I hope that the wheels stay on sufficiently to get an idea of where EM wants to take Twitter and find out what kind of value it can bring. Having said that, he really made it obvious to me as an eng that the severance is the option I would be taking. Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people. But somebody who takes over the company and accrues so much social debt so quickly for no other discernible reason than looking like the smartest person in the room misses the bar for "the right people" by a pretty significant margin.
>Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people.
I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore". It's a lose-lose situation; I don't think Twitter's problems would be solved by engineering harder; and you will spend 80 hrs/wk where you can end up fired because people aren't as deterministic as cars.
It's a completely bewildering move; I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter. What's most surprising it seems he has no thesis for the company or how it can be made better or what was so terrible about it.
>I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore".
It's been more than twenty years since the dot-com bust and people still think that just because a company is on a website that makes it a tech company. Sure, Twitter's product is twitter.com the website, but most criticism of it and ideas for improvement don't revolve around the engineering aspects of keeping a website running: they revolve around 'product' features and sociological ideas on how to organize the community of users, what kind of content to allow/promote and what to censor.
Likewise, when people talk about the value they see in Twitter, nobody talks about the great distributed system that runs behind the scenes, because its only role is to provide users with the actual product: people go on Twitter to keep up with the news, see funny posts, feel connected with other people during major events or while watching a TV show. The tech is only relevant in that it allows this to happen. By that logic Walmart is a tech company because I can buy stuff on their website.
Thinking that by having engineers go "hardcore" you're automatically going to have a better product is like if a pizza delivery company decided to invest in better cars because people criticized their pizzas.
Sure, if you want to build new features fast you'll need software developers working hard, but much more importantly, you'll need people who understand the product and the users (in their various different communities and habits). That expertise is much harder to quantify and it seems clear that Musk deems it irrelevant, at least judging by the rollout of his most recent features and the utter failure of Twitter Blue
> Thinking that by having engineers go "hardcore" you're automatically going to have a better product is like if a pizza delivery company decided to invest in better cars because people criticized their pizzas.
Bingo. Hard-core engineering has been the lynchpin of Tesla and SpaceX's success -- they literally won via designing and manufacturing superior physical things.
It makes sense that EM would blunder by attempting to reproduce that type of success at Twitter. And it will be a blunder, unless: (a) he plans to build one or more new products (or drastically change the nature of the existing product), and (b) those new or drastically changed products will somehow "win" in a big way that Twitter isn't winning now.
But at least to me, (a) doesn't seem likely and (b) seems even less likely.
(a) seems very likely to me. Didn't he already speak about making Twitter a "super-app"? super-apps are a bit new to the American audience but in China / India they are surprisingly commonplace.
I won't be surprised if he churns through a bunch of different ideas: Subscriptions, Deals with news companies, short form videos + creator tools, different kinds of ad experiences, the edit button, better spam filtering etc.
There's a lot of potential things Twitter could be doing if they didn't limit themselves to their core product.
I don't think (b) is unlikely. Their current product is already highly valuable. You don't need their short form video product to succeed in a way TikTok did but there's enough of an audience to capture there to improve the company's valuation.
Maybe I'm living in a filter bubble, but I think it's going to be hard to build a "super app" that relies on the presence and active participation of reputable brands--publishers, if it's a news platform; businesses, if it's a b2c communications platform--when those brands are currently freaked out by the seemingly erratic behavior of the new CEO.
Even if Musk somehow learns to stop live-tweeting his trial-by-fire, the damage might be done: natural iterations on business plans and features will play into a by now near-universal stereotype of Musk as some sort of shoot-from-the-hip madman, which will deter business partners from committing.
(Like, if I'm Fox News or the NY Times, do I want to commit to publish on Musk's new platform when tomorrow he might get stoned and decide to offer hosting to the Daily Stormer? Or, if I'm Bank of America, do I want to commit to consumer payments when tomorrow Musk might pivot his "super app" to offering video shorts instead?)
Again, maybe I'm living in a bubble, but Musk's reputation seems like a huge impediment to, like, doing this. At all. Ever.
He has. But doesn’t the concept of a super app fly in direct opposition with some of his stated goals and issues regarding Twitter? He has ranted about bloat, both in terms of features, engineering, and employment at Twitter, and all his seemingly disastrous moves since taking over have been aimed at reducing bloat. And yet creating a “super app” sounds like it will be adding back in bloat orders of magnitude larger than whatever currently exists at Twitter.
I’m not sure anything Elon says about the current or future state of Twitter has any credibility. It seems like the company is now being directed via stream of consciousness at this point.
Good point you raise. Without broaching speculative argument as to the general state of Mr Musk’s consciousness-stream:
Giant, bloated organizations (and projects, and other things) can often be helped by reduced-size, highly-directed streams of consciousness suddenly making unilateral changes to them.
One way to term it— and there are many— is crisis restructuring. Whether Twitter was actually in crisis, and whether the unilateral stream of consciousness doing the restructuring is ”divinely inspired,” remains to be seen.
Twitter's cost was based on its market value. Expanding the portfolio, however, isn't as expensive, especially not when your new boss has all the money. That combined with its pull factors is why some people bet on Twitter coming around eventually.
On the other hand, exactly that development towards super-apps makes it even more important that we push for decentralization.
Not to mention that the US is already reigned by mono- and oligopolies in many markets, it is also a privacy disaster.
Many nations, especially in Asia, have little awareness of the concept of privacy. and thus its consequences, so it isn't surprising such offers took off so swiftly there.
You are correct, he did mention (a) as his intent in buying Twitter. Makes me think that he acquired Twitter for the users and wants to introduce those super-app features ASAP.
That may be true for its fit and finish (panel alignments etc.), but the fact that they mastered vertical integration and supply chain management in less than 10 years is beyond amazing. Their powertrain (battery, motors, other hv components like charger etc) are first class and unparalleled in performance (and cost). We’ll see what Lucid will achieve in the next couple of years, their claimed (and validated) numbers such as range are very impressive, but for now, but Tesla has proven that it is a hardcore engineering company in a few important areas, there are others that need to catch up.
Tesla's manufacturing process engineering is unparalleled in the automotive space, but the final products are often buggy because when you reinvent manufacturing overnight and don't nail it 100% all people see are the bugs.
I personally don't like Teslas that much, I think they got a lot of things wrong, but the manufacturing process engineering really is leading the whole car industry by quite a ways.
Check out MunroLive's teardown videos on YouTube where they talk about the changes to part counts, castings, fasteners, and all the internal details that consumers don't notice.
Are you familiar with the innovation diffusion curve[0]? It is very normal for industry leaders to build buggy products, because early adopters value innovation more than perfection. That’s how the whole tech industry works.
Tesla may or may not succeed in appealing to the late majority and laggards, but if they don’t, the Toyota you buy in 15 years will still have benefitted from the industry changes Tesla is leading today.
What is Tesla doing in 2022 that every other car maker hasn't started doing? It seems like they're still building buggy products long after this excuse could work.
Well, its hard when you say things like "every other car maker". Other car makers are starting to do some of the same things, but sometimes these are things Tesla did first.
For example, both Lucid and Rivian use round cells for batteries. BMW is exploring the 4680 form factor. Most other manufacturers still do not use round cells.
Tesla is using large castings for major parts of the frame. I think Volvo is starting to do this? Its not entirely a new trend, but again, Tesla was the first in the auto industry to do it this way.
The way Tesla does the structural pack for the 4680 is unique as well at the moment.
Having said that, I think Tesla people overstate the customer significance of all of these things. The real impact is technically interesting, but isn't really making a big difference in the outcome of the vehicles.
There are other EVs that charge faster and are significantly cheaper too, now that Tesla keeps raising prices.
If you find yourself characterizing something as an "excuse", it's a pretty good sign that you're looking for confirmation of bias rather than new information to form an opinion about.
But sure, how about:
- Model years. Have you seen the 2022 Tesla Model 3? No, because it doesn't exist. Teslas evolve over time. Other manufacturers still have days where the next model year starts being produced and the cars are very different than the previous day.
- Greatly simplified cabin. I hate this, but I think it's the future.
- OTA software updates. Some other makers are doing small updates a bit, but nobody (let alone everybody) is doing what Tesla is here
>Teslas evolve over time. Other manufacturers still have days where the next model year starts being produced and the cars are very different than the previous day
People who like Tesla and people who hate it both seem prone to making declarations about how different it is that seem unfounded to me.
The auto industry underwent a long evolution to regimented model years, and they still make changes in between to this day. Framing a lack of model years as progress rather than regress by ~a half century seems arbitrary to me.
When cars are recalled, it isn't uncommon for the population to be defined as a range of serial numbers. The fact that recalls aren't always based on model years seems like pretty good evidence that changes are made in between, doesn't it?
I thought the exact same thing, there's really absolutely nothing special about Tesla anymore.
I appreciate the direction they pushed the industry towards, but I feel like the innovation has finished and I'd expect a lot of the problems to be ironed out.
Toyota on the other hand have produced a car which runs on hydrogen, it is in production and for sale in the USA right now. They also do hybrids and I'm sure if they wanted to, they'd do electric no problems.
American automotive manufacturing became hyper-conservative over time. A willingness to let (non-safety-critical (1)) bugs get to market with the tradeoff of making products you otherwise wouldn't is a market-distinguishing tradeoff.
(1) But my larger concern is that I can't say about Tesla that only non-safety-critical bugs are making it out the door, so I also won't buy one. Because unlike a buggy phone or buggy smart watch, a buggy car with safety-critical bugs can kill other people, so there's wisdom in disallowing it.
Which doubles the ironic nature because most of the Japanese cars sold in the US are built in the US, and many (most) of the "US Cars" that are sold in the US are built in Mexico and Canada.
Why... unions. Japanese Manufacturers have evaded the UAW problem, where Ford and GM have had to flee the nation to get out from under decades of sunk costs
It still absolutely rocks if acceleration speed is your most important metric (which I personally find quite compelling), but in pretty much every other aspect they're janky cars compared to similar vehicles in the same price range and even some cheaper ones. Very fun to drive though.
THIS. "Extremely powerful & fast, fun to drive, and the company making 'em is run by an alpha macho guy who also builds space rockets"...yeah, that has huge emotional appeal to a large number of well-to-do males - who would not want to be seen in a Nissan Leaf, Toyota Prius, etc.
Sounds more like cargo-culting boys rather than adult males... I've personally know noone who decides car buys based on this, and this counts also 2 tesla owners. Car sale tax discounts, free charging, plenty of charging spots were the actual reasons for those 2 (myself I am still happily on petrol for next decade at least, thank you)
That's interesting. I don't own a car and I'm not looking for one, but I still had the impression Tesla was leading on range. However, they're beaten at both price levels, potentially with a significant price discount.
Mercedes EQS 450+, 640km, €106,307
Tesla Model S Plaid, 540km, €140,995
Mercedes EQE 350+, 525km, € 79,850
Tesla Model 3 LR DM, 485km, € 60,995
BMW i4 eDrive40, 470km, € 60,630
VW ID.3 Pro S 5Seats 450km, € 43,720
There's a third issue besides price and range in the EV market right now. Wait time. e.g. that VW ID.3 has a wait time of over a year for delivery. That crosses it off my shopping list, unfortunately.
In Europe where I live - VW, BMW and Mercedes do not have a reliable system of recharging for longer trips. Why they are not working to create that is beyond me.
You don't seem to be across what's happening in Europe. All of the companies you mentioned are invested in Ionity which provides 350 kW chargers at over 400 locations:
Europe has standardized on CCS Type 2 Combo for charging. Any CCS EV can charge on any CCS charging network. Teslas can charge on Ionity, BMWs can charge on Tesla chargers, charging networks like FastNed, BP, GridServe, EnBW, Circle K and friends can charge all brands, etc.:
It is still not that great in the USA. In the Pacific Northwest, if I want to goto Spokane, I have to hope the the Electrify America charging stations in Ellensburg aren't down again. One point of failure doesn't make me feel very comfortable, especially since EA is so flaky (if Tesla opens up there supercharger network, I'll be the first to buy an adapter).
If I want to go down to John Day national monument in eastern Oregon, things are even worse. Things will get better (oh, and we want to do a trip to Anchorage someday...).
That is one of the best tests out there, IMO. I do wish they'd add their charge curve details to it somehow. Something like the estimated time to completely a 600 mile trip would be an interesting detail, as range isn't the only thing that matters.
Aren't all EV ranges measured based on the latest EU measurement standard? Which means cars are incredibly prepped for those tests, but the results are not made up and they are more or less comparable between models and brands.
make sure to researched tested vs claimed range, Teslas have good range but fall short from claimed range by large %, there are cars that end up having the same or better range like the Taycan even though the claimed range from Porsche is less! do your own research, correlation is not your coin, etc
I can't agree with that. They are certainly not janky compared to the Leaf or Bolt and up until fairly recently the 3 was price competitive with the Bolt.
Beyond that, comparisons get more complicated, but there are still perks to the 3/Y. For example, the Ioniq 5 and EV6 charge faster but have less real world range at highway speeds. In practice, this negates most of their charging advantage.
If you want the best EV sedan for road tripping in the US right now, there is nothing lower price and also better than the 3 LR.
Only if we look at the only competition of Tesla being other electric cars, which has never been the case. It was just its most distinguishing feature, but ultimately it's an implementation detail.
If you want to argue that there is really nothing superior about Tesla's engineering that's fine, but you can't shove implementation details under the rug when it suits you. For there to be nothing superior in their engineering there must also be no implementation detail that is superior.
My "implementation detail" comment above does not refer to the quality of engineering overall, but specifically in the context of competition. Yes, when comparing electric cars, the quality of the electric engine is a very large element; but it is much smaller if we're comparing all the elements that matter to someone buying a car (quality of body construction, interior finishing, steering etc).
Why should they bother? They can go into electrics at their own pace, when the infrastructure and demand is better, and still eat Tesla's lunch.
Heck, even Audi A.G. that you've mentioned (not close to being the biggest car company) is comparable to Tesla numbers-wise.
In many industries it's not the first movers that get the market, it's the big mature market-friendly solutions (sort of how the iPod wasn't the first commercial mp3 player).
It's not like people want them to optimize for acceleration anyway...
>Why should they bother? They can go into electrics at their own pace, when the infrastructure and demand is better, and still eat Tesla's lunch.
I had a lecture about electric mobility last semester where a tech lead (don't want to dox them) from Daimler's electric truck program and a tech lead from Daimler's electric car program were invited. In regards to electric trucks things seem to be going great but the electric car program had massive problems with Tesla. The person in question was very hyped about the competition but admitted they got beat with the previous gen cars and that they had to completely redesign their processes to be quicker since Tesla is constantly updating their models. They were hoping to be slightly better than Tesla this gen and to get ahead next gen. So in summary I'd say that didn't turn out great for them.
>It's not like people want them to optimize for acceleration anyway...
The many YouTube views of teslas beating sports cars would beg to differ. If people didn't want acceleration everyone would be driving an 80HP hatchback or a 120-160HP SUV.
So, being on par (on even a tad ahead) of the biggest competitor in the current gen, and being ahead of the competition in the next gen, is bad? Sounds fairly good to me, especially when you have trucks, ICE and EV, and ICE cars that provide a lot of cash to finance all of that development.
That's kind of the issue. Daimler's EV car project is considered a flop because it's only alive due to Daimler being able to lose money from it.
If they started earlier they would have been able to earn some of that money that went to Tesla, could have ironed out the issues while EVs were still considered in something like an open beta where owners had a lot more tolerance for issues and their processes would have become more agile naturally due to the competition with Tesla. Not to mention they could have improved their image as a luxury EV manufacturer by being one of the first.
You can even see the panic about being late to the game on Daimler's part. Their first gen EVs was made using ICE chassis which logically could not compete with cars designed from the ground up to be electric.
They can't enter a new market at their own pace when it is eating demand for their existing market. If competitors wait another 10 years to bring a serious EV to market, they won't have the revenue to cover their expenses on their existing ICE business lines, much less fund the capex needed to get into EVs. And most car companies have a lot of debt, so the problem will be even worse.
Right now EVs make up such a minimal percentage of the car market that they aren't making a meaningful dent in ICE demand, but once they hit 10% or more, car companies that don't have a slice of that segment are going to be feeling it financially. I expect there will be major casualties in the car business because of failure to get into the EV market fast enough.
Benz is a little behind, but Porsche and Audi are doing just fine, in general. The Taycan and etron gt are both fantastic vehicles that compare well with the Model S. The larger etron SUV is about to get a revision that will make it very competitive as well.
The only one that I dislike within Audi is the Q4 etron. Its too close to the id4, IMO.
Tesla showed that there is a viable market for electric cars if the look and work like "regular" cars, not tiny spaceships, and if the supporting infrastructure is in place (Superchargers).
Tesla was not the first EV sold in the US. Earlier attempts by the established manufacturers were curiosities at best. And now that Tesla proved that EVs can actually be good, and can be made profitable, those established manufacturers are willing to move into that market.
So, no, it's not about engineering, it's about taking the risk and committing to expanding the market.
Exactly, Tesla also pushed the envelope with charging speeds, at a time when a lot of people in the industry were limiting things to 50kw and treating EVs as little purely city cars.
The iMiev preceded the Tesla and sold better in many part of the world because it was a more decent proposal.
What Tesla did was making greenwashing and wasting energy with electricity dfast and cool. It is probably better than wasting with ICE in nuclear powered countries but that is not what the world need right now or ever.
Not sure about engineering.
But they build a electric-car factory from scratch in Berlin in 2 years during the pandemic.
Check how many years other companies take to build ICE or electric car factories…
Not sure how “completed” it is, but it already produced Model Y, right?
Compare that with VW, how many electric cars they are making, and how long did the biggest auto-manufacter in Germany (not a bad country for Engineering standards) took to get factories ready for EVs?
Not compared to manufacturers with decades of experience no. But making cars is hard. Starting Tesla from a clean sheet is impressive.
Think about all the Chinese manufacturers, that for years were churning out the butts of jokes. How many of those would have survived in an actual competitive market?
No. But he took it from the proverbial garden shed to a global company.
I'm not a musk fan boy, but what he did with Tesla is impressive.
Compared to the company they were buying chassis from (lotus). If someone took lotus to the size of Tesla in less than 2 decades, would you not say that's impressive?
Starting a boutique sports car manufacturer is 'relatively' easy. Making a global car company, not so much.
Yeah, his skill is in hucksterism. That can be used for good (Tesla), but it can also be used for ill (all the hyperloop nonsense). But he's still a huckster.
When I use the term "hard-core engineering", I'm not referring to how "hard" people work. I'm referring to how advanced the required engineering is to accomplish a goal.
I think this is a really interesting move, that, if Elon hadn't fucked things up so badly, could actually have a chance of making the acquisition work. I think that TikTok is a political issue and the government would like to (and IMO should) kill it because of the Chinese issue, but won't because they fear the user backlash. If Vine could gain enough of a user base to be a credible fallback option, then banning TikTok from the US market would be politically feasible, and Vine would be worth a fortune.
I do not think twitter has the ML capabilities you need to built a TT competitor, and they aren’t just competing with TT anymore. YouTube, IG, and FB are already getting pretty close. Elon would have to something pretty different than just copying them
SpaceX did some good standard mainstream solutions. Sometimes success is not about some exotic innovation but doing your normal job well. A standard lox kerosene gas generator rocket engine. Flat aluminum panel construction. Only the interstage is composite. Started small with Falcon 1. The Merlin engine had heritage from NASA's FASTRAC program.
If you look at Ariane V, Atlas V or Delta IV, they all have some peculiarities and operational warts. Large solid rockets, Russian engine, hydrogen. In some sense, Falcon 9 is the most "ordinary" of the launchers available now.
