever.
This has not been experience at all. I receive this login wall pop up every time I look at Twitter, including today while trying to read this post. I generally look at Twitter once a day for some link that gets sent to sent to me and this is consistently true.
I can't help but wonder if this is to ensure he gets a good severance package before Musk comes in and cleans house? I can only hope, but it doesn't seem likely based on tone :(.
Feels less condescending than Apple "Geniuses" or Best Buy "Nerds", and pretty in line with "Googlers", "Toasters" or "Hulugans".
Is this a thing most people refer to other employees as most of the time? No, but it helps corporate create an image of a fun, playful workplace. I think it's utter bullshit, but you know, to each their own.
It all sounds like too much Kool-aid has been drunk by the employees. That's the creepy thing about it to me. Another example of where the employees wear company branded clothing. I've worked for a place where the company sold their branded items to employees and the employees would purchase each and every new version that was offered. I swear I could hear them chanting "one of us".
> No, but it helps corporate create an image of a fun, playful workplace
Nah, all of these corporate 'pet names' are applied unilaterally, by the executives to the workers. Condescension is the point. The application of such a nickname is a show of power, meant to remind workers of their place in the system.
I don't disagree with you, hence the sentence immediately following that. That said, tons of middle managers seem to buy into the BS more than the people above or below them, and seem to proudly think of themselves as stupid nickname that is applicable.
If your culture involves calling me anything other than an "employee", I'm not a fan. Personally, I will always think of myself as a "Mercenary" regardless of who's signing my checks currently.
> I'm proud that we changed the perception around Twitter’s pace of innovation, and proud that we shifted the culture internally to make bigger bets, move faster, and eliminate sacred cows.
If he was fired on paternity leave, the credited play is to say nothing. This is potentially a beautiful lawsuit and the last thing you want to do is lose ground on something you said on the internet.
Neither of these things seem particularly kosher moves to make. The question is how to figure out which one it is.
It would seem weird for Parag to be following Musk's orders given how Musk has behaved. It also seems weird for Musk to already have the insight into the company to know specifically who to fire. There's not much advantage to making these changes now.
On the other hand, going rogue and making big strategic decisions about the company really has the potential to burn Parag's reputation for wherever he would move next.
I guess there's a third option - that Musk has expressed a specific view, Parag has a different view, but that they both think that this move is necessary anyway so just got on and did it.