He also spent 44 billion on it, which he had, instead of using said 44 billion to lobby politicians of both parties and invest directly into whatever he wanted to do with the weapons program money. Sounds like a really solid strategy to me.
Lobbying is surprisingly cheap. The entire pharma industry spends $5B/year, while the entire fossil fuel industry spends $2B/year[0]. Both have achieved a large degree of control over government decisions affecting them.
Elon could have had his weapons program for $1B. He could have dominated defense spending for a decade for $25B. I don’t think the ROI of this $44B of very indirect investment will compare.
Keep in mind he actually spent around half that. There were significant loans and other investments contributing.
He needs more than lobbying, he needs to sway an election. But there were obviously other reasons as well, he probably thinks a hive mind is cool to own and he could finally build his everything app X, etc.. it's just the orbital weapons program is near the top of that list as he thinks it's necessary to save humanity from itself. From free-wheeling philosophy discussions, he seems to think this SkyNet system is actually a kind of Roko's Basilisk.
It was $13B in loans from a variety of banks. Lenders makes yes/no decision on loans, they do not retain management interest the way equity investors do.
This is what I hate about politics and political reporting. People can make a vaguely plausible sounding insinuation about anything being connected. And then noone can disprove it.
But.. isn't he trying to turn it into a Super App like WeChat? That means they have to build about 10 other huge products plus every new idea the boss comes out with in by next week. After having their headcount cut in half. Sounds pretty hardcore to me
If he’s trying to do that, then I’d say he should focus outside of engineering and more on product design, marketing, and brand.
“How to build a Super App” is not that complicated, from an engineering perspective. It does requires hard work, especially if you want to build it fast.
But the big problem is not really how to build it as much as how to make it successful: how to make people use your app over other ones they already use. There are apps like Venmo and WhatsApp that cover WeChat’s use cases pretty well, why should people switch to Twitter?
Step one would probably be to get people to trust your app. I don’t think the latest developments at Twitter make it seem particularly trustworthy
> the great distributed system that runs behind the scenes
As someone is reported to have been asked in a Twitter job interview, when a celebrity with 10,000,000 followers sends out a tweet, how do you deliver them all within 3 seconds?
Did someone measure the 3 seconds delay on tweets sent to 10 mil followers ? Or just some assumption based on lower scale tests ?
I'd imagine "shard the servers serving the subscription to users, accessing sharded database/queue of new tweets" would get you close. Much easier to do with established software now than when twitter was created tho.
if my memory serves me correctly, for "standard" users, tweets are push - it will be pushed to all your subscribers, so they get instant feeds. for "celebrities", tweets are pull - when you open your feed it will pull the latest tweets for your celebrities from a dedicated cache for celebrity tweets
Who in their right mind would rely on Tweets for a calamity??
Phones have built-in support for emergency messages (that bypass all normal silences and notification hiders, unless you explicitly go into settings and disable emergency message support), and carriers are required by law to broadcast such messages to everyone in range.
Twitter is a niche social network (at least in most of the world) and even of those that use it, a huge number will have various forms of disabled notifications.
I personally am rarely on Twitter but it used to be an invaluable resource when you're in an area and don't really have time for a fully fleshed out news article to come out the next day about what's going on on the ground. Block club Chicago was tweeting and retweeting videos of police beating up protesters that night a couple blocks from my apartment in 2020, well ahead of the articles that came out the next day.
It was also interesting to see in real time an active disinformation campaign materialize and disappear that same day. Up until around 1 AM there were a lot of people posting about how the "Proud Boys" were planning to show up or had shown up and encouraging people to bring weapons, then all initial tweets were deleted late at night, with only screen shots or people who had quoted them still being available on the site. But that was a problem I hope would be fixed instead of the removal of the checks to make it all in to a shit show.
Sure, I'm not saying Twitter had no value or that Musk isn't destroying what value it had - he clearly is.
I'm just pointing out a limited fact - that the 3s limit is not relevant even for emergency situations, as no one does or should rely on emergency tweets.
It's used for notifying residents of earthquake, tsunami, and other disaster risks. Residents in japan for most immediate disasters will hear an alert through the national system (via phones, TV, radio, etc) and on top of that residents can check the NERV twitter or other sources to determine what degree of threat it is and what the next best course of action is.
Was like "Huh, didn't know Anno took the name of a real organisation for his show", but from seeing the logo is the logo of the fictional anime organisation, the inspiration is clearly reversed. It seems a real app that gives notifications from actual earthquake warning systems, I wonder if they licensed that logo.
EDIT: Apparently they did some sort of cross promo deal with 3.0+1.0 after existing for a few years, so Khara is aware of them so they must have some sort of agreement to use that name and logo
Agreed. That's what the J-alert system is for. It sends out your basic "get to cover", "stay covered", "find high ground" type alerts but the NERV bulletins give you quite a bit more useful information on where else is affected and what impact that will have. Also worth noting that NERV supports a mobile app which can give you only the useful subset of notifications.
IMHO J-alert is for the first second and NERV is for the seconds after.
I mean, their original setup during early years (and I'm not making this up) required them to restart their Rails service every day, else it would crash/stuck because of memory leaks.
That's not a "tech startup" based on "hardcore engineering", that's a startup based on a social idea and implemented with some trivial tech.
Scaling this to hundreds of millions is not exactly a "hardcore engineering" thing either. Mostly regular engineering with some good practices (like share nothing) and devops. Tons of companies do just the same, today you can even do it from your bedroom by building on top of AWS, GAE, etc, there are even templates for this...
I think you're dramatically underestimating the scope and scale of the problems Twitter had to solve. See the thread below for examples of the sort of solutions they had to build because open source or cloud-hosted solutions weren't available or viable.
>Do you think they still run Ruby that can't reclaim allocated unmanaged memory?
No, I don't.
My point is their initial success years (which wasn't that off the current product) wasn't some hardcore engineering feat: just a cruder-than-average Rails app.
Around 2012-2015 we had someone on-call over the holidays do a redeploy every few days because of Rails memory growth at our now-IPO'd ecommerce giant.
This growth impacted every rails app back then, the popular ones more quickly is all..
It is not about engineering, it is about conformity. As you implicitly acknowledge, Twitter does not need as much engineering, nor does it need creative engineering. For engineering, Elon needs cogs, preferably those who buy into his cult of personality.
As for the hard to quantify work, Elon needs people he can trust. Even if the existing people are good, they can not be trusted. Committing to something like Twitter 2 is as good an oath as it gets. The other alternative is to just fire everyone he did not hire himself.
Engineering, for most digital products, is as good as much you can ignore it exists.
I remember the dread that must be dealing with their process load when I get to a whale page, not when I'm tweeting successfully.
Anyway, the thing here is that since EM wants to enact that much change in a short time frame as possible, and guessing he's likely to make mistakes along the way, he'll need engineering work as hard as possible.
> It's been more than twenty years since the dot-com bust and people still think that just because a company is on a website that makes it a tech company.
Yes like Instagram and others. It was not tech stack that was sold but community of users. I guess Musk's lenders knows this.
> company is on a website that makes it a tech company
Well, we generally consider social media companies tech companies. And since they don't really have anything else other than the tech stack (and the users on it, but they don't "have" those), not sure as what you would characterise it.
> ideas for improvement don't revolve around the engineering aspects of keeping a website running
What makes you think that the desired engineering improvements are about "keeping [the] website running"?
It seems to me that what is being sought are engineering solutions to, for example, stop the spread misinformation without censorship. That would be pretty cool, I think. And I can imagine a way of pulling it off, because we actually have such mechanisms in the (non-internet) social networks that make up what Jonathan Rauch calls The Constitution of Knowledge.[1]
These mechanisms use network effects to amplify good information and attenuate (but not censor) bad information. What is good and bad? The network decides this by what information it attenuates or amplifies. Bad scientific papers don't get cited, good ones do. The stories in the National Enquirer don't get picked up by other papers, and nobody believes them to be true.
This obviously isn't perfect, but it's about as good as it's gonna get, and works pretty well in practice.
Internet social media disrupted these mechanisms by its extreme virality, which seems to apply specifically to bad information. It just spreads extremely fast, literally exponentially (not the "very large" meaning of "exponential"). Kind of like a virus.
And we learned recently that to suppress a viral pandemic, completely 100% sterilising immunity is not actually needed. You just need to slow it down enough to get the R number below 1, ideally significantly below 1. That's what I think the "Do you want to read the article first before retweeting?" prompts are for: slow things down a bit.
Of course "slowing things down a bit" is counter to your economic self-interest and fiduciary responsibility when you're an ad-driven company. So getting off ads completely or at least partly is an important part of it.
> Thinking that by having engineers go "hardcore" you're automatically going to have a better product
Who thinks that? Why do you believe that anyone thinks this? While I don't agree with Elon's approach, the causation would clearly be the other way around: there is a lot of engineering to do to get to a better product (less dependent on ads, more attenuation of bad information without censorship etc.). And all that has to be done while under a bit of pressure, this ain't a Greenfield project with unlimited runway. So yeah, might get a bit "hardcore".
> Well, we generally consider social media companies tech companies. And since they don't really have anything else other than the tech stack (and the users on it, but they don't "have" those), not sure as what you would characterise it.
Consider where the bulk of the revenue comes from and you’ll find out what industry the company is actually in.
So ads.. as much as I dislike the industry, that's also an eng intensive task, right, as you attempt to predict user tendencies, raise engagement by showing the right shit, capture more data, and engage in the bot arms race.
Interestingly enough, it turns out that Twitter never really built a DR system for performance ads, hence why the brands pulling out can crater their revenue.
nope, it's direct response advertising, which is the stuff that gets you to click and purchase online.
Both FB and Google have really successful systems for this, and it insulates them massively from brand safety concerns. It appears that Twitter never invested in this (which is kinda insane tbh), and hence the large brand advertisers have a lot more power over them.
Maybe youre right about them pursuing engagement for its own sake, maybe they're not in that game.
Though, whatever approach you have in discovery, or ranking posts, you're having an impact on your users, and promote a certain dynamic, no? I imagine their next approach won't be the equivalent of letting go of the steering wheel, just maybe not mindlessly chasing the same metrics as they are currently.
Maybe that's a little too social psych to call tech/engineering, but I imagine the data science that would support that would be quite exciting.
Facebook and Google have huge tech operations, but Facebook and Twitter are content distributors and market aggregators, not tech companies.
You can buy a jet or a rocket, but you can't buy a Twitter or a Facebook. You can't even hire part of their stack. (FB has content deals and APIs for advertisers and marketers, but not - so far as I know - direct access to the servers.)
Which is why AWS is a tech company. But Amazon is an online store that happens to use tech.
It's like saying book publishers are really just printers, or FedEx is really an airline and truck driving company.
Some publishers do indeed do their R&D for print operations and logistics. But they're still primarily content houses. Any engineering that happens is a means to a productive end, not a product in itself.
I always thought tech was used as the lever in a tech company..
Doesn't matter what you sell, or service you offer, but if you're leveraging technology to add large numbers of users with a marginal increase in cost, I see that as a tech company.
This generally means there is an internal focus on the technology itself as any improvement can have a direct link to a user's LTV.
But maybe I'm talking less tech company, and more tech led organisation..
> engineering solutions to, for example, stop the spread misinformation without censorship.
I really don't think this is an engineering problem. If I was a tech lead and a product manager came up to me with this, I'd tell them they need to figure out what they mean before they start talking to engineers. Software-Development is not concerned with the nature of truth and misinformation, it is concerned with what works given precise goals.
Nobody in engineering school or at an engineering job gets taught or learns what counts as misinformation and how to assess it: you need people with humanities expertise for this.
The "Do you want to read..." prompts are actually a good example of what I mean, because the engineering that goes into making those is quite trivial. But the idea of using them, trying to make them effective at their goal, and determining how much they're working, these are all things that fall outside of engineering, and have more to do with product-design and sociology.
Creating a feature is not as important as getting people to use it, and use it the right way.
Based on the features Elon has rolled out so far (Twitter Blue), it seems to me they're putting more emphasis on just building it, rather than figuring out how people will use it and whether it will be beneficial
By that definition no tech company is a tech company. People search things on google because they want to find information , not because of the algorithms that bring that information. People use stable diffusion because they want to create images , whatever the cool ai technology behind it.
I would argue that when the primary products of a company are technologies, they are tech companies. That would include TSMC, AMD, AWS and much of Microsoft.
If your products are just BUILT using technology, well then you may consider yourself in another business. Whether that is a clothing, cars, pharmaceutical, weaponry or social media platforms (sorted by increasing potential for harm ;)
Still, even if you're in the last category, it may be fair to consider it "tech" if the main challenges/differentiating factors in creating the product is scienc/engineering/technological rather than for instance design, marketing or organizational efficiency.
Exactly. In the real world no one cares what tech stack you use, whether it's a monolith or not. Businesses serve customer needs. Tech is the tool and is only useful to that extent.
> I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter.
The first time? It really looks like it was the result of a disagreement with the Twitter board. They wouldn't accept his advice or help on how to make twitter better after he became a 9.1% shareholder. The offer to buy the company outright might have been more spite than anything else.
I think he calmed down and realised what a bad idea his offer was (especially at that price), and then spent the next month or so trying to back out.
The second time? Well, he was kind of trapped and was actually forced to buy it.
The twitter board were suing him to hold him to the binding deal to buy at $44 billion that he signed. He only finalised the deal to avoid the lawsuit. It's possible he was afraid of what discovery would reveal.
He bought it because he was sued for specific performance and was legally screwed in every available way. He literally waived due diligence and signed a contract with a specific performance clause.
Companies couldn’t prove a MAC in the middle of the 08 housing crash, musk sure as hell wasn’t having screwed every legal argument he had available weeks in advance.
His options were buy now for 44 billion or buy maybe a month later for 44 billion plus whatever the court decided to tack on for hellishly bad faith dealing and arguments.
His legal team tried every truck available and even a lousy “well we said we’d buy it so they should drop the lawsuit “ play. The court saw right through and said “you get 4 weeks to buy and if not then the suit continues”
So they paid up because to claim you’re going to but then to not go through with it would have seen the most wrathfully phenomenal court proceeding in history.
Discovery was just an added bonus of embarrassment and very unlikely to be related at all. Every sound legal mind working for musk was probably screaming at him to shut up and eventually told him he was going to have to go through. The ONLY way this current situation could be worse is if he had continued to try and fight it after his last Hail Mary because that specific court exists almost solely to VERY quickly mitigate multi billion dollar deals and would absolutely make a very clear example out of anyone who thought they were too rich to touch.
Musk may be one of the most wealthy men in the world but Delaware deals with companies with MUCH higher net worth and resources constantly.
Trump is a con-man. But Musk? Seeing how Musk's companies have actually put real cars on the road and rockets into space, I'm having a hard time buying that particular accusation.
Yes, he was forced to buy it ... after he initially signed a paper committing to buy it. He was only forced after trying to get out of what he had signed.
It would have cost him "only" a $B to weasel out, much less than expected losses. So it has value to him greater than those losses. Would be unsurprising if he used it for political leverage. I don't think he is allowed to run for the presidency, but he can probably seat his choice.
This is a common misunderstanding. The $1B clause was for if the deal was blocked by regulators, it had nothing to do with Elon just deciding to back out of the deal, so just paying that to walk away was never an option. The commenters above saying that the court was about to order specific performance have it right.
(Reverse) break-up fees are a tool to ensure commitment of both sides to a deal. The main target in the Twitter deal was probably the financing, not the regulatory case, making it a bit less attractive to fail the financing for the deal somehow to get out of it (although there was some debate how realistic that option was anyways). And in the other direction, Twitter was on the hook for a billion for various things it could've done to hurt the deal, e.g. the board recommending shareholders vote against it, or for a competing offer.
Its clear that Jack Dorsey let Elon know about the only real alternative path for Twitter, which is opening protocols and reversing profit-seeking decisions made many years ago now.
However, I'm beginning to think Elon didn't get the deep dive he needed to understand what this really means. I have my ears up for the language or relationships showing he is really spending time on this... but I have only seen a dog chasing its tail.
At some level, Elon is characteristically aligned with this version of Twitter, however by saddling current Twitter with so much serviceable debt it is probably more difficult to go back in time than it ever was before.
Dorsey is buddy buddy with Musk and has proven time and time again he'll say whatever needs to be said in the moment without ever committing to it. Excuse me for not believing a single second any idea he puts forward. He had every opportunity to do it while he was there, was majority shareholder for the longest time.
Him saying he's working on web5 should really clue you in on the kind of lying clown he is.
> But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened—the bastards went to four blades. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three blades and a strip. Moisture or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to five blades.
Yep. Although I don’t understand why anyone thought that would amount to anything WRT Twitter itself. I honestly laughed when I read this take a few weeks back:
An open protocol isn’t going to help Twitter’s debt load, indeed giving up platform control will very very much do the opposite. Musk knows this. And anyways, there are no engineers left to massively redesign their platform to become less profitable.
There is also a question of spending $44B to rebuild a company from scratch. Couldn’t Musk have spent under a billion to create a startup and effectively competed with Twitter ?
If he really wants to do that, by buying Twitter he removed the incumbent and also acquired its users. Much easier than competing and trying to make people switch to a new service.
My unverifiable prediction: no matter how many users will leave Twitter, the ones left will be more than the ones that would be using a new service after 1, 2, 5 years.
Well, not often, no. I'm not really expecting that to happen with Twitter, I just think it IS a possibility. How many websites/apps that were as big as Twitter have totally disappeared?
I'd argue neither was anywhere near as big as twitter. In terms of users, maybe — I have no idea. But in terms of reach and influence? I don't think so.
I think regardless numbers, it is usually a slow burn for situations like these. And probably plenty of people will probably not see a space to fill and try their luck. Hopefully, one of them will work.
Curious about how well collateralized that debt is. At current rates I’d be surprised banks would want to write 10s of billions for twitter. Particularly when the business plan is “I will lay off 75% of the company and hope things hold together.”
I have only been reading the details through Money Stuff, but according to Levine, the banks are taking a bath on the deal. Currently trying to underwrite the debt for 60-70 cents on the dollar.
And they were offered like 50 cents, if memory serves well. Brings some serious Margin Call vibes, doesn't it? "Sell everything, today", getting 50 cents is better the 30 or, worst case, nothing. Looking forward for the banks to find loopholes in the agreements with Musk and sue him for negligence or something.
Margin Call. I have no idea why it wasn't more well-known. Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Zachary Quinto, Paul Bettany, Demi Moore, Aasif Mandvi, Stanley Tucci. It's about a thinly-disguised Goldman Sachs realizing the housing market was about to collapse in 2008 and unloading all their toxic assets in a single day.
I get the sense that Dorsey played Musk hard. Musk heard what he wanted to hear, and Dorsey walked away with a cool billion. Musk is wrecking the place and laying the ground for the next thing, which Dorsey was already working on.
Right? I can't help but wonder if he's planning on doing something in the fediverse in some way. It'd be interesting to see a bunch of ex-twitter folks boot up a crowdfunded mastodon instance.
Interesting. I hope this ends up being a pull request or somesuch on activitypub, rather than a standalone competing standard. They're right that migration is a problem on activitypub atm, though I'm not sure there's a good way to build it into the protocol. Maybe have a server tag a couple of others as trusted backups?
But he was at the helm of Twitter for how long? He had the opportunity to pursue all those things. Musk and Darsey’s text message thread was just two billionaires convincing themselves they’re as smart as they think they are.
"We have to throw away the entire business and product and rebuild it in a model where our old thing is impossible" is a tough sell to a boardroom, obviously.
I mean, there is a model that works, it's Discord. Small self-associating groups from various parts of our lives. TBH that's so far ahead of facebook - humans draw meaning from being in groups where there groups are small enough to know and have repeat interactions with people. You all know bigger discords you're in (gpu drop discord lol) where you're just a face in the sea and it's much harder to maintain meaningful relationships in a place like that, fediverse would be like that too. Humans evolved for smaller group sizes and a group of like 30 or 50 active users is EXCELLENT for social media, Discord nails this perfectly, personal communication breaks down at like 75-100 active users tops.
Facebook is an ocean and it's unstructured (Google Plus or whatever had user grouping, which was an advancement imo - you can say "that's a work person" and interact with them in certain ways) unless you go out of your way to set it up like that. Discord really just works amazingly well for that, I have tons of hobby groups and game groups where I've known people for a super long time and friend groups from whatever community. Kids have the "school chat discords" and if I was in college we'd have had study groups on it I'm sure, we had FB groups then. No reason you can't have a "family discord" too (so uncool, mom!).
Mastodon basically is (or could be) that as a protocol, if you want to treat it like that. Dress it up in a discord-like client and get it onto phones/etc and make the user-story good. People already show they'll pay to self-host discord servers etc, so come up with a cool "Algo" style ansible deployment thingy that makes it super simple, just fires up a server on an AWS account for you and gives you a link you can send to your friends etc. Congrats, you are now the Underwater Basketweaving Enthusiasts Discord Server, here's a random (or generated human-meaningful) link. Not everybody needs to run a server, but, make it easy enough that people can do it. And as a user, just join the discords you like and let the server op run it/mod it, just like now.
What exactly does Twitter do in this business model, though, lol? And how do you get there? Twitter's "broadcast" model is nothing at all like that. I guess they're gonna... throw it all away and start fresh? Seems like that's what's happening I guess.
But I guess I just don't see the value in federation generally, to the end user. Pods aren't authoritative, they're decentralized and human-meaningful (in Zooko's Triangle), so oauth type stuff doesn't really matter, I would never want to "auth against UnderwaterBasketweaving" or whatever, because it's trivial to spin up another instance and make fake users etc. And why would I want to "cross the streams" between my home and work pods, or let Wendys marketing come and mine/advertise my server, etc, if I'm the one running it? Am I paying for wendys to scrape my content? Consistent cross-discord-instance identity is all I really want from social media, at most and that doesn't need to be tied to this at all, you can do that via google auth or some other idp(s) that solves that problem. Where is the revenue stream in this at all?
I don't want "community moderation service" in my decentralized communities... there are places where "work moderation" would pitch a fit and some places where work protocol would be incredibly uncool. But with small communities, O(1) moderation works fine, you don't need it, just let the discord server op do discord mod shit and delegate roles/etc to other mods too. Yes, godmode is fine in self-organizing communities because if moderation drifts sufficiently far from group norms the community will reorganize without you. Crossing the streams also ruins that, it means you have to moderate the firehose or punt it to an authority who will, and it's all just a big "why" when discord mods are fine.
Similarly, want a feed of interesting content? We had an app for that, it was called "mee6 bot", and the server admin asks what twitters/youtubes/etc people want for certain channels. You want a new channel? Ask for it, or make it. I am on a server with 30-ish active members and everyone has basic "add channel/rename/reorder/etc" and "warn" punishments etc, it's fine. If you're constantly being a dick you'd get kicked out but it's never been a problem. Family discord, or work discord, or some other close-knit irl community? just let people do things. social ostracism will keep people in line with the norms, people mostly don't like losing friends.
(maybe disk quotas though, because that is one that will add up faster than users realize. Nobody has solved "free content service" without it being tethered to another business, like youtube or imgur or discord. no, I am not interested in your IPFS childporncoin either. give me a sustainable, "local" method for hosting content... like requiring users to host content themselves on an instance or server hosts providing user-quotas for hosting etc. Define how important you consider your content (indefinite, 30 days, etc) and refuse new uploads if they're past quota.)
And if you just want a service where you click it and it runs in a hosted instance by a cloud provider... well, discord exists, and dropbox remains popular even in a world of NASs, etc.
But none of that has anything to do with Twitter or will have anything to do with Twitter, lol.
Discord is absolutely horrible for discovery tho. It's fine for private communities but it is entirely ungooglable so you need the other forms of media to even get people to attend say your community around some video game.
I actually detest some companies using it as official communication for their product as none of the question answered are googlable so instead of googling "how to do X" and get some forum post, there is nothing and you have to sign onto their discord and ask same question.
Impossible search is a feature: where there is search there are ads, paid links and SEO spam, instead of people you trust, or at least people you know, giving out links to Discord servers.
I've been having the same feeling about discord - this is the future for social media, or at least the social media I want:
- Smaller streams, fewer people, more personal.
- No great feed of everything. You go to a place to read about a thing. Different thing, different place.
If discord had a bit more work that would enable persistent threads like reddit, and encouraged longer, more thoughtful posts like HN and quality moderation, it would be perfect.
Actually, what I want is HN/Discord mashup. Anybody want to fund it?
basically: humans can totally interact in 10 x O(50) communities despite being utterly unable to interact in 1 x O(500) community. That's really the same lesson as scrum teams too, just at a different scale.
human empathy and working set is totally limited by team size and cache level, you need to optimize for facing the same problems/interests as the person next to you.
Families/localities/regions are the cache layers of empathy. And I'm using "family" broadly.
>If discord had a bit more work that would enable persistent threads like reddit, and encouraged longer, more thoughtful posts like HN and quality moderation, it would be perfect.
Facebook Groups is this product - but it's exceedingly difficult to find the small percentage of well-moderated, smaller groups which are specialized/for enthusiasts. Also, the FB sub-comment/response structure is far worse than HN or Reddit and leaves much to be desired. But I've joined a few with good moderation and thoughtful, interesting discussions.
That being said, any group with [thousands] of members or loose moderation devolves into an absolute shitshow of shit posting and scam/spam posters.
I thought about it more, and you are correct that Reddit enables private subreddits. My circle of friends on the Internet have one - but we've stopped using it. For me, a problem was that Reddit itself became polluted by influencers, so I avoid it (the whole site) as much as possible now. Since Discord hasn't had that problem, it was an easy, pleasant move to make.
So why not keep the main instance pay to play, for any official and public accounts, and the anonymous parts of the net get their own distributed instances?
I don’t think so. I think although Elon is poorly managing Twitter. What we are seeing is how poorly managed Twitter was behind closed doors. Years of technical debt and no movement or improvements. Sounds like people were just getting over paid and producing very little. Atleast that’s what it seems like from all the ex employees ranting on Twitter about being fired.
I'm not quite sure how I'm defending him. I don't really like him, especially after he voiced his opinions on Ukraine and Taiwan, I hope he loses all his money. And I'll never touch a Tesla.
All Elon has done by buying Twitter is reveal how much of a trash company it was internally. From management/board perspective, clearly they was never listening to the engineers and just doing the bare minimum to get inflated salaries and bonuses.
99% of companies would have imploded at the same pace.
Offending everyone who matters that runs the product you just bought and terrorizing all your employees is a fast and easy road to completely imploding any company.
Indeed. I agree with most if not all of the changes Musk made, but it was obvious to anyone that he made them in the worst possible way on the worst possible schedule. He couldn't be doing more damage if he was deliberately trying to tank the company.
He did that idiocy because company wasn't profitable in the first place tho.
Like, yeah, if he did that to well functioning company it would fall apart too, but Twitter wasn't a well-functioning company. And by that I mean "he would ruin it slower".
> All Elon has done by buying Twitter is reveal how much of a trash company it was internally.
Except that's not true at all. What he did is saddle it with a bunch of debt and fire of a bunch of really-poorly-considered cosr cutting and revenue enhancement ideas that clearly weren’t thought through or part of a coherent strategy.
He might have and end-game vision, but he had no plausible roadmap to deal with the sucking wounded he inflcted with the acquisition, much less to get to his end-game vision.
No sorry. When you have people on Twitter claiming that they should be fixing 10+ years of technical debt to improve performance. And the platform is overrun by bots and spam, issues are not resolved. Complaints dating back 10 years are not addressed in any way. There’s obviously internal problems.
If the platform cannot run for 5 minutes without someone pressing a button to keep it online then I have to question what 1000s of engineers are doing at Twitter.
Engineers not being good is probably not the issue. But I’m pretty sure it comes from higher up.
It’s also evident that Twitter was poorly managed by the fact it’s pretty much never made a profit.
>>If the platform cannot run for 5 minutes without someone pressing a button to keep it online then I have to question what 1000s of engineers are doing at Twitter.
It is not just tech debt per se. In larger companies most middle managers have no incentive to fix things for the long term. And lack of automation means they get to hire more people, which is good for them, as it expands their fiefdom.
I know one company in California which hires H1-Bs by the thousands, many even make it to Green cards. Their work- Somebody sends a bunch of values from the India office, they manually edit shell scripts(written ages ago, by some dude who has long left), run it, get the values and enter those values into some internal application. The thought that all this could be done by web api's didn't cross their mind. Never mind that automating this simple thing could help cut employee count by the thousands. Another place that I heard of, similar things but with SQL. The whole thing could be automated. But somebody wrote a bunch of shell scripts and left shop. Now people need to take outputs from SQL scripts and feed to the next ones. And then cut paste the data into some system.
In the woke world that we live in, where everybody is supposed to be special, and we are supposed to lie to ensure nobody gets hurt feelings. Most people forget, these jobs should have never existed at the first place. Many a times cutting them actually leads to more profits, and saves lots of management effort. Sure people losing jobs is sad, but if you are doing a job that shouldn't exist at the first place, you should likely move before you are let go.
The world is full of wasted effort, it is many times even tolerated for all sorts of reasons. But some times it is not.
He lost me on Ukraine and Taiwan too. Free democratic societies allowed him to become something. Dictators and Communism for everyone that stands in his way towards more wealth.
I was determined to buy a Tesla. Now we placed an order for a VW ID.4.
I really don't get why people dislike his Ukraine stance.
"Beat up Russia a bunch, make peace and throw Russia a bone by letting them keep Crimea." seems like the death minimising stance to me and in the best interests of the inhabitants of the each region.
If Russia gets anything out of this war it would be anything but death minimising. It will signal to them, and all other states, that aggressive wars are viable. They are in Ukraine because war has worked out for them in Georgia and Chechnya. You are literally espousing a pro-imperialism stance masquerading as a moderate position.
Because Russia has been taking pieces of land from Ukraine since 2014. If you'd hand over more land to Russia now, they'd invade again in a couple of years, with their army stronger than it is now.
Besides that, appeasement has never worked against aggressors in the past. It basically looks like Musk is calling for another Munich Agreement. It shows a complete lack of understanding of history, and of international relations.
Because it is dumb, insensitive to people losing their lives on the the front lines and makes it seem like Russia is _actually willing_ to get out of Ukraine if only it is allowed to keep Crimea, which it clearly is not?
I was a fan for all that Musk did with SpaceX. Single-handedly dropping costs to LEO and creating a civilian / commercial space industry -- mind blowingly impressive, and willed into existence by one man.
When he spoke against Taiwanese and Ukrainian sovereignty, he looked an awful lot like he was being controlled or having his arm twisted by foreign powers. These were hugely inflammatory remarks made back to back during a time of heightened geopolitical tensions.
I have to wonder if those high up in the ranks at the DoD are looking at ways to minimize Elon's risk or influence. Especially given the fact that he now launches classified payloads. Elon has enormous vested financial interests near or within two adversarial countries.
I get the impression that others at SpaceX moderate and "manage" him.
Let him get distracted with micro-managing whatever cool project is currently takes his fancy, while they do the more boring job of keeping the company running, and making sure the customers are happy.
I bet these people are extra happy when he is focusing on projects that don't have customers yet, like Starship/BFR.
Twitter might actually be the first time were he has 100% control over a large company without someone in the background moderating his more wild impulses.
Gwynne Shotwell is the too seldom acknowledged hero of SpaceX, who has played exactly that role of keeping the lights on, moderating Musk’s worse impulses, and managing him into less destructive directions. It’s been evident for years.
There are similar people at Tesla, who focus on the endless operational tweaking and improvement that Musk finds boring, and who slowly fixed all the most critical issues on the Model 3 line while Musk increasingly took to politics and social media.
I’m not one of those who believes Musk hasn’t done anything or played no part in SpaceX or Tesla’s success, because that’s clearly false. But he also hasn’t been the sole genius responsible for all the success or infallible. But too many people have made him believe he was and we’re now seeing the result of that hubris and ignorance.
Yet, Gwynne seems happy to lie about suborbital freight for him, and about colonizing Mars. I have not encountered anyone prominent at Tesla supporting his lies about self-driving (though that doesn't mean none do).
That's a bit ridiculous. Buying Twitter for $44bn was entirely his fault (and I think, a very stupid decision) and he does seem to be running the company into the ground, but were the fundamentals of the business solid before he got there? Did it ever justify its share price? Is ad revenue a sustainable business model? Was it going to remain profitable for long enough for someone who bought in e.g. 2020 to make a good return?
If you go to market and buy a lame horse then flog it into the ground, that's entirely your fault, but it's not like the horse was ever going to race well.
I think the analogy is he bought a house that needed a new foundation and he tried to fix it with kerosene and fire. The issues may well have been fixable but he had no sense of what the issues were to begin with, just his ego-driven edgelord perspective.
It was a rhetorical question: for me the answer is no. TWTR apparently justified its share price to someone on the market, but I think it's been overvalued since IPO.
I have no idea if TSLA is overvalued or undervalued. I don't know enough about the automotive industry, renewable energy regulations, or batteries to even guess.
Why? The business was weeks away from shutting down in 2015 under original ownership, Twitter looked to be saved from 2018 - 2019, but not really, seeing as 2018-2019 were the only 2 profitable years for Twitter ever
Twitter was leaking money for 2020 and 2021, the trend looked to be continuing for 2022, they had an OK first quarter, and maybe they were going to continue to do well, but I sincerely doubt it seeing how every single tech stock has performed this year. Q2 alone blew away $344 million loss compared to Q1's $513 million gain. I also sincerely doubt Twitter was being led well by looking at their earnings reports and the money hole that punctured the company coffers in 2020Q2. The middling performance through 2021 continued when that should've been Twitter's best years, all other tech stocks even ad agencies were printing money, why was Twitter not doing the same?
I think Twitter board's best decision they ever made was offloading the company off to Elon, cut their losses for a clearly failing company with little to no headwind coming their way for the next few quarters at minimum.
But I do need to know why does Elon get the brunt of the blame for Twitter's presumed downfall? Seems like Twitter was already a falling knife by itself
> why does Elon get the brunt of the blame for Twitter's presumed downfall
A few reasons
- he's greatly accelerating its decline in a highly visible and embarrassing way
- he got ripped off. $44b is a hilariously bad deal. He could have saved a few billion and used it to run twitter, at a minor loss, for many years.
- and lastly: he tried to catch a falling knife and is standing around pretending he isn't bleeding. Considering the hubris he has put on display over the past 5 years or so, everyone's taking a moment to enjoy the show.
Are you really "getting ripped off" if you came in with a ridiculously high offer (when no one asked) and they accepted it because they'd be crazy not to?
"I've got this old beater that I'm tired of working out of every day."
Your food truck sucks and your food is no better. You should sell churros.
"Churros don't really match our poboy sandwiches."
I can fix this, I'll just buy you out for a million dollars.
"... ok, sounds good to me."
What do you mean the truck is only worth about three grand? I want out of this deal.
It's the right thing to do with a sinking ship that needs to take big risks. Twitter's previous shareholders are surely very happy with how much money he's taken out of bankers' pockets and put into theirs.
Your breathless narration of that data is certainly a master class in spin. Maybe the company was performing far below what would be possible. But it is hard to look at the data and conclude that there was any imminent risk of its demise.
Twitter posted a net loss of $221 million in 2021, and a $1.1 billion loss in 2020.
Quarters are only good for forecasting and deciding what to do. Financial year is what matters overall. That’s an indicator of the overall success for the year.
In retrospect, most online-only tech companies had a great time during the unusual thing, so much so many of them made the mistake of hiring like the same trends would continue
I mean, Twitter was a slowly sinking ship which he turned into a quickly sinking ship. The guy is entirely to blame for the current situation - engineers and advertisers fleeing - but it’s not like buying it was a clever move in the first place.
Twitter was already failing, just in slow motion. 10 out of the last 12 years, including last year, the company lost money. I never saw the management team propose or execute on a legitimate path to sustainable profitability, either. Elon is just driving into the ground faster than the largely incompetent leadership team before him did.
So what you are saying, is the prior business model did not work, and firing the prior management team, getting rid of complacent employees, and striking out on a new path, is a good idea?
Twitter was on pace to lose billions without him. They were doing massive layoffs under Parag, extrapolating Facebook and Snapchat results gets you Twitter’s anemic last reports as a public company even without the overhang of Musk
Yeah, why do you think they accepted so quickly? They tried to get Wall Street to be interested and they turned their nose up extremely quickly, and that was right after a 50% price drop
That's two figures more than actual. Reportedly, Musk paid Agrawal $42M and spent $120M total on golden parachutes, which is still only low 9 figures. Still obscene. Most employers do not give severance to fired former employees. They were in charge of Twitter while it was losing billions. They should have paid him. He could have saved money right there by giving them the address to the unemployment office.
Maybe... But not all tech debt is bad. As long as it's not holding you back and you are making deliberate choices.
Twitter may have been badly managed, but it was consistent in experience. And in a large way that is a valuable product/feature itself. Elon will change things enough that it won't be like what it was, a giant distributed broadcast platform.
I think the greatest threat to musk is musk himself. He seems to be very badly advised at the moment. It's going to lead to a elon against the world situation where he wrecks something everyone likes and he's tarnished forever.
He should have paid the 1Bn exit fee and just keep shitposting from the sidelines.
> He should have paid the 1Bn exit fee and just keep shitposting from the sidelines.
He didn't have that option. That was the fee if the deal fell through for other reasons outside Musk's control. Musk didn't have any out in the contract. When that became clear in Delaware, he gave in.
There's a decent chunk of the population that would be ecstatic if Twitter went away and they never had to hear about it again, so he'd probably gain some fans there.
Of course not, if a company is profitable, its technical debt that made the company money and paid the bills. But if technical debt means running 40 servers instead of 10, then it should be something that is addressed, not ignored for 10+ years.
> but it was consistent in experience.
Consistent experience of being spammed by bot accounts. Looking at anyone popular and 95% of the replies are bots, or tweeting the wrong word and being spammed by bots. Is a terrible experience which has never been addressed.
> I think the greatest threat to musk is musk himself.
I agree. I think over the years popularity has gone to his head, stroked his ego, and he isn't the same person he was 10 years ago. He may not be the greatest example of a 'good' person but wqhat hes done with Tesla, SpaceX, etc, getting the right people in place and such to build these companies up, hes done well, but in the last 4-5 years hes sorta gone off the rails.
> But if technical debt means running 40 servers instead of 10, then it should be something that is addressed, not ignored for 10+ years.
Technical debt is rarely that simple. Usually it is a pile of Chesterton's Fences that only the people who built it really understand why its all there, but if you start just ripping it all down then you wind up breaking something important (think "service which scours databases to ensure that they're compliant with GDPR regulations and avoids a billion dollar fine from the EU" or something of that nature). The code may have grown organically and arguably need to be tossed and rewritten, but most of the time the code in its current state is also the requirements doc for the rewrite (and either the rewrite will take 10 times as long as anyone thinks or else the new system will throw away 90% of the old system without understanding it and now you have to deal with pissed off EU regulators and there goes everything you would have saved).
I'm usually on the side where I think its time to take the hard decisions and spend the effort either cleaning up the existing codebase or rewriting it, but that's rarely the way the business sees things, and they'd prefer to just bolt on some more crap yet again to keep it going for another year because they're trying to boost their metrics, not solve long term problems.
We could write a book on the different types of technical debt, obviously dumbing it down to 40 vs 10 servers is a massively over simplification on my part.
My point is when you're in a small company, even dollar counts, if infrastructure isn't trying to optimize hardware utialization then you end up throwing hardware at the problems. If engineering isn't trying to optimize codebases then you're throwing more resources at the problem (people, hardware, time, more services, monitoring, and safe guards). Then there's issues with marketing, sales, management, etc.
The other day we had that tweet from elon 'apologising' for android being slow and the '1000 requests' which was disputed by one of the engineers and he got himself fired.
But what he said is they have 10+ years of technical debt hindering performance.
Large companies like twitter suffer from the idea they are 'too big to fail'. They have 1000s of engineers and I question, what are they doing, you obviously have enough money and resources, but at the same time why are a portion of those people not sitting there optimizing what exists.
We don't see any resolution to bots, we don't see new useful features, we don't see any attempt to address issues people have been complaining about for 10 years. etc. So we have 1000s of engineers doing what exactly? There's some incredibly smart people working or worked at twitter, but their talents were wasted on effectively maintaining a sinking ship by trying to make it sink slower instead of trying to patch the holes and keep it afloat.
What’s missed in these discussions is that you need to get ROI out of the time spent working on code. If you spend all of your time rewriting code, your simply not going to get any ROI.
If a piece of code works and only needs changes once in a blue moon… well then it’s pretty good. Even if it’s a tangled mess of assembly.
Even if that’s true (I just don’t know) the cost alone of servicing the company debt is now greater than the cost of paying all those people to sit around and do nothing, and anyway the problems with Twitter aren’t ones that are fixed by engineering.
> They wouldn't accept his advice or help on how to make twitter better after he became a 9.1% shareholder.
They were happy for him to become a director. He balked as soon as it became clear that he'd have to pass the same background check as all the other directors. I wonder why that is?
> It's possible he was afraid of what discovery would reveal.
Like... his degrees being dodgy and having been an illegal overstayer in the 90s, which is a documented claim doing the rounds?
He also would have owed fiduciary duties to the TSLA stockholders if he were a director. I think this, and not the D&O questionnaire, was the primary reason he turned down the board seat. No more pumps and dump with TSLA stock or playing fast and loose with SEC filings triggered by stock accumulation.
No-- the $1B was liquidated damages in the case the deal couldn't close for other reasons (regulatory, unable to finance). It didn't give Elon a blanket "out"-- the deal explicitly had a very strong "specific performance" term.
I was half expecting Musk to "fail to find financing" in a way that had plausible deniability, just so he could use the $1 exit clause.
But that wouldn't have saved him from discovery in the court case, and I've also heard rumours the SEC were already looking into him for stock market manipulation over this Twitter thing.
His financing was committed at the time he signed the merger agreement, and the banks that agreed to lend it were pretty tightly committed to the deal. They also have their own separate legal exposure and risk to their franchises if they refused to fund the debt at closing.
If the financing failed to show up through no fault of the acquirer, then yes, the acquirer could terminate and pay a $1 billion break fee. But there have been recent Delaware cases that suggest an acquirer manufacturing grounds for its lenders to refuse to fund will not excuse the acquirer’s obligation to buy the company - regardless of whatever limited termination fee is written into the contract.
I was more than half expecting Musk's financiers to smell the bullshit and run screaming. He's already talking bankruptcy so I'm still wondering why they went forward.
Well, depends on the backing they got from Musk, doesn't it? And honestly, who would have believed someone would burn 44 billion, including 13 billion in dept, so fast to a complete pile of ash? I do wonder so, with a lot of Tesla's success depending on Musks reputation and ability to raise money, what the fallout of this will be. Until the Twitter desaster, Musk was a sure bet for investors. Now? Well, his financing banks wanted 60 cent per dollar when selling the debt on to investors. And they were only offered 50 cent. That alone tells you a lot.
so even if he personally spent $1million on getting lobbyists to convince gov't to say no, that would still only have been $1.1b vs the ~$44 or whatever the price in the window was.
Of course he’s going to do what he defaults to and knows best to try to get out of a bad deal?
Can you really say edgelording so hard you appear to be a legitimate national security threat to get out of a $44bln deal you don’t want is something that doesn’t sound typically Elon Musk?
It looks more like he wanted exclusive Tesla and/or SpaceX deals there. Russia has no proper cars, but China has. The Russian rocket industry might also look attractive, he won't get any Chinese contracts for sure.
The heavily embargoed, historic-enemy of the US Russia?
The one who is actively threatening to nuke us because we’re sending millions of tons of weapons and ammunition to someone they’re invading while we sanction them to the gills?
What are you smoking? There is no way they’d let him export Rocket engines to them, or cars. Likely for decades.
I suspect the FBI visited him after his Putin talk and reminded him that they could make him register as a foreign agent, or go to jail for that. Not that anyone would say anything.
Not to mention the fucking insulting assumption that people were not already working hard. During my tour (left years ago) there have been many time periods when I worked my ass off. I ended up leaving because of the total burn-out and the effect it started to have on my health. Despite that even years later I played with the idea of going back someday. No chance of that now of course. So sad to see it end this way.
I guess, if you buy the premise that cash flow is problem number one and the company needs a significant pivot, then going into crunch-mode and trying to turn the ship as quickly as possible (at the cost of technical and, uh, sleep debt) is a reasonable solution. Maybe not the best, but reasonable.
But it's pretty transparent that the cash flow problem is pretty much a problem because the new owner doesn't really want to own Twitter, or believe it can pay for itself; he wants to own a different product which has as many users as Twitter did. No judgement here, I don't necessarily think he's wrong. But why as an employee would I feel obligated to make his choices my problem?
> I guess, if you buy the premise that cash flow is problem number one
Well, luckily you don't need to buy the premise that cash flow was problem number one—after he bought it, he saddled it with so much debt that it definitely became problem number one!
> What's most surprising it seems he has no thesis for the company or how it can be made better or what was so terrible about it.
I believe the thesis is he thinks it's possible to duplicate WeChat as a ubiquitous everything-app (news, media, social media, payments, ordering in restaurants, shopping, messaging) in the West. Why someone would believe that, I don't know. I imagine thinking you could also be the owner of it might motivate believing it can happen somewhat.
I suppose the other thesis is that Twitter was horribly mismanaged and can work on far fewer resources to do more if he runs it like Space X or Tesla. That seems plausible to me though in this case it's beyond me why he thinks the actions he's taken will get him there.
> Twitter [...] can work on far fewer resources to do more if he runs it like Space X or Tesla
Even disregarding the content moderation speed run, the technical problems for Tesla and Space X are fundamentally about four things: physics, mathematics, materials technology and applied computer science. Mostly predictable. Twitter is like any other large messaging or information distribution system. Chaotic. Unpredictable. Highly adversarial.
Think about it. In a cloud of atoms, you don't get a sizable fraction trying to game the rest of them. Materials technology may be cruel, but at least it's not actively adversarial. Lithium batteries are volatile and can explode, but they don't do so out of malice.
With Twitter, EM is quickly learning that people are not that different from him. Awful. And dealing with them requires skills and knowledge that the best engineering can't cover.
Incidentally, I think EM is also finding new peers. He is on course to wreak about 40B worth of economic damage in a month, which puts him in the Truss-Kwarteng category. Quite an achievement.
There already exist WeChat equivalents in the West that do "news, media, social media, payments, ordering in restaurants, shopping, messaging", and in fact they even predate WeChat. They're known as Android and iOS.
If uses the point is, if you ask a typical WeChat user to describe what it is, you'll get a similar answer to the android equivalent. From a user point of view, they're comparable.
I don't think I know anyone who does all of their shopping on facebook, or pays their bills on facebook, or uses facebook messaging exclusively, let alone all of those things. Having the feature list isn't the thing, it's getting people to see the app as their one stop shop for all their technology needs. Just having the feature list doesn't replicate WeChat, I don't know why Elon thinks it's possible to replicate.
WeChat solved a problem specific to the Chinese market, given how it's internet market is structured. In the rest of the world, that problem is solved at an OS or browser level. And buying either of those would have been way cheaper than $44 billion
I agree with the first two sentences, but not sure how you think buying a browser or OS would be cheaper. Facebook tried hard and could not do it with a way bigger war chest. Google spent significant money into Android and Chrome (I have worked for both so not impartial).
The thing is with both OS and browser is that they are really long term efforts and I am not sure if Elon could pull that of anymore. For sure Elon from 10 years ago could, but not sure if he has the patience anymore. Same with Zuck, I don't think he has the patience for what he is trying to achieve.
It makes sense if you just fired 50% of your workforce. Although I could never quite figure out what so many people were doing on the product I imagine, in that 50% of staff were some pretty important roles, that now need their hours covered.
I do not considered this fair, ethical or very smart. Just imagine all the tribal knowledge that just vanished. Twitter ought to hope they kept enough of the right infrastructure people around to actually keep the site up.
The way I see it Elon boasted 'hardcore!' .... and most of Twitter's employees called his bluff, now he's screwed.
All this is really because he doesn't really understand his business - what he's selling is access to Twitter's user's attention .... and he's alienated them all because he thinks it's all about technology
> I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter.
He lives off Twitter. His fame and fortune would not be where it’s without Twitter and he very well knows it. You can label that an emotional connection or even personal. I don’t think he out right planned to buy it. One thing after another, he found himself locked into - buying it.
Well, yes. After he presented an acquisition agreement to the Twitter board of directors and presented them with a committed financing package, the Twitter board literally could not refuse Musk’s without spending the rest of their lives in depositions with Twitter public shareholders.
So Twitter of course accepted the deal, Musk (voluntarily) signed the merger agreement, and that was that - he was indeed locked into buying the company (subject to certain conditions - receipt of regulatory approvals, Twitter shareholders approving the merger, stuff like that).
This was not like hitting a lucky streak at the craps table and waking up 12 hours later with a new wife. The decision to purchase was deliberate. Doesn’t mean he didn’t develop buyer’s remorse after - he most certainly did - but the threatened tender offer, the rich, target-friendly merger agreement - this is exactly how you aggressively and deliberately pursue ownership of a big public company.
You know the butterfly effect where one small decision affects tens of thousands of other things? That must have been the day that things were going to well at Tesla, record profits, etc, that Musk got bored and decided he only likes to work under unbearable pressure. So, he made a couple of insulting tweets and now here we are.
I really can't believe he didn't put any escape clauses in his contract, no due dilligence, etc. I think he's very smart in general but this mistake is pretty much colossal in size.
Immediately starts by threatening advertisers, retweets that story about Pelosi's husband, fires people (probably needed to be done) and then this crazy scheme.
The problem as someone else mentioned is that for Tesla and SpaceX those were really the only two places where you could work if you wanted to do electric cars or space stuff. So they attracted very dedicated people.
Twitter is just web dev stuff and these people can work anywhere. It's not a great time to look for a job but when you get a lot of middle aged people who don't necessarily want to upend their life for their job especially when it was extremely cushy before, well, it's bound to be a problem.
I do think he'll probably pull this off but it's gonna be a pretty miserable road.
"Just web dev" stuff is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It's not like Twitter is just some react code on the cloud. It's been around since 2006 and is essentially a massive realtime platform. I don't think Twitter has any unique secret sauce, but the kind of people who can run a large online platform and dedicated metal really don't exist anymore; and under fire they will either need to run to the cloud (increasing costs) or start dealing with outages.
>I do think he'll probably pull this off
It seems far more likely to me that he ends up selling it to Google or something for pennies. So far, publicly, he hasn't communicated any sort of thesis or plan and most of the head engineering staff has been let go. How long do you think it will take to get a new engineering lead up to speed on 16 years of Twitter infra while also meaningfully transforming the company? His only option at this point is maintaining the app on a shoe-string budget to get "profit", but that seems like a very boring outcome that should have been left to a P/E firm.
>It seems far more likely to me that he ends up selling it to Google or something for pennies.
Although Elon appears to be aggressively driving twitter into the ground, this might be one of the few outcomes which actually increases the certainty of twitter getting killed.
> ends up selling it to Google or something for pennies
I guess it says good things about EM that I could totally see waking up tomorrow to the news that he sold it to Google for $75m and a new pixel phone. I can even see the Tweet: “well that was a disaster.”
For all his faults, he does not seem beholden to consistency.
No matter how big it is it's an order of magnitude less difficult than Cars or Spaceships, don't kid yourself on that. That can be evidenced with how fast they rolled out new features to twitter blue. They made some bad product decisions but the tech side went very fast.
I like that you also came up with the idea that elon will sell for pennies when in reality he's basically succeeded at nearly everything he's done. And he's had massive win after massive win. But you think he's gonna fail here.
It’s why he has succeeded all this time. You don’t get investments by being grounded.
Privacy is regarded highly in the US which means less transparency.
Take for example this:
https://mobile.twitter.com/capitolhunters/status/15933075419...
Shouldn’t confirming Elons university degree be extremely simple?
And if you are treated as a god for so long by your cult on Twitter, media etc then you start believing that you are one and then there is no way back until you get all the way to hell where you finally realize that you are a mere mortal and your huge ego made you a fool of yourself.
I think he's made a major mis-step with twitter though.
SpaceX/Tesla employees work as hard as they do because they believe in the mission of the company. They're willing to just buckle down and do amazing things beyond most people.
Twitter had a lot of normal employees, however, it also already had the true believers in the mission. Those people don't seem to have bought Musk's vision and they're leaving the company. He wanted to get just down to those folks, but I think by and large, they're gone. I don't know that he can recover from that mis-step. He needed to come in, explain his vision and got the true believers onboard before he cleaned house IMHO.
I think more importantly probably all Twitter employees could find a similar job in 20-50 other companies in the area they live in. You cannot beat them up when there are still tons of employers willing to snap them up.
His ego really isn't what you are making it out to be. Has he ever said any of those things? In almost all the interviews he has he never talks about how smart he is, he talks about how good the engineers he works with are.
> I really can't believe he didn't put any escape clauses in his contract, no due dilligence, etc. I think he's very smart in general but this mistake is pretty much colossal in size.
As an almost ironclad rule, acquisition agreements for big public companies don’t have escape clauses or diligence outs. The buyer does the diligence before they sign the acquisition agreement. His very, very good lawyers at Skadden advised him of this. After it’s signed, it’s really just a question of how quickly the logistics of taking a public company private can be completed.
Musk, for all intents and purposes, bought Twitter back in April. He just didn’t take possession and pay for it until October.
Within the scope of an argument about the job mobility for Twitter engineers, Twitter is "just web dev stuff" or maybe "just planet-scale web dev stuff." The key point is that the skills these engineers have is valuable in many places and EM's behaviour is rapidly driving away everyone who has a reasonable chance of finding work within the next 6-12 months.
WHat I find interesting is the Twitter the business is no more "web stuff" than HN is "web stuff." The real business is on what we might call the product management side, and the central problem to solve when deciding what kind of social media product you have is deciding whether to moderate it, and if so, what you moderate and what you allow.
Even if he miraculously gets enough people motivated work there keeping the lights on and the machine humming, I am with the many people suggesting he has absolutely no idea how to actually run the product side of the business, where decisions like "anybody can rent a blue check for $8 a month" can have drastically negative consequences for the part of your business that sells advertising.
At this moment in time, that side of the business is extremely messy, and it isn't an engineering problem, it's a people problem.
Elon does not strike me as a people person, nor does he appear to be interested in delegating the most important role in the company—the person who decides what Twitter's product is—to anyone with competence in this area.
You are right that it isn't "just web dev", but at the same time the rest of the statement still holds. There's lots and lots of large-scale (mostly-)web services, and running one certainly isn't that groundbreaking anymore. If you really want to work on one, it doesn't have to be Twitter.
I imagine theres lots of groundbreaking stuff to work on at Twitter. Lots of opportunities to apply AI, do cool distributed systems research, build specialized hardware to optimize video, build new types of databases, apply computational social science (all things facebook does fyi). Its far far more than "just web dev". Now you can just stop working on your products and just hope the website stays alive but not sure its a good plan in the long run
Yeah they have problems that most companies don't, and a scale that most companies don't. But, web dev and scaling is not nearly as hard as car manufacturing or rocket design. Both of which are far more complex, also have a ton of software and people's lives are on the line.
> I really can't believe he didn't put any escape clauses in his contract, no due dilligence, etc. I think he's very smart in general but this mistake is pretty much colossal in size.
This was not a mistake. He was seeing that his offer to buy twitter was not taken seriously. Understandably the board felt he will flake out. He wanted to show he won't flake out. The way he could demonstrate that was by binding his own hands.
So he went to his lawyers and asked them to write an offer he can't back out from. And then he got what he asked for.
Looks like EM is riven between "make Twitter an open platform for all opinions" and "burn Twitter down". Both good aims, but a mixed strategy does not lead anywhere good.
This is a completely absurd plan from one person. Especially as egoistic as Musk. He never wanted it to be a free speech platform. Just more pleasing to his opinions
>I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore".
There is no opportunity to "go hardcore" for the kind of devs that build greenfield crap at lightning speed and leave spaghetti in their wake.
Elon appears to intend to slice and dice his way to profitability like a textbook MBA. In order to support that there is opportunity for architects, engineers and process specialists who are skilled at hacking existing stuff together to make square pegs fit in round holes well enough to work and with minimal expenditure of engineering man hours. There are few of these people because it's not a skillset that the traditional software engineering trade really values and pushes people toward and fewer still who fit that category and want to work 50+hr weeks, and fewer still because pre-Elon Twitter isn't the kind of place these people thrive and so most would have self-selected out.
Crypto. Twitter as an ad agency business has not much room to expand. You just have to look at the team EM assembled. EM himself was paypal founder. Many others on his investment teams are related to payment as well...even Jack has his square. Think about it, tweeter turn into like wechat with built in payment wallet especially crypto wallets managing like an exchange by a paypal founder who happen to have good access to government relationship. With expected tsunami of retrenchments coming especially for IT sectors, EM can afford to replace entire current Twitter engineers several time over - cheaper and more efficient. Most of those tweeters tech staff seems to be very obvilious of the incoming tech layoffs. FB along expected to let go about 30K (at least 2 more rounds in 2023). Google doing their 10K. Netflix and MS expected to hit that number as well before end of 2023. The labour market will be full of very good devs out of job. Can see that? When one is desperate with tons of bills to pay, no matter how much one despise EM, one will swallow the pride and work for him. Remember EM has access to vast amount of economic data (see who his friends are). He knows what is going on and how much leverage on his side vs entire tech community. It isnt lose-lose situation...mostly rank and yank situation done with maximum drama.
Not a fan of Elon but it does look like Twitter had some serious problems that did need to be fixed. Like not having plans for dealing with cold-boot situations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593122
This was more to reduce headcount but to increase drama, which in turn makes you visit Twitter more, which in turn leads to more ad impressions and money for Twitter. As EM tweeted, more people have visited Twitter now than ever before. I just deleted my account when I understood what was going on.
They've probably already lost 95% of the 'hardcore' people. If you're good, and EM's threatening to fire everyone, then you get another job. The people who've stayed are presumably makeweights and time-servers.
> It's a completely bewildering move; I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter.
Yet another one of his relationships burned down and this time his ex is with a trans lady. One of his kids went to court to kick him out of her life while doing the paperwork for her name change. He's been a shitty husband and a shitty father, but instead of spending hundreds of dollars on a decent psychologist he's decided that "woke twitter" are to blame because they kicked a transphobic comedian off the site, and he's spiraled out of control since then.
He'd literally rather burn $44 billion dollars than admit that he has shortcomings. Or face a background check on his alleged university credentials.
>It's a completely bewildering move; I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter.
The entire and obvious and openly stated point of Musk buying Twitter was to reinstate Trump, and re-inflict his regular unhinged sociopathic tweets and lies and misinformation and calls to violence and bullying and hate speech and racism upon everyone in the world again, just when we were all getting used to enjoying not hearing from him every single fucking day and the middle of the night.
There's no other rational explanation, and although that obvious explanation may sound completely irrational, so is Musk, and it is still the real reason, and the inextricable consequence, just as predicted by Occam's Razor, and foretold by Musk's own words.
There's nothing bewildering about it at all, so stop acting so surprised, and pretending he changed his mind after what he said so emphatically and unambiguously.
It's not like it's a secret, or contested. He openly announced it. When people show you who they are and what they'll do, believe them.
>"I do think that it was not correct to ban Donald Trump," Musk said. "I think that was a mistake because it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice."
>Musk added that Trump's ban was "morally wrong and flat-out stupid."
Those damn pens. They are making some healthy people lose their shit when used a bit too heavily. I'm worried about those with PTSD and other trauma being "prescribed" this stuff, honestly. THC vape pen use needs to be studied in-depth. Dangerous.
> What's most surprising it seems he has no thesis for the company or how it can be made better or what was so terrible about it.
Have you ever used Twitter?
To someone who has used Twitter in the past weeks this reads like deliberate trolling.
Twitter was absolutely terrible to use and the pace of noticible change within days/weeks under Elon is mind blowing to me. He's clearly going fast with things like getting rid of (shadow-)banning for no apparent reason, getting rid of banning anything of a certain political flavor, making Twitter faster (both in browser as well as on Android), getting rid of fake scammer accounts who deliberately impersonated famous people and companies to scam people, getting rid of bots and spam which where a HUGE problem (still are until the transition to verified is done) and so on.
I mean getting rid of politically flavored sensorship alone will have a massive impact globally for something like Twitter. That alone was obviously very terrible to many people before Musk.
PS: since you said you don't understand what his vision is. My best guess: it's to create a platform that competes with click-bait sponsored propaganda journalism. In the form of citizen journalism on Twitter. I think it could work and I also think there's a huge need for it as traditional journalism is dead in my opinion.
> Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people.
This is a death march - no question about it. The book by Edward Yourdon should be required reading for any who are still at Twitter.
One of the things that is in the book had in it that I recall was a four quadrant grid of 'morale' and 'likelihood of success'(?).
There are indeed high morale high chance of success death marches - and they can be fun to be on. The "we will get this done and it will be glorious" type things.
There are also the low morale high chance of success that just drag on and it is a "we will get this done, and then we will all quit." I've been on that one - it was awful. I can only imagine the low morale low chance ones being completely dreadful and people hoping that it gets canceled before too much longer.
Amazon says that I got a copy of this on August 11th, 2012... and that was an order in which the book I got was given to my manager at the time. The project rolled out in October (before Black Friday code freezes went in effect) and I started looking for new employment in January after the company did its yearly bonuses.
One of the things I do to ground myself in situations where I'm facing a death march, or find myself working at a company that does a pivot is listen to the song "Road to Nowhere" by the Talking Heads. If the intro lyrics cut too deep, I start looking.
I googled the name of this book and for me your post on Reddit about it four years ago (I assume it's you due to the similar username). Guess it hasn't gotten anymore out of date. I'll have to look into a getting a copy.
I try to keep the same name/idenity-ish across systems. It was originally a collision of names (three people on the team all had the same first name). One got the short form, one the long form, and the Scoobie Do movie had just come out and for some reason, I got "Shaggy". A bit later, had a coworker who was Japanese and my first name is awkward to say to the Japanese sounds, but "shaggy" is fine - except that it was pronounced as "SHA-gie" which turned out to be much less taken as a user name than the traditional form, so I use it where I can.
That order also had Slack and Peopleware by Tom DeMarco (which I'll also recommend).
These are things that are timeless (though Peopleware is on a 3rd edition).
These books are about time management, project management, culture, workspaces... and reasonably applicable to all domains - not just software development.
Death marches are often software projects, but I've seen some lawyers on a "death march" case where its dragging on and on.
The ideas of Slack are applicable to every job - though especially those of knowledge workers (the book is likely as good for building architects as it is for software developers). Similar things about productivity and desk space are also true for architects and software developers.
They're good books and interesting things to read... but they're not books about software development as software.
>Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people.
And for the right financial upside. I completely understand going hardcore at a startup in which you have equity. But hasn't Twitter going private removed a lot of the incentive for employees? What is the upside for a Twitter engineer dedicating themselves to the company? Making one of the richest people on the planet slightly richer?
I once worked for an adtech company that had profit sharing instead of RSUs. The early employees were compensated very well because it was unsurprisingly very profitable. I joined after they raised money so they switched to "phantom equity" in a LLC instead of RSUs. When they went public I was granted 1 stock for every piece of phantom equity plus about $5. These weren't options, I didn't have to pay anything to exercise them. Worked out to a 50% appreciation over two-ish years of working there, so not too shabby at all.
The point is there's other forms of variable compensation beside options you can give to employees of a private entity that are just as good (or even better) than options that may or may not become liquid over 7-10 years. Twitter could set up something similar to entice top performers to stay.
Most people working at a startup in which you have equity will make nothing from the equity. You do get to fantasize, like buying a lottery ticket.
I would say for me working hard at startups was mostly because I enjoyed the technical challenge, the culture, and the team I was working with. And I was paid pretty well. I placed $0 value on my equity (and for me that's also what it ended up being worth).
Interviewee: "Under what circumstances do they become liquid?"
Elon: "We have to first make money above and beyond paying this crushing debt, then we have to have a growth story to sell to the public, then we go public, then you wait out the employee lockout period, and if you're still an employee, you can sell your RSUs."
Interviewee: "So, like, 2-5 years of sleeping in the office to win Survivor Twitter and not get fired, plus I have to depend upon you to steer us to profitability."
Elon: "Exactly. And when it comes to profitability, my favourite tactic is firing people like you."
All this would make some sense, but Elon is asking for a blank check from the remaining employees. There is no promise right now, there is no pay off, there are no RSUs, there is no liquidity event, there is ... nothing.
Just one of the wealthiest people in history asking people to work 12 hour days every day of the week, forever, for some nebulous reasons that he can't state, just because.
Such a radical renegotiation of the employment agreement between the workers and the management requires a LOT of study and time. Not two days and clicking a button that says you agree to something.
You'd be crazy to agree to this, and Elon would be crazy to think that anyone that did click is doing anything but trying to find another job while at work.
> Just one of the wealthiest people in history asking people to work 12 hour days every day of the week, forever, for some nebulous reasons that he can't state, just because.
"a company for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is"
> Elon would be crazy to think that anyone that did click is doing anything but trying to find another job while at work.
Haha, can someone tweet this at him so he sees it. He thinks he'll be getting dedicated loyal employees (let's deem them the Yes-clickers), but if he becomes aware of this flaw in his plan, he's going to treat them with paranoia and mistrust as well.
While holidays are coming up (so probably not much happening for a month or two on the employment front) and pretty slow times in the tech sector in general, I think I'd still be hard put to turn down 3 months (supposedly) guaranteed at this point. Obviously visa holders might be in a different boat as may people preferring to keep an uncertain but possibly longer-term job whatever the pain. However, given the uncertainty even for those who stay, I can't imagine not taking the payout for most.
And even if there is a future liquidity event, what could the return possibly be? Musk already bought Twitter at a premium over the market, then the whole market backslid, then he took control and cratered the company even further. Any equity is already a small fraction of what it would have been worth before this whole ordeal. To get any startup like return, Musk doesn't have to just right the ship, he has to make Twitter drastically more successful than it was before.
Part of the deal of going "hardcore" working at a startup is that you get a small chance of becoming rich. I don't think working 80 hrs/wk is worth it when the upside is adding an extra 20% or whatever onto your salary.
Besides getting rich there is always the mission. So the question to ask Elon is...
"How many people still working at Twitter hated all the woke crap like banning Nazis and were practically begging some conservative billionaire to buy the site, fire everyone, and turn it into an extremely successful free-speech Libertarian playground like Parler or Truth Social?"
Those are the only people who would willingly take his offer. Almost everyone else working there now has a job mobility problem, but the moment that problem gets solved, they're out.
Some businesses do just fine with employees that don't really want to work there, but they typically have enormous hiring funnels running 24/7/365 to handle the churn. Like McDonalds or Amazon's warehouses. Twitter doesn't have that, and you won;t find it at PayPal, Tesla, or SpaceX.
There is just so much irony all over this, at every level and every side. It’s hilarious. Musk wanted to buy it, then tried to back away. The board tried to prevent the sale, then sued to make it happen. Employees loathed the idea of Musk being their boss, but also wanted his cash for their stock.
And as much good a pubic soapbox platform could have been for society, destroying the company seems to me to be the only appropriate karmic justice for all involved, including society because of what Twitter had become and had been used for politically.
It’s an unpopular opinion but I find it all funny too, for the reasons you described. The degree to which people are experiencing self-righteous outrage over twitter is in direct proportion to how histrionic and annoying their personas are. Twitter may have had some fine contributors, but I think it was a net negative on culture, and encouraged shallow thinking and moral grandstanding.
And there’s an upside. If the people threatening to leave actually do, it will likely make the platform better.
I honestly want to see Twitter's financials before it goes. I have a suspicion that a lot of it's revenue was from government sources, especially after Arab Spring.
Exactly, severance was absolutely a no brainer based on that email. I have gone "hardcore" many times in my life working crazy hours but all of that has either been in exceptional circumstances or me doing it because I was having fun. If someone emailed saying that "going hardcore and crazy hours" is the baseline for acceptable performance (note, not even good performance, just acceptable performance), I'd be outta there too.
I feel bad for all those who are on visas though and may not have the flexibility to accept the severance offer.
I know people joked about him wanting to destroy it, but I'm increasingly of the opinion that that's the only rational explanation for what he's doing. Even Dilbert's PHB seems mild compared to Musk. Either he's a massive idiot, or he wants to destroy Twitter without looking like he intended to destroy it, and so prefers to look like a massive idiot instead.
Elon fired his existing employees for daring to criticize him in a private Slack, he's too thin-skinned to hire anybody who has dared to criticize him in public.
George Hotz has criticized Elon, yet Elon wants him on board.
There is a difference between critiquing your employer or insulting your employer. Try insulting your employer on Slack or Twitter and see how it goes.
"Several Twitter employees who shared news of Mr. Frohnhoefer’s firing in internal chats were cut, said six people familiar with events. They were told that they had been terminated for “violating company policy,” according to emails seen by The Times."
Is there a difference between "insulting your employer" and "sharing the publicly-verifiable actions of your employer"? Elon's trying to spin this as "insubordination" when in truth he's just trying to quash any and all dissent, like the authoritarian he is.
> he's just trying to quash any and all dissent, like the authoritarian he is.
Quashing such dissent is good and perfectly in line with his responsibility as CEO. Office gossip and politics doesn't serve a purpose other than distraction and disruption - especially when conducted in private chats.
Oddly enough I don’t see this being discussed here. There hasn’t been growth in user counts that might bring large technical problems. Sure there’s going to be work needed, optimizations, new features or whatever. I think twitters problems are how to grow users and grow revenue, neither of which require technical solutions to get traction going.
Twitter is a service which handles bursty type demand. One of these events is the World Cup, which starts on Sunday. Which Twitter engineering has previously noted is one of their most challenging demand times.
I think this is super weird. massive events happen every so often. the first one is a challenge, the second one might bring a new set of challenges, but by the third one you haven't a well oiled process, then there's some serious engineering issues that go deeper than the challenge itself.
this is something that was talked well before Elon, they have thousands upon thousands engineers, for a plafromt that had a fixed set of features since forever.
I don't claim that twitter could be run by the smart cousing from it's basement, but the effort/result numbers seem way off from here.
I think everyone is conveniently setting this topic aside in the ferwor to pile up on Elon (whom actions I don't defent in any way, shape or form) but something in that area was in need of a correction for a while, and apparently the whole stack is politicized enough than steering the ship would have been challenging irregardless by whom would have taken such task.
You should go work for a big retail giant during a christmas season. It's not the pure load that does you in, spinning up more clusters on AWS and bumping up the size of the instance is super easy. What kills you every time is the edge cases and "1 in a million" chances that the load brings. Every single bit of code you've written since the last huge season is suddenly very aggressively being tested in ways you couldn't really simulate. Sure you've fixed the problems that caused fires last year but there is ALWAYS new stuff to start fires. Even if you froze the code base from the previous year, you would still see new patterns and behaviors, and all the problems they will uncover.
Twitter was definitely poorly managed, had no vision, and the engineers were probably closing lots of tickets with well written and documented and smart code. The problem is that if the tickets being created are stupid, no amount of "hardcore engineering" can fix that. You can't fix "draw a red line using this blue pen" with better coders.
If you actually care about twitter (you shouldn't), what it needed was a plan to make people hate it less, since even the people who use it constantly seem to hate it, and a strategy to make things more reliable and cheaper, essentially pay off all the tech debt they accrued by doing everything before it was done. But that would have required a massive undertaking, and public companies generally hate that kind of thing, and would rather slowly die over decades than make things better by spending a couple bucks up front.
None of that makes walking in, shitting on everyone's keyboard, pissing off everyone that could be talented, firing lots of people seemingly randomly or off the cuff, and saddling the company with a bunch of new debt they no longer have revenue streams for because your stupid feature idea was predictably stupid, a smart or correct or laudable action.
A scaled up Birdwatch [1], or some other system, with the ability to find truths, could be incredible. Trust in media is, rightfully, near all time lows [2].
His attempt at pay-for checks, and the layoffs, show he's very interested in making/losing less money. I was highlighting a potential path to attract users, and not (potentially) scare advertisers, which would align with that goal.
I don't think a rational person would try to make any long term conclusions from less than a month of new ownership.
Twitter's media capabilities are really awful and have remained awful for as long as I can remember. The media player is slow as hell and malfunctions all the time.
Twitter was built on shaky foundations. From the very earliest days, the "fail whale" was a recurring theme
Apparently uploading videos that don't degrade to unwatchable quality is a pretty hard problem to solve. A lot of artists work around this by uploading gifs, which then get converted to videos by Twitter's backend, but aren't degraded as badly for whatever reason.
And then you look at how Zuckerberg is handling his lay off by being so humanly well with all the packages, bonuses, process and the support teams even more for a massive lay off and how all this is going to cost that you wonder if we really knew who they really are.
I'm not saying it's a fair metric, but when I compare Twitter's open output to similarly VC-funded-but-now-public companies, the engineering output doesn't seem particularly exciting.
For comparison:
Meta / Facebook:
* React
* PyTorch
* Fasttext
* Their unsung-but-indispensible-for-humanitarian-orgs Data for Good program
Google:
* Flutter
* Go
* Kubernetes
* Tensorflow
* BERT / Large language models generally
* Mapreduce / Hadoop
The much-maligned Uber:
* H3 Geospatial indexing
* Kepler.gl
* Manifold
Even AirBNB!
* Airflow
* Superset
I use most of these products (or their descendants) every day in my work.
When I think of Twitter, all I think of is how they arbitrarily shut off humanitarian access to their APIs (and earlier, the Twitter firehose). There's not a single Twitter-supported open product that I use.
Am I the only one? Is there a great Twitter-supported project that I missed?
It’s the only one I could think of but it certainly had a big impact on lots of people, enabling a lot of devs who were bad at design and responsiveness to make halfway decent looking websites.
> I'm pretty sure almost all of this team was laid off (certainly the people I knew who worked on it were).
That's really sad news. The crew I interacted with (Alex, Omari, Tobias, others) were top-flight engineers who also really understood the problem space and how to navigate the internal complexities of Meta. Hope the laid off / repositioned staff are OK, and if they're looking for new opportunities my email's in my profile.
I'd be willing to work "hardcore" if there were enough reward, ie a huge raise and lots of equity in the new company. I have a feeling if I asked him what it would be, he would fire me though. There's no point in working for a mercurial boss like that. No ability to freely speak your mind is a complete waste of everyone's time.
And it's not even just going "hardcore" his wording was "extremely hardcore."[1]. That sounds devoid of fun to me and possibly a euphemism for exhaustion. The World Cup starts on Sunday, it will be interesting to see if the wheels stay on for that.
I really hope it implodes. He has been so childish throughout, he deserves to lose the 44 billion. Sucks that thousands of people are out of work, but maybe this is better for them than a slow painful death of a once okayish company.
Like I said I feel sorry for them, I can't imagine that the h1b and other programs don't have good will time for them to find other employment. Twitter doesn't hire hacks, I'm sure they'll be fine. I'm just talking about the overall greater good because I think they -all- will be out of a job soon. I never wanted twitter to die, but if it's just going to be parler with venmo shrug
Until relatively recently - 2017, to be specific - someone on H1B who lost their job had no grace period to find other employment under the law. Enforcement was another matter, so many people chanced it regardless - but the concern is that overstaying one's visa can have significant consequences for your ability to get new ones long into the future if found out.
In 2017, USCIS unilaterally enacted a 60-day grace period as an administrative rule, which is still in effect today. But, given the current US job market in tech, 60 days may not be sufficient.
Twitter aside, it should also be noted that, being an administrative rule, it can be changed fairly easily for political reasons, since it doesn't have to go through Congress, and courts generally err on the side of executive agencies' judgment on such matters.
They already have basically no advertisers except SpaceX, which is a balance transfer in all but name, and maybe some right wing stuff. Real brands are terrified of them.
They have no money. It’s not coming in, and only gets worse when the site goes down.
They’re facing employment lawsuits over the last two weeks. They’re facing a discrimination lawsuit for requiring an employee with an ADA accommodation to work from home to work from the office (after that announcement).
The FTC is mad. Congress is mad. Who knows what other lawsuits/etc will pop up.
I just don’t understand how they can survive. Seems like chapter 7. Not “renegotiate the debt and we swear we’ll be fine” chapter 11. Sell every last post-it note and auction off the wall art to pay the creditors chapter 7.
I knew he’d ruin Twitter. I never expected anything like this. I expected people to slowly leave (platform and employment) due to new policies and values.
Eh, Tumblr was bought for $1bn, sold for $3m, and is still up. Twitter will most likely remain up in some form (unless the "black start" issues are really bad or the cloud bill is a lot more than expected) and get sold to someone quieter.
> They already have basically no advertisers except SpaceX
Source? Musk claimed a "massive drop" but who knows how much that is, if he exaggerated for effect or whether it's permanent ("paused" doesn't mean permanent, if it makes financial sense advertisers will return).
> I expected people to slowly leave
Yet number of users increased faster than ever. These kinds of predictions reminds me of the expectations that Trump would be prosecuted any day now thorough out his whole presidency.
Maybe Twitter will crash and burn, maybe Musk has absolutely no idea what he's doing, or maybe generally outraged people are bad at predicting the future because they're easily misled by their general dislike of someone's personality.
On principal, I hope it crashes and burns and ruins him. And I know this will cause a lot of people to suffer some. I am so sorry for that. But these piss ant billionaires need to start facing real consequences when they behave so abhorrently. I hope all of his ventures fail similarly. Fuck him and his petulant behavior forever.
Billionares have a support system of other billionares giving one another handsies. I'm sure if Musk was in danger of feeling pain someone like Thiel or Bezos would step up to give him a hand perhaps without interest even.
I agree "fuck him", but sadly I doubt he'll suffer much of a fallout of this.
That said I am riding the sweet wave of schadenfreude and do hope that twitter crashes and burns (and that everyone who works there gets severance)
Wow. The guy who started sending more rockets to space than NASA and almost single-handedly made electric cars cool is suddenly the most evil man alive.
The ends don’t justify the means. And his ends are dubious at best. He didn’t singlehandedly do anything. The successes of SpaceX and Tesla are mostly do to the hard work of thousands of workers.
I think he's just flailing about, nothing much beyond that. Triumphing with a popular platform and revenue would absolutely be his hope, but he's making rushed, questionable decisions that bring compounding issues. From the start, muddying the existing blue check with the idea of a paid tier seems bizarre and unnecessary.
I have no degree at all and my job is pretty advanced research and implementation of ultra low-latency software execution stack in a major market maker. What's your point?
The point is that all of tech has now collectively decided that Elon Musk is a "phony" and "not that smart".
Apparently there was a memo sent to everyone in tech that they have to completely discount his work at Tesla and SpaceX and only evaluate him based on his tweets.
I feel like I'm living in bizarro world where overnight, Elon Musk became a dumbass - at least in the eyes of the tech industry.
Outside of people who blindly lucked into something, I can’t think of anyone stupid who actually built a long-term, sustainable business where they had to juggle multiple duties.
> to get an idea of where EM wants to take Twitter and find out what kind of value it can bring.
He said several times he wants to make it into a western Wechat equivalent, very dystopian with overall negative value to society and positive value for him and the government agencies.
If I'm giving Elon the benefit of the doubt, A. he's intelligent B. He has 20+ years of corporate experience running companies, I would assume that there was some method to this madness. If I had to guess, he came in with the assumption that forces in the company would be hostile to him based on their beliefs. In order to weed those forces out, he engineered some of this madness to shake those people out. Unfortunately it seems like it may be backfiring.
I'm amazed at how naive some of the people are here. Why not just accept what you're seeing with your own two eyes? Why look for an alternate explanation?
Agreed. I have seen some disturbing stuff on Twitter where people say things like “why are you arguing with the smartest man alive?”, “this person invented modern rockets”, “you should just do what your boss says”, and more just complete falsehoods parroted by followers who seemingly have no upside to doing so. It’s weird and bothersome.
There is a difference between watching a giant tire fire from a distance, and throwing $44bln of your own and investors money on said tire fire nominally to make it ‘better’.
If he gets himself under control and stops it from downward spiraling (including losing much of their existing advertiser revenue!) then he’s making some progress.
But right now, he seems to be throwing gasoline on it.
If x is powerful because they’re smart and work hard, I can become powerful because I’m smart and work hard. If x is powerful because they were born rich and got lucky, I… don’t have much control over whether I become powerful.
Twitter won't automagically stay online. A complex system needs dedicated and experienced engineers to maintain it, apply updates and troubleshoot issues, and that's if you're not actively developing new features.
So it will coast for a while before the wheels come off. Maybe performance will degrade, maybe media stops loading or your timeline won't refresh. Maybe none of that happens and a critical system deep down fails and it just stops. But Musk has all but ensured that Twitter in its current form cannot continue to function.
I strongly suspect that was a case of switching off something that few people realized was required by for MFA service to operate. That speaks to poor comms, poor docs, and poor understanding of the systems (by the people who were still around.) "Chesterton's Fence" says you shouldn't be turning off stuff you don't understand, but if it looked OK to turn it off, but it wasn't, then that's actually an indictment of the poor engineering practises that Elon claims are rampant around Twitter. Rather than showing Elon to be an idiot it might prove his point.
But we're not in Twitter, so we can't know. What I would say is that if everything was well signposted that the service was critical then I doubt Elon would have recklessly ordered it should be turned off regardless. He's not that bad. It smells of bad documentation to me.
In the hypothetical fantasy scenario in which I'm assuming leadership of a company that I claim is plagued by poor engineering practices -- practices which include bad documentation -- the last thing I would want to do is order people to turn off stuff without making sure that the stuff they're turning off is mission critical. Hell, I would do my best to make sure I don't issue orders that could even be misconstrued as that.
But hey, maybe that's why I'm just an engineer without any interest of making the switch to the "leadership" ladder, and not a CEO.
But did he have to be so cruel? Post this picture https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592618665933156352 while 5k people lost their jobs? And all the other stuff... I mean... it's one thing to "tell it like it is", which is a trait a lot of people admire. But he's just doing a bunch of stuff that deep down only abominable human beings would think and let alone act on it.
There's an increasingly blunt divide these days between people who think cruelty is a good signal because it's in some way "realistic", and people who think avoidable suffering is bad and should be avoided. This is almost exactly the "woke"/"antiwoke" split.
Thank you for making this point. It's basically confusing correlation with causation, or even reversing causation. Cargo cult thinking. Positive long term change often causes shorter term harm to some people, and this causes shorter term harm to some people, so this must be positive long term change. Poking at a wound, or exercising to overload, precisely because it hurts, because the hurt has become overly associated with progress. Some people make the error innocently. Others use it as an excuse, and make up fancy terms like "technocracy" (Musk's grandfather) or "longtermism" (Musk himself) to dress up the rationalization. Really, it's about essentializing harm itself.
Thank you both pjc50 and notacoward because I heard the phrase "cruelty is the point" and I've always interpreted as the person doing the cruelty enjoys what they do, as if the cruelty by itself is the goal, not a means to an end.
This might map with the idea how the military first needs to break a person to rebuild them in something that's capable of doing what society has taught us to never do (namely, kill others), and more strongly to what I've been increasingly hearing lately in the business world which is "antifragility".
In no way I am equating killing with building resilient systems, but I can see a thread connecting them when someone thinks that cruelty can produce better and improved new behaviors or systems.
You're completely welcome and I'm happy that you saw some value in it. Your military-training analogy is good too. "That which does not kill us makes us stronger" is a powerful concept, but comes with many caveats that are usually overlooked. It is the ability to heal and learn and adapt that is most essential, not the need to challenge, and unfortunately the Nietzschean expression obscures that. The ways in which his ideas were later used should also serve as a stark warning of how dangerous that particular line of thinking can be.
Right, it’s all 4D chess instead of the more obvious answer - he’s overwhelmed and embarrassed, and like many workaholic insecure bosses, it lashing out at folks and cutting his own throat?
Twitter's headcount doubled between 2018 and 2022. They added literally 2500+ people in the two pandemic years itself.
50% layoffs gets them back to their 2018 headcount.
As far as I can remember, Twitter was functioning fine in 2018 as well. And it certainly didn't grow enough or add enough features to warrant 50% headcount increase in two pandemic years.
Yes but which 50% left matters. Engineers in a big complicated system like that are NOT replaceable and NOBODY properly manages their bus-factor. If you spent the past five years basically babying the twitter infra and making sure it stays working and understanding it and building on it and convincing yourself at night that it's okay how stupid and poorly engineered it is because it gets the job done and now elon comes in and spends his time calling you incompetent and overpaid and offers you a 3 month severance, you aren't staying.
My take is that there's a personality type that sees Elon hyping up the "hardcore-ness" and WANTS to get in.
Remember that some people willingly put themselves through extremely situations - obsctacle races, bootcamps, etc. 80hrs/week doesn't bother them. Work-life balance isn't something they care about. The David Goggins types.
Elon has built his career seeking out such people. Couple all of this "hardcore" talk with some elaborate BS about "Twitter's mission" (and he IS an excellent hype man) and I can totally see certain type of engineers jumping through hoops just to get in.
At least trying to take the wrapper off the box -- not sure if he has figured out how to play yet..
Word on the street is full teams (including most of infra) have clicked "no". He may be in a state where the site can't even stay up as he coasts on employee fumes.
My initial interpretation is that social debt is the antithesis of social capital and represents things like burning one's credibility, demonstrating untrustworthiness, losing respect, etc.
Some querying on the Internet shows people discussing social debt as a software engineering concept. In that context, it seems to be parallel to the idea of technical debt but revolves around the quality of the social dynamics of a team rather than the quality of the code.
In any case, it's definitionally not objectively measurable (and I'm not sure why that would be desirable), since it's about people's perceptions and subjective experiences with each other. One can, of course, subjectively measure it.
Think of it as negative goodwill. It is not objectively measured, in the same way that goodwill on balance sheets is not objectively measured.
But it’s a real thing. Qualitatively it is the impairment from people not wanting to do business with you. In Twitter’s case, that manifests as decreased advertiser demand, which results in lower ad prices.
And to the extent Twitter is losing MAU, that impacts ad inventory.
Goodwill on balance sheets is a technical thing and is quite different from common parlance "goodwill". It's the fudge factor introduced when doing an acquisition to make the numbers balance up correctly.
Yes — my point is that goodwill is intended to explain the difference between book value and purchase price. If something is “worth” $500, as evidenced by market cap, why pay $600? Because it’s worth $600 to you. That extra $100 is hand waved away as intangibles.
Maybe it wasn’t the best analogy. Was just looking for similar “it’s real but not precisely accounted for” concepts .
I thought "goodwill" was routinely assessed and considered in takeovers. It amounts to the goodwill of the customer base, doesn't it? I.e., how many customers are they, how much are they worth, and will the new owner get to keep them?
We certainly don’t know enough about psychology to objectively measure much of anything. But I suppose a massive portion of your workforce deciding to take severance instead of working for you any longer is one of the most concrete examples of high social debt coming and biting you in the ass I’ve ever heard of.
And in general that’s the idea of social debt. That every time you ask someone to change their responsibilities, or do something against company culture, or do something against their morals,
or work longer hours for no extra pay, etc: you accrue negativity in their mind associated with you. Do that enough without there being positive things to “pay off” the debt and they’ll be less motivated to work for you, quit entirely, or even sabotage you.
I never understood the premise behind questions like GP's, when they ask about something that's very obvious and intuitive for a person with any life experience. Maybe some of these comments are just about trying to be argumentative rather than asking honest questions.
> What is 'social debt' and how is it (objectively) measured?
ESG score (Environmental, Social and Governance), it isn't measured objectively but used as a tool for political control and for parading by activists.
Elon did two things:
- he angered elites by changing the blue mark from status symbol to something else.
- he angered the techies by firing people.
These people have so much clout that doing sentiment analysis on his name before and after the twitter fiasco would probably have very interesting results.
There is nowhere to take Twitter, it is on the tail end of its business cycle. The only move to play here is to go into damage control mode and relist ASAP. That way Elon can minimize his loss to 'only' $10 billion or less
I don't hope the wheels stay on. I hope they come off, as a warning to anyone in the future considering acquiring an organization with the idea that its people are a small part of its value and can be cast out or easily replaced.
Do you think this could be one of those "There were making fun of me and telling me to quit, but now they call me a genius", kinda like what happened with many YouTubers and entrepreneurs?
I personally don't like how negative everyone has been since EM took over. The 44 billion wasn't 100% his money, he got funding, so he's still liable. And since Twitter is known for being hated, very few people have something positive to say about Twitter. I think EM making changes is good.
Of course losing your job isn't fun, but I don't think that this amount of negativity is productive or good for anyone.
Don't get me wrong, EM makes mistakes, even if he doesn't address them, like HyperLoop, which is not only practical but also not his idea. But like why not wait a bit too actually see what's his vision for Twitter, beyond just saying that he's trying to serve his ego.
>Hundreds upon hundreds of Twitter employees have technically resigned but still have access to Twitter’s internal systems, with some speculating it is because the employees tasked with managing that access also resigned.
At this point it just seems like a matter of time before Musk and/or his fan club start trying to change the narrative to him purposely running the company to the ground, and the fact that he wasted billions of dollars doing it somehow is noble.
Aside: there is no "technically resigned" here, if they're referring to Musk's loyalty-pledge deadline. Those employees have been terminated -- and are entitled to unemployment and wrongful termination protections.
I wonder if this legally really is the case. Twitter seems to have asked "Do you still want to work here", giving an option to affirm. They didn't say "you have to go", they said "you may go if you do not like the new direction of the company, please tell us which one it is".
I'd be rather careful with that, and not just proclaim these people were terminated. I see a rather good chance court could rule very differently.
The magic proclamation is actually going the other way. If the company is ending the employment, that is termination. The company does not get to simply say "well you've resigned."
Perhaps you're not arguing termination vs resignation but rather whether they're entitled to unemployment and wrongful termination protection? That's more open for debate, but the former employees are entitled to those considerations (which they would not be had they resigned).
Likely that contract doesn't have a clause that states it only remains valid if the employee clicks on "yes" in death march emails.
So, the contract remains valid until either the employee quits or the employer terminates. Not reacting to an email is not quitting.
I'm pretty sure that legally, the employees that received that email and didn't click/answer are still considered employees. They are only terminated once they received their actual termination papers, not an "if / then" email.
Are you seriously saying you spend 8+ hours a day working for a company and don't have a contract that manages your rights (like salary, PTO, ...) and obligations (work hours, presence, ...)?
Most American workers have an employment agreement with generalized clauses to the effect of "we can terminate you at any time for any reason" and "hours are thusly unless management needs you otherwise" and "duties are so-and-so but also anything else we want you to do."
I've had jobs where I kept the software running so smoothly 80% of my time at work was spent with a broom or a rag cleaning because "downtime" was not a thing.
Federal employment laws, state employment laws, and court precedents substitute for a detailed contract for many employees in the U.S.
This is in fact a big reason that companies like to use so many contractors: it’s way easier to manage the downside risk for a contractor because the employer’s liability is scoped entirely to one written agreement. Whereas their relationship with employees is scoped to the broad set of laws and precedents mentioned in my first paragraph.
European here. What do you mean? Employment contracts are not common or mandatory? Unheard of here. I painted my grandma's house for money and we still wrote a single page contract.
There are employment agreements, but they typically only cover protections for the company - not stealing IP, no competition clause, etc.
Since most states are at will employment, you don’t need a reason to fire someone, just like an employee doesn’t need a reason to quit. Both parties can end employment without cause at any time for any reason. There are some varying exceptions to this, but it’s mostly the case.
Guessing here but I think the implication is that courts in the US are unable/unwilling to enforce workers rights even when laid out in a contract. In a post-union US there is not enough organised support for workers unless they are very rich.
Obviously employees all (maybe almost all) have employment contracts
Many W-2 employees still have a contract. It's quite common for an employment contract to exist for regular salaried employees, and extremely common at companies like Twitter.
We do have work contracts, but for salaried employees they are often :
"You work for us, we pay you (salary amount) and you will do everything we ask you to and thanks to 'right to work' laws we can fire you at anytime for any or no reason"
I'm guessing this is the case because "I didn't see the email" is plausible. I think all my jobs have asked for a one sentence resignation email to HR just so everyone's on the same page.
It has nothing to do with the plausibility of seeing the email or not. Somebody could say “yeah I read that email. It was stupid and I wasn’t going to respond to it. I would still like to work here though, just not on double hours.”
There is a lot of tailwind for California's economy. If I were starting a new company, I would stay away from California. Every possible metric is worse except for network effects and access to capital in SV.
>I wonder if that’s why people are moving out of California at a record rate. Same with companies
Probably because they are no longer competitive to afford them. If you want to argue that there needs to be a more compassionate, less capitalist competition to California then I'll walk back my argument as I would agree that there are tradeoffs there. If you were discussing there needing "to be some competition to California model" and referencing capitalistic model then I will still point to the fact that gdp per capita puts California as the best subnational polity
>Every possible metric is worse except for network effects and access to capital in SV.
Again if you meant to compare this to a non capitalistic market then you have a point, but if this is capitalism vs capitalism that's like saying "if you just remove all the ways they are winning, aren't they actually losing?"
Is it that simple though? By your logic it's possible to never fire anyone, just change the contract until they resign... doesn't really make sense to me.
No, I didn't say that. And there it really becomes tricky, If they try to unilaterally change terms of the contract, they cannot do that. However, at the same time an employee is not entitled to dictate the direction of a company. I am pretty sure a lot of the "perks" that might go away in favor or "hardcore mode" weren't contractually guaranteed. The terms of the employment contract wouldn't have changed then. If they muddle around e.g. with pay or work hours that would be quite different.
I don't really see the "constructive dismissal" argument either that others brought up, as that would require the employer deliberately creating a hostile work environment. Just saying "we're going into hardcore mode" and taking away some perks that weren't guaranteed wouldn't yet fulfill that. There might be of course other shit that twitter/Musk pulled/pulls that may legally satisfy a constructive dismissal. The email, in my laypersons view, wouldn't be enough.
However there is a strong point about the "missed the email" argument, and the non-affirmative nature of the "resignations" it creates. I think that's a rather strong point in favor of the employees. But then again, never underestimate courts ability to render "surprising" rulings.
My guess is though that twitter would not just "dismiss" everybody who did not respond. At the very least HR would get in touch with those people anyway, at which point employees can say "oh wait, what email?". I'd think the email is just meant as a pre-filter to save time by filtering out what people you do not need to talk to because they want to stay anyway.
Most tweets about the Elon/twitter situation are fake nonsense, including this one.
Last week a tweet said Elon had shut down the microservice responsible for 2FA. 100,000 upvotes on Reddit/twitter and 1000s of shouting comments. The story was nonsense of course. Depressing to see such discourse gets posted here too.
But they blocked access to the HQ. That should definitely stop rogue employees (with company hardware and full system access) from doing anything malicious right?
Elon has offered no vision for twitter 2.0, only the promise of hard work towards a nebulous goal.
He then offered no equity in return for that hard work rebuilding the platform.
Why would anyone stay? “Hey, do you want to work triple the amount of hours for me for the same pay?”
I wonder if seeing Chinese companies and Chinese factories work has warped his judgement.
Without a vision of “this is how we’re going to change the world” and the shared commitment of “whoever helps me will get a big piece of the pie!” How does he expect people to stay motivated exactly ?
I finally understand why brilliant people like Karpathy leave Tesla.
He could give out stock. Anyone staying by choice (not forced like an h1b), has to buy into the vision that their 'hardcore' work will eventually make Twitter public again. Effectively rebooting the company as a startup.
IMO, given EM's antics, he's making the base pay of anyone he hires go up, not down. I can't imagine what he's going to have to pay the CEO he says he's going to put in place at Twitter.
Yes, he could give out stock, but for that being valued bei the employees they have to buy in into the vision, which currently seems to be missing. (Is there a chance for a payment app (haha, Musk and banking regulation) or the "everything app" like WeChat? Those seem to be his ideas ...)
I get the idea that he doesn’t know himself, which is why he hasn’t explained it? He just seems to have vague ideas on what to do.
I don’t know. But from what I’m hearing, he offered no vision for twitter employees either.
Here’s an example Twitter thread of someone who saw entire teams fired around him, saw that he would have to deal with systems be barely knew anything about, and had no idea what Musk’s vision:
https://twitter.com/peterclowes/status/1593458256034275330?s...
His mentality might be that it's too late to go back and the company is probably going to fail anyway. So he has to radically change the workforce and the culture there. So he's throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks apparently. While that might improve overhead costs eventually, I don't see how it's going to result in a platform that gets the moderation/censorship balance correct while keeping the advertisers happy.
Was the company really on its way to failure? It was rudderless and with no profit, but with him as CEO would he really struggle to keep finding VC funding? He could have slowly attrited the workforce over 3 months, 6 months, while defining a future vision, making sure he’s got everyone he needs and that he’s found the Jony Ives of twitter (exceptional workers who were stifled by the bureaucracy).
Instead he’s nuked the company workforce? I dunno. Seems a bit reckless to me. Why would twitter be under so much pressure?
A social media company that's stagnating typically doesn't have much time to remain viable before they'll give way to the next big platform. I think they only had a few years left before they became the next myspace anyway.
This isn't to say that firing so many employees, trying to quickly roll out a change in the blue checkmark system and scaring off advertisers was the right choice of course. So I basically agree that he should have tried to fix the company over the course of a year or two.
What’s the evidence for your first statement? MySpace was a long time ago now. FB and twitter are “stagnant” but have been around for over a decade, even with other platforms popping up around them.
> I wonder if seeing Chinese companies and Chinese factories work has warped his judgement.
Reuters reported recently that Tesla plans to start exporting cars from its China factory to the U.S. (Tesla denied the report, btw, but this an Elon-run company we're talking about so that means effectively nothing):
right? He wants engineering wage slaves, he shoulda bought TikTok. Or maybe he'll just end up moving engineering to China as his big brain billionaire flex.
> I wonder if seeing Chinese companies and Chinese factories work has warped his judgement.
Elon Musk has publicly praised the Chinese work ethic of "burning the 3am oil"[1], and dunks on the idea of a 40 hour work week[2]. He's made it abundantly clear where he stands on labor norms.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe his vision for Twitter 2.0 is to rebrand Twitter as X (I believe he owns x.com) and rebuild it as WeChat for the North American.
Twitter engineers are reporting in saying he gave no indication of how this would be done. See my other comments for a source.
I think that’s it too, but I wonder about it’s feasibility. I’m not sure we need a WeChat in the west. I remember a good article shared here about how the Chinese ecosystem is so different that WeChat makes sense.
oh yes the how and whether its actually a product people want or not are huge open questions that haven't been answered, at least not externally and seemingly not internally as well.
What happens when Twitter survives despite reducing headcount by 80-90%?
It's going to send a message that companies are more overstaffed than we thought. This may explain an underlying fear driving even some engineers to put their reputation on the line with confident declarations that Twitter is going to fail. Some were saying it wouldn't survive the night. It's now morning. Others saying it won't last the weekend or coming week. We'll soon find out. I would expect some bumps along the way. Twitter Blue was a bump.
Perhaps Twitter is just the first to go lean before the recession. Elon merely the first dancer who is willing to look dumb. Now who's going to be the first follower to transform the lone nut into a leader?
Watch this 2 minute to see how this works, you may have seen this before:
Now here's a counterbalance to the fear with an optimistic take: This is a correction. A small number of tech companies have been hoarding talent. The talent gets a 3 month severance and made available to the larger ecosystem.
I don't think there's any doubt that many tech companies are hideously, bafflingly over-staffed (3000 people working on just the music functionality of Alexa? What could they possibly be doing?). But maybe take a bit of time to understand what everybody is (and isn't) doing before throwing half out and alienating the rest?
This is just a masterclass in how not to do it. He doesn't look dumb because he's reducing the headcount. He looks dumb because he's going about it like an absolute lunatic.
People constantly underestimate the size of the support staff needed to keep the engineering team productive. For every ten or so software engineers you hire to work on a new product or feature, you're going to need 5-10 QA engineers, another project manager, another product manager, maybe another build engineer, maybe more internal IT staff... You need these people. Software doesn't just leap from developers' fingertips directly onto store shelves. And now that that program's engineering manager has so many more direct reports, that manager needs another manager to split his duties up... And now that there are so many managers, their Director maybe needs a personal assistant to help keep her schedule better organized. All that extra staff eventually requires more HR support, more people working in facilities/building management, more janitors. On the business side, this product is going to need a few more marketers, maybe salespeople to sell it, business analysts to track its effectiveness, and so on. After a couple rounds of this, the company looks up and somehow has 3,000 people and HN sneers about what could they all be doing...
There's a difference between saying "I could bang that out in a weekend and replace the whole department" and recognizing that 3,000 people supporting a relatively small feature is a sign of bloat in an organization. Surely there's _some_ point where the headcount becomes a sign of a problem -- would it be okay to make OP's comment if 100,000 people were working that feature?
I agree with your general point that a "software team" in a big org requires a lot more people than just engineers developing new features, and that the headcount doesn't necessarily scale linearly. That doesn't change the fact that in a normal business, if 3,000 full-time staff (support staff and all) are working on something, it's probably something pretty big that generates enough revenue or has enough growth potential to justify that cost. Even if a team is working hard and "doing stuff", they can still be grossly overstaffed.
That could happen, but if you were running, say, a grocery store, and 90 of your 100 employees walked out the door in a single swoop, everything would look pretty good for a little while, maybe even a day or two. There's still merchandise on the shelves, customers are still able to check out because you've routed your staff there. But over time things will start to cascade. The freezer breaks. Someone breaks a bottle of wine in aisle 10. A customer can't find anything and walks out. Etc etc.
But yeah, for that little bit at the start, everything "looks" fine.
Point being: it's way too soon to say twitter is surviving.
If it requires more than 20% - 30% of your staff to sustain operations then you've implemented it wrong. So sure, you should be able to keep operations going having sustained large staff reductions, but you aren't going to be doing anything to expand your business opportunities. Maybe Musk doesn't think that's required, but if they lose too many key operations personnel then they may be screwed.
It "survived", but apparently with some minor disruptions [1], which isn't a good signal at all. Any social media site should be able to survive a Thursday night with no major news events, celebrity deaths, natural disasters, or scandals.
What will be the true test is the world cup. If it can survive the final game (estimated 1.5 to 2 Billion viewership), that will be impressive. Historically, that's been a major engineering challenge for any "public" social network. With 90% less staff, it might not be possible to monitor, triage, test, fix, etc. on the fly.
I suspect you right to some extent. But "survive" has two meanings: 1) keep the site up and running, and 2) make money. A site of this size earns gobs more money with just a small fractional increase in traffic. I have no doubt Twitter can stay running on a skeleton crew, but can it earn more revenue in the long run than it would have with a larger crew.
I think that Twitter won't fail anytime soon. These rash HR moves probably have a mid-term goal of completely replacing the company personnel. When 95% or so of donations made by Twitter staff went to Democratic party, it is safe to say that his political stance of allowing free speech for all parties will be heavily resented by the current workforce, and might lead to demotivation, low productivity and even sabotage. Replace potentially unloyal people who don't even want to go to the office with a new skeleton crew, get everything functioning, then bring in new personnel to work on new features.
Yes, and actually Tesla is similar in that their staff donates 94% to Democrats. That's not an issue because it's not affecting the output of electric cars in a negative way. Perhaps it's even positive since they are more motivated in the direction of electrification and its role with regard to climate change. But Twitter is the public square and needs to be neutral.
> It's going to send a message that companies are more overstaffed than we thought.
Consider the FTX news, where the new CEO appointed to clean up the mess called it a complete failure of corporate governance.
There is a huge amount of work that isn't directly related to keeping a website running that is required to sustain a large corporation and keep it legal. You can ignore all of this for a while, but not forever.
From various reports it seems Twitter has fired everyone in security, privacy, media relations, regulatory compliance and we probably haven't heard of everything.
I wish companies could go lean. I had tremendous growth when working for Netflix partly because engineers there got to build meaningful systems with huge ownership and very small teams. Case in point, my coworker and I owned four or five high-traffic systems and carried a pager 24x7. It didn't bother us at all as our we got alerts maybe once or twice a month.
That said, a lean company requires strong leadership, technical depth in management, and specific types of cultures. I don't believe that most companies are up to such challenge.
So not only are they going to find a vulnerability on twitter’s backend that allows them to remotely execute code on the Twitter servers, but then they’re also going to find some vulnerability in the app that is accessible from the previous vulnerability on the backend that allows them to execute arbitrary code on my phone, without pushing any sort of app update to the Apple store, and then they’re going to use that vulnerability in the app to deploy some 0day that gets around all the protections in iOS?
I'm more worried about cold path logs. Like, what if Twitter just randomly has the past year's worth of geolocation data on so-and-so, and it happens to be exposed in an SQL query, and that query happens to get run and the results exfiltrated.
It depends a lot on what Twitter keeps and for how long, but e.g. consider American soldiers being used to pinpoint nuclear silos, for example.
Imagine being able to map where every journalist is in the world. Now imagine being able to do that for every minute of every day for the past decade.
Objectively, this is an enormous geopolitical risk at just the wrong time, but I have no interest in panicking so aside from mentioning it here, I'm letting it be somebody else's problem
Before anyone asks: the cold path is long-term logging and storage, as opposed to the hot path, i.e. real-time telemetry. (Or at least that's what we called them at the last CloudCo I worked at).
Generally, you try to keep PII (personally identifiable information) and other stuff out of the cold path, but the data still has to be somewhere, right? So there's the hot path.
The overall effect is that stuff that is only logged 'on the hot path' gets effectively forgotten after a while, so you don't have to worry about the management and stewardship of that data.
But you could, for example, force a compromised system to log PII (incl GPS coordinates, radiotelemetry, accelerometer) to the cold path and then come back and get it later.
For bonus points, do stego so it looks innocent.
That is one of the scenarios I'm worried is playing out over there. One of many worries, to be honest, but this one just seems like the kind of breach we'd find out about years later, if at all, under the new regime.
Meanwhile, people in this or that far-off place just... disappear.
The parent isn't talking about aggregate overview of journalists. They are talking about targeted tracking. We already know the saudis were doing their damndest to have access to twitter for basically that exact purpose, and they keep telling me to ignore the hacksaws they brought.
You can use Twitter with a third party app. In this regard Twitter stands out from the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok etc. and is the reason I use it and none of the others.
This is why I have been saying even if you don't log off from twitter completely at least do houseclean your old tweets with tweetdelete.net (or something IDK).
I do not trust Elon to use my posting history responsibly, period.
At the moment, that request might still be handled by a microservice written by the old staff that does the right thing. If that microservice is still up.
> At the moment, that request might still be handled by a microservice written by the old staff that does the right thing.
That's being optimistic. The old microservice was written before GDPR took effect. When data management was "get everything, keep everything, storage is cheap, we (or some 3 letters agency) may find a use for it 10 years from now".
That might be true, but in any case, if you don’t trust the new owner to do the right thing, then the present state is still preferable over any future state.
its better than leaving it out there, also there are compliance laws like GDPR in some jurisdictions (similar in California) where they have to be more careful with data. overall I'd rather ask them to delete it & have them try to jump through hoops to resurrect it.
further as GP mentioned, this should provide some protection from unintentional breaches. push come to shove I am prepared to delete the account and ask my friends to follow me on mastodon, its really not that much of lock-in with twitter.
I'm using Firefox but if you are that paranoid you should be using Chrome. Firefox is a child play compared to Chrome in term of security (but not privacy).
All one has to confirm is look into the privacy/system privilege that a Twitter app consumes to say "oh, yeah; website-version of Twitter is a safer thing to use".
So wait, we've had all these exploits and no one raised those concerns until Elon took over? How come it wasn't on national news before Elon bought the company?
Everything has exploits waiting to get discovered and used. They just get worked on under normal circumstances and patched. With all the chaos there's no one to patch or monitor
Check out hacker one and look at what gets disclosed everyday major companies have little issues popping up
The longer they remain in a code freeze, inevitably the outdated codebase will develop vulns. And they’re not gonna be able to patch vulns and 0days during a freeze..
The management is worried about internal sabotage?
My Twitter friends said Twitter has been having large exodus. CSL(core systems lib?) team, blobstore team, graph platform team, and revenue forecasting team seemed have all quit. I'm not sure how robust and autonomous Twitter's infra is. Hopefully Twitter will continue to function.
It makes me wonder how much “infrastructure runway” a company like Twitter has. If every engineer resigns, how long will it take before the infrastructure stops working autonomously… server/DB hard drives fill up or crash, PSUs die, high maintenance processes grind to a haunt, network capacity stops scaling, etc.
My guess is a few weeks if that. However, the World Cup is starting this weekend, and Twitter will see heavy traffic spikes. I assume in the chaos that has been the last month they’ve failed to properly account for this. Maybe I’m wrong, but if Twitter holds up through this weekend it’ll be a clear sign they had way too many employees.
I think we're going to find out in the next few days, but if you believe this graph the signs are not encouraging (NB: this appears to be self-reported outages so I'm not sure that it is trustworthy):
I remember getting into Sangria (Scala's GraphQL implementation) for the first time a couple years ago and seeing Twitter devs helping contribute to the lib. Was excited to see Twitter push that envelope. Now sad to see it all go away.
Even better, how the fuck do you triage a system you've never touched before, that most likely is overengineered to hell and back, while the guys responsible for getting you splunk creds are still trying to find out who can give them THEIR creds to get in themselves.
When I first heard about twitter I thought 1) that’s a dumb idea and 2) it won’t last long.
I was of course very wrong about #2 but feel increasingly right about #1 the more time goes by and the more (IMO) it provides net harm to society and social discourse.
So I’m sympathetic to the employees stuck there but hoping my timeline for #2 was simply way off and it finally goes away.
Weird new CEO fires half the company, then demands a _loyalty pledge_, like a common Henry VIII. Sensibly, everyone quits. I mean, the only saboteur there is the leadership.
I think any reasonably well engineered system of this scale should run fine for a few weeks without ops, barring any weird Murphy's Law madness. Staying up for two days is not much of an achievement. Perhaps the real test is still ongoing.
Why would you assume it's about politics instead of the whole "shitty asshole boss who has open contempt for you and your coworkers, who is promising to massively overwork you, who might fire you any moment and has already fired half your peers"? I think you'd have to be completely insane to want to work there right now.
Well, there was twitter drama that preceded elon's buying twitter, and there was clearly a lot of employees pushing their politics using it. Hell, we got recent thread about how Japanese Twitter changed the moment the "moderation" got kicked out.
But yeah, asshole boss gonna be #1 cause here with literally anything else being barely related.
You're putting a lot of stock into this idea that the root cause is some left-leaning employees. I don't buy it whatsoever. But even if we assumed it true (it's not), if you bought a company where the employees hate[0] you and you immediately start antagonising them doesn't that indicate that you were the problem?
[0] - I don't believe this is true either. As I said in another comment, not everyone likes their boss. But many people at Twitter liked their jobs and their colleagues, and probably would've tolerated some cringe-y Musk tweets or a change in direction. But my sense is that when Musk started firing people (either en-masse or individually, like the guy patiently explaining the "1000 RPC calls" thing) that's when the mood shifted to "fuck this guy, and fuck this company"
How is abandoning a mad boss sabotage? Those people are my new heroes. They clearly send a message to anyone in the industry trying to emulate musk, that if you mess around you find out.
If that’s what you meant, then I think a clearer wording would have been “self-sabotage”. The wording “internal sabotage” implies a coordinated effort against Musk by people inside Twitter.
Because while particular actions he's taken in the past few weeks may be justifiable in certain contexts, all of them taken together can only be interpreted as an attempt to set 44 billion dollars on fire.
He's probably going to buy up a load of dogecoin then pump it by saying it'll be accepted on the site, and use the profits to keep the lights on for a while
It doesn’t matter. They aren’t public anymore and Elon Musk has tons of finance and tax people across his business empire. You think a guy worth hundreds of billions doesn’t have a team of finance people?
Not op, but I actually don't think that a guy who apparently likes to trim the fat has a bunch of finance people around who have enough free time to do payroll and reporting for a 44 billion dollar company that was just acquired and is in the process of letting go thousands of employees.
The source is a random tweet. It's incredible to see people consume such propaganda wholesale. There seems to be a derangement when it comes to Elon Musk, people will literally believe anything. Millions of people last week ACTUALLY BELIEVED that Elon Musk shut down the the microservice responsible for 2FA. The source of that story was also a random tweet.
I meant it's not a "random tweet" from anon. As for "like we trust the press to be objective" you are free to trust whoever you want, but I have seen what "anti-MSM" people share in their uncensored places, and that's no better than mainstream journalism at all.
I think the equivalent English meme would be this exchange from Pirates of the Caribbean: "You are without doubt the worst pirate I've ever heard of"/"But you have heard of me"
Funny thing about running an internet service. Every visit costs you money. With advertisers dropping like flies, more eyeballs isn't always a good thing.
Pretty sure other disasters have caused spikes in Twitter usage too. Even someone as dense as F.Elon should know that transient fluctuations in any metric don't mean anything. Do they not teach statistics in South African high schools? Only sustainable changes matter, and when Twitter itself is the disaster that's not sustainable. People will only stand around in hopes of seeing the final collapse for so long.
Highest DAU for xx% less overhead is literally winning. That's why people have lost their minds. They want him to fail so badly and they're getting the feeling that he won't, so cognitive dissonance is through the roof.
Twitter has not changed as a product. His Twitter blue has been a disaster so far. Hes getting attention for his much larger failure, being the worst tech company manager we've seen in a while.
You cant take credit for positive outcomes if you done nothing yet.
The same Twitter but with higher DAU is running with xx% less overhead. That's an objective improvement measured by numbers. That Twitter blue was a mess for a day doesn't matter in the long run.
Losing advertisers is a problem in the short term, but less overhead helps and they're pivoting the model. I thought we all hated ads? Now people suddenly support that model? Please. It's all so fake.
You’re giving him a lot of benefit of the doubt. So far we only have his untrustworthy[1] statements about DAU slightly ticking up, but we have third party confirmation that he’s lost a significant number of employees in critical job roles with no explanation about how Twitter can survive long term without them and advertisers leaving which is dropping revenue. Until he has an actual win or a compelling argument as to how his strategy is going to improve long term, I don’t see why you wouldn’t look at his management of Twitter as a disaster
[1]he already posted a conspiracy theory, deleted it when called out, and then said he never posted it. That’s his recent behavior, if you trust his statements I have a bridge to sell you
I give builders the benefit of the doubt, especially if they've done it before. Especially if they've put rockets in space.
That he deleted that stupid tweet was admission it was stupid. Where did he say he never posted it though? It's highly unlikely he said that and wasn't joking. He knows everything he posts is captured immediately.
>That he deleted that stupid tweet was admission it was stupid.
No, admitting that it was stupid would be an admission that it was stupid. Removing its existence is just hiding the mistake.
>Where did he say he never posted it though? It's highly unlikely he said that and wasn't joking.
Here[1], and inb4 you say that's obviously a joke. No it is not to a casual observer. He claims he never tweeted what was reported, and the only indication at all that the tweet should be read in a not monotone voice is the emphasis asterisks around not. All that indicates to a casual observer is that he is emphatically denying he ever made the first indirect tweet.
If you're a power plant owner and want to maximize energy output, setting the plant on fire is certainly one way to release a lot of energy very quickly.
Winning means making more money. Twitter isn’t a machine that automatically converts DAU to money. It’s an operation that sells ads. And it seems to be doing poorly at that as of late.
That just tells me that (a) they were/are over provisioned so an increase in DAU was a rather simple thing, (b) computers are deterministic and if everybody quit then the system is at the same state as it was when it already had less DAU and was able to handle more. There is no engineering feat here brought by him.
Are you seriously suggesting that making people believe that you're running the company to the ground is a good way to build publicity?
It's true that good publicity comes from amazing turnarounds. Final Fantasy XIV is a good example, since FFXIV 1.0 was widely regarded as terrible and 2.0 was lauded for somehow miraculously turning the company's fortunes around.
But the big difference there is that it was a new management that did it. You don't get points for completely ruining your company's best-known product (to the point where some believe it to be the company's only product).
The reason people are "using" Twitter now is to watch a trainwreck. Most people by now probably have a backup plan.
> Elon, there's a bunch of us in SV who will come up tonight to help on the infra side to keep the site up.
> If you need help just ask.
As if you could just drive over to the Twitter HQ, grok how all the infrastructure works, and make/provide meaningful contributions/tweaks/upkeep.... tonight
That's either a level of delusion that I can't imagine and/or someone who has no idea what they are talking about. I also can't imagine carrying water for or "simp-ing" for a billionaire, especially one who treats people so terribly (this "work yourself to the bone or resign" ultimatum was one of the more disgusting things I've seen in tech, I'm appalled at the people defending it as some genius move).
Really I feel bad for the people who have no choice but to stay at Twitter, the H-1B's and the like. The brain drain is going to be (/already has been) massive and all that will be left are the people who have no choice, can't find a better/different job, or are true sycophants. None of that makes for a healthy work environment and isn't conducive to making good products.
Later in that thread he says he's currently in sales, but used to be a "self-taught infrastructure engineer". If you look at the site that he links from his Twitter profile you'll see a half-finished site made with a site-generator. Just the type of talent you want running the infra for the company you just paid $44B for.
It's about the optics of some rando, with a half broken site that he's sharing publicly, claiming he'll "come up tonight" to help run one of the biggest sites on the web. Using a landing page creator like ConvertKit shouldn't require any frontend skills.
To be honest, this sounds like bloody red meat to any black or grey hats out there interested in having some infiltration fun. Why not show up at Twitter’s hq with a mouth full of smart sounding engineering babble and a backpack full of spycraft toys?
Yep, Elon's paranoid about his current employees sabotaging him, but he should be just as paranoid about new job applicants looking to gain access and capitalize on the internal chaos.
Not gonna lie, if my current contract was ending id take a stint at twitter for a while just to be a fly on the wall for the insanity even knowing id get the arse at any time.
I'm somewhat surprised that nobody bypassed the internal systems to tweet stuff using Musk's account. (Or maybe somebody has and we just can't distinguish?)
Hahaha. Even better, the twitterer specializes in digital detoxes (a worthy cause, but counter to Twitter's goals). Maybe his secret plan is to turn down services in a volunteer capacity
At the end of the day, most software eats the same stuff and the levers are often rudimentary and grokable, especially if you focus on a specific area. I don't think someone could meaningfully implement a new feature in a night, but could they tackle a problem in a given service and identity a rough remediation to save the next 72h? Yes, this stuff happens all the time. I've jumped on outages like this and figured it out as I went. You're not going to build a new feature but it's probably possible to get oriented enough to avoid catastrophy.
People want it all to fail out of spite, and attempt to bring their dreams to life by merely doomsdaying repeatedly and with fervor. We had 4y of Trump and no amount of wishful doomsdaying actually changed anything. The media was full of drama and we told ourselves stories of incredible disfunctions, but at the end of the day the government kept on doing its thing, the country mostly didn't change too much on the fundamentals. Reality is most often more boring than that (save FTX-like events).
That’s very naive. We’re talking about a distributed system with thousands of servers, with code from people who might not even work there anymore. Yeah, maybe if a server gets a high disk usage alert because of runaway logs you might fix it… but maybe that fix causes another problem, or maybe the alert is in a system that you don’t even know its purpose. Maybe 72h is just what it takes to you understand the internal tooling and how to do any action there.
Basic firefighting often revolves around the same set of problems. It's not that naive. Tell me I'm wrong? I work with systems like this. Realistically most problems that show up by themselves (ie not caused by bad code) often have very common mitigations/remedies. There's surely some super complex interaction going on but bugs showing up of this complex nature are usually due to code changes, or scaling events that reach a tipping point. Odds are those aren't the bread and butter of problems faced by Twitter _right now_.
> Realistically most problems that show up by themselves (ie not caused by bad code)
Well that goes the first assumption.
> or scaling events that reach a tipping point
Such as having applications running without restarts for a long time due to deploy freezes?
> Odds are those aren't the bread and butter of problems faced by Twitter _right now_.
Right now, exactly this moment, probably not. But if those were the only worrying events that could happen in the short term, I doubt anyone would need to offer any help to Twitter.
> due to code changes
Well, Musk has said that he wants to do "hardcore engineering" implying there will be a lot of changes coming up. That surely can't go wrong.
The World Cup is starting Sunday. That usually would be an all hands on decks event at least ops wise, but there are very few hands left and the door to the deck is closed anyway...
Dude just getting access / logins you need, client side certs for auth, MFA that’s required by certain systems, SSH keys would take time and be arduous during a regular hire, can you imagine what this would look like trying to show up and have it all in a night for a sev1/p1, when so many (who would manage that access, as others have pointed out in other threads) have been let go or left already? Hell, who even manages IAM or PKI at Twitter at this point?
If the problems are "this link is saturated" or "we're out of compute capacity" and other run of the mill stuff, I think getting access, being able to measure, identify and effect change is indeed the tough part.
The problems themselves most often have simple short term remedies.
I really think people blow out of proportion the actual requirements to keep things running, probably because they wish to see him fail. But everywhere I've worked, systems were most stable when engineers weren't there to muck with them. There's a reason many people refuse to ship on Friday.
Are you going to be able to do it under the conditions of massive brain drain? Better hope the engineering and SRE teams had up to date SOPs that work well. Oh, and you’re new. So that means you need to probably start getting access granted to services on the fly first to even see dashboards. But it sounds like that team has also seen massive attrition…
Are you sure you can be effective coming completely cold into a company with massive attrition?
I think Twitter is becoming a place for high risk reward employment. Maybe it crashes and burns, maybe you quickly ascend the ranks in the turmoil and reach a point in your career that would have taken substantially longer in a more traditional route. If Twitter does something like what Tesla did, you might even get filthy rich. Or, hey, maybe it doesn't work out and you get nothing but an interesting story, Twitter collapses or Elon fires you or whatever.
Many companies say that they are like a startup, but I can see Twitter going back to that style. Far fewer people, far faster shipping, less thinking things through, etc. The bluechecks for anyone in a week and undoing it seems very startup like to me. Is that good? Probably not - but it is interesting, and, like I said, high risk high reward.
Yes? That's what he has said he plans to do, take it public again. And, of course, they have to deal with the debt. Twitter might not be able to, but they might. That's the high risk part - you might burn out, get fired, or the company might collapse.
A turn around is clearly possible. Social media companies have been tremendously valuable in recent history and might become so again. Musk has had amazing financial success with other companies.
As an employee your potential rewards are what I've already explicitly called out. You can advance further and faster up the corporate hierarchy in the tumult. You can also earn and hold stock rewards that may be extremely valuable. And, of course, you may consider it intrinsically valuable to help shape a tool used by hundreds of millions worldwide, and, as the number of employees shrinks, the per-employee impact increases.
> That's what he has said he plans to do, take it public again.
For a mere hobby it is too expensive even for him. 44bn (+continuing operating costs, credit costs, ...) also is a lot to regain via profits. So the logical thing is to either sell it to some other corporation (who!?) or going public. But for that he has to somehow make it an attractive investment, while currently he is doing the opposite.
You don't think you would have an opportunity to achieve a higher position at Twitter (and more money either there or by switching into an adjacent company) faster than at a FAANG? And the other indication you have, apart from common sense, is Tesla. If you had got and held on to a lot of Tesla stock you would have been rewarded. No guarantees obviously, but if Twitter could be as successful - same thing could happen there. It's a possibility.
Elon literally fired 50% of Twitter's staff in order to save on expenses. He's not going to suddenly turn around and dectuple the salary of the remnants.
People here on HN drastically underestimate the value of Twitter’s network and name. Musk could start 1,000 social media companies for 1,000 lifetimes and still not hit on Twitter’s timing and execution early on.
The age of social media is dead. No one is creating a Twitter competitor in 2022+. Either the site completely dies and people flee to existing platforms, or it lives on.
The idea that one can just build a Twitter clone shows little understanding of human nature.
>The age of social media is dead. No one is creating a Twitter competitor in 2022+
What happened in 2022 that all the doors are suddenly closed? Wouldn't you have said the same in 2016, before TikTok came out of nowhere and became the most popular website (per Cloudflare). I'm pretty sure people spoke similarly in 2006 about how Facebook has no chance against Myspace. The only constant is change.
Yes, but more risk. In five to ten years I think there is more of a chance for Twitter to be worth 500 billion dollars than a random startup trying to recreate Twitter.
> As if you could just drive over to the Twitter HQ, grok how all the infrastructure works, and make/provide meaningful contributions/tweaks/upkeep.... tonight
The infra is just too clever for anybody to grok in a million years. These clowns probably don't even have fedoras, no way they'll ever figure it out.
Ever been on a team where a key person responsible for a piece of infra leaves suddenly, and next incident takes hours to resolve instead of minutes as everyone is running around trying to understand what the code is doing? It will be like that but way worse.
Yes, I have actually. Let it take hours to resolve, what of it?
Way better than keeping a person around who hoards institutional knowledge and admin access for job security. In fact that would be the first person I'd zero in on and get rid of, and have in the past. Not only are people like that not indispensable, they should never have been hired, anywhere.
A well engineered twitter has everything necessary to run it in properly documented internal wikis and can be handed off to a small new group of competent ops people at the drop of a hat. Ideally new hires should be able to fix and change things within a day of starting their jobs with little to no hand holding. I'm sure it is very far from that at the moment due to the unprofessionalism of everybody involved, but this is actually the best and fastest way to get it there purely from an ops perspective - usually takes years to convince management to yank off the bandaid because everybody is too scared to take responsibility.
Twitter used to have fail whales all the goddamn time, sky doesn't fall, it isn't amazon they aren't losing money every second it is down.
Whoever stayed on will be able to figure out eventually which things to restart in what order so long as they aren't locked out of the servers.
Unless Twitter is still using Zookeeper. :P
In the process of figuring it out they'll be putting in-writing what should have been documented all along and getting a feel for the brittle bits. Long term twitter is better off.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
I'm sure the databases have recent known good backups at worst you'll get a bunch out of prolonged outages and some dataloss - since we are talking about tweets, nothing of value was lost.
The random spaghetti of deployment scripts, the right JVM parameters that got derived from trial and error over time so things don't OOM, and what format the git tag should be for the CI branch are problems of ones own creation.
Operating a Kafka cluster doesn't make one an expert at anything. Zilch.
The site is still up and in a month or two Elon should cut another 90% of them and it will still be up.
Some people will have to live down the discovery that they were never essential workers but rather seat fillers.
It's really funny, because his beliefs stated in public were so naive, and obviously belied the fact that he grossly underestimated what it takes to build and run a successful social media company.
I was admittedly giving him benefit of the doubt at first, because an active user of the website would understand how not to break it. I just struggle to rationalize any of the decisions he's made thus far.
I think it could go hand in hand. What an "active user" does and expects from Twitter is wildly different depending on your residence country, social position, gender, age, occupation etc.
There is not one Twitter experience, but a multitude, and expecting to fully grasp the platform just by being on it for a few years is unrealistic.
I think that's important to note, and also worth keeping in mind that Elon's Twitter experience is probably an extreme outlier in terms of how users interact with the site.
I think benefit of the doubt was somewhat warranted. Waiting to see what happens. But there were many who just completely dismissed the valid risks and criticisms people raised.
He was either: completely making wrong inferences and misunderstanding the statistics around the bots problem, or just lying to try to get out of the deal. Neither deserves benefit of the doubt.
It is kind of strange how before, HN was an altar of Musk devotees praising him and his crusade for Free Speech Absolutism. And now, it's crickets. While the changes he's making are far worse than imagined, no one that wasn't a devotee imagined he was going to do anything beneficial for the platform. So I assume they are just being quiet now since nothing that's being done can be handwaved away.
The ever-present problem with that way of looking at it is that there's actually nothing special or new or more obvious about these events than any previously that should have keyed you in that he's a petulant, stupid man-child.
If this actually woke you up, why didn't you wake up when he called a diver a pedo for no reason, and instead of apologizing he fought it in court saying that "nononono it's perfectly normal we said it all the time as kids" as if that should make it okay.
I wouldn't call myself a devotee, but I'm still on the positive side of the opinion spectrum.
The primary reason to not talk much is that it's useless. You can't reason with an angry mob. Sure there are plenty of things to criticize, but the mob is not focused on valid criticism targets. Anything and everything is hailed as a sign of evil and/or incompetence. It is incredibly exhausting to try to provide nuanced reasoning against kneejerk hate.
Overall I thought the whole Twitter purchase was a distraction when it was first announced and I still think that. I'm much more interested in SpaceX.
There's definitely some vitriol flying around relating to this - some directed at Musk, some directed at the woke/left/liberals they feel are responsible. But there are far more reasonable criticisms of the last couple of weeks' worth of chaos that express a tone of incredulity than anything. To me I think it's just that most of the things people have a problem with are basically indefensible, so either his fans won't try defend them or they've come round to the idea that he's maybe not who they thought he was.
I have found plenty to be impressed with at points in the past and I suspect he will still go down in the history books. But he’s been losing it for awhile now and this Twitter mess seems to be his crash and burn moment that could take his other companies down with it. What else is there to say?
Twitter doesn't need 10,000 engineers to keep running. I'd be shocked if a well designed system would need more than a hundred given the head counts as some of the places I've worked at. That doesn't stop Musk from killing it in the transition from here to there.
And what glorious fun we're all having looking at this train wreck.
I don't know what a musky user is but if site keeps functioning with a 90% reduction in head count it would be one of those most hilarious events in SV history.
Bet it stays up and a certain crowd moves on to boycotts before eventually returning as users next year.
It has been half a year since this nonsense all began. I hope everyone at the company planned for upheaval and knew there was a (seemingly large) chance they would lose their job.
How does one follow a come-back-to-office police while being simultaniously being locked out from said office? Is this an employer lockout, the employer version of an employee strike? So many questions! Maybe one of those blue checkmarked Elon's on Twitter can answer!
But seriously, how can someone burn down something he just bought for 44 billion so fast and consequently?
This reminds me of Stephen Elop from Nokia and "Burning Platform" memo.. Nokia lost its top smartphone manufacturer (25% of the market) position in about half-year after that.
But the timescale involved were much longer.. the Nokia losses happened in months, not in days.
Well, Twitter is not burning through as much cash anymore now that most of the people are gone…
Cutting the burn rate is a clear and sensible part of Musk’s strategy. The more he lowers Twitter’s expenses, the more time he gives Twitter to try new things.
He’s done a terrible job of executing it, but that part of the business strategy, at least, is sound.
"burning cash" in this context doesn't refer to the literal burn rate, it's more that he's spending a great deal of money without presenting any clear vision or direction for the company
This is 100% going to happen. Twitter will crash and burn, and then fanboys will go "This was Elon's plan all along! He hated Twitter, and just wanted to kill it to own the libs. Everything he was doing was an act. What a genius!!"
I'm not even a sycophant, and I'm starting to wonder this, only because it somehow makes more sense than to pull a Dark Knight Joker and light a pile of money on fire.
Yea, I think I’m still leaning in that direction, although I wouldn’t use those words or go all in on this.
One thing that’s interesting about this shakeup is that it’s a very clear statement about where Elon sees value, right? Lazy “rest and vest” engineers? Just go home. Communications department? Get out.
Perhaps what Elon wants to say is “look, this thing runs fine on 20% of the staff, and now that the 80% naysayers are gone we’re going to really get shit done”. When I’ve worked for companies approximately the size of Twitter I’ve sure felt the urge to say that. :)
Now, the question is, now aligned with “reality” is this reasoning from first principles? No doubt a lot of haters are gonna hate, like crazy. Is it enough to take the whole company down?
Every place I've worked that had more than 50 staff, 90% of the productive work was done by 10% of the staff. I mean, I can't document that; it's anecdata. But I think it's a pretty reliable rule-of-thumb guideline.
I’m not so sure about that. I think the chance of running a company without the 80% unproductive naysayers has a very strong appeal to the 10%. Also, in bloated “political” organizations they typically run on 10% of mental capacity anyway, so a “hardcore death match” may not have the same meaning to them.
You will find out how much un-sexy but highly important work was done by those underperforming non-hardcore people. Which is usually quite a lot, including keeping the literal lights on.
Yea, I don’t want to exclude the possibility of that outcome. If Elon does run this $44 billion social experiment I will watch very carefully though. It will be very interesting indeed.
(And my feeling is that a lot of the Elon-hate comes from people who fear that the outcome will be more in line with my expectations than yours.)
Supposing that the "correct" 80% is getting cut in this exercise - Musk is still essentially promising sweatshop work conditions for those who remain. It's evident that what he wants is for engineers to work early mornings, late nights, weekends, holidays, maximally in the office, under a trigger-happy boss who shit-talks you, your company and your work on social media, and is motivated by pure financial desperation.
Imagine the relief of not filling out dozens of useless forms for five layers of management that do not really understand what you do anyway. One could really GSD at that point.
Most people don’t bank on all the “dead weight” being able to jump ship and find a new job. Musk also hasn’t outlined what his actual vision is so you’d be signing up for “hardcore” work without knowing if you agree with the goal
> Every place I've worked that had more than 50 staff, 90% of the productive work was done by 10% of the staff.
That’s my feeling too. But I’m not 100% sure that feeling aligns perfectly with “reality”. We humans have blind spots, and it may be that some of the 80% actually do very important stuff that I happen to be blind to.
That’s very likely. In a past life I’ve done a bunch of auditing for m and a, apart the obvious nepotistic paid internships more often than not people thought to be unproductive were really important to the organisation.
Think about payroll, legal and the likes. They’re not necessarily productive in terms of the main product, but they help reduce the legal risk for the company and insure that people in the ‘productive departments’ may stay productive.
As software developers we tend to only see the number of features/fixes someone pushes to the product as the main metric of productivity, however there’s way more to running a largish company.
> * “look, this thing runs fine on 20% of the staff*
Tech companies are growth-oriented companies. It doesn't matter if their current set of features "runs"; it's not the end of the story, it's only the beginning.
If the current featureset runs perfectly, but there is no R&D progress towards the next set of features to keep up with the competition, keep the current userbase onboard, and solicit the next generations of users: the company is dead.
>> * “look, this thing runs fine on 20% of the staff*
The full quote read “look, this thing runs fine on 20% of the staff, and now that the 80% naysayers are gone we’re going to really get shit done”. “Get shit done” is essentially what you call R&D progress.
I wouldn't discard the possibility that Twitter affects his other assets, though. It seems like he's using his other companies' talent and money to try to prop up Twitter (like borrowing engineers from Tesla and committing SpaceX to Twitter ad-spend) and Musk himself is distracted from running his other companies. On top of that, a lot of Tesla's stock price hinges on speculative value instead of current cash flows. If public perception starts to believe that Musk is damaging his brands and mismanaging his companies by spreading himself too thin and commingling profitable businesses with unprofitable ones, his other holdings will become less valuable.
I mean, he'll always have food on the table at the end of the day, but there's a good chance he won't have the kind of wealth and influence in the future that you'd need to make a big-balls move like buying a large tech company.
My respect to twitter folks quitting en mass is through the roof. I understand those who can not quit right now due to financial commitments. But as soon as your house is in order, quit. This will send a strong message to anyone trying to emulate musk.
And the people looking at your resume later. Staying at Twitter now will need a darn good explanation, otherwise I guess the assumption is you buy into this BS, or you need your visa. If you need your visa I get it, otherwise that is a stain on your resume
I was saying the same thing to friend last night. If I saw “Twitter X-Y” on a resume where X is <=2023 and Y is >= 2023 then I’m going to have questions. The people attracted to that kind of company run by that kind of person set off red flags for me. H-1B is an acceptable reason, almost anything else isn’t.
What about simply "I had a mortgage to pay, we were going into a recession and all the other tech companies stopped hiring"? I've clinged on to crappy jobs out of desperation during bear markets. This should not be a red flag.
So in this situation you're imagining a great engineer, who's been getting paid a twitter level salary and has good perf reviews and good code (one would think, to avoid the chopping block thus far) couldn't take 3 months salary and get another job in that time?
I find that difficult to believe. But, like I said, you better have a darn good reason when you're explaining having twitter 2023 in your resume. If that is a good reason, cool. I'm betting the default will be you buy into Elon's lord of the flies type management style and shitposting, and you thought you were smarter than all your co-workers are you're glad to see them gone. Add in some sympathy for the nazis that were banned from twitter, and I see a pretty toxic looking mix. Not a good co-worker.
Sorry, but I would not quit a job right now, with tech hiring freezing and a recession coming up, unless I were working for literal Nazis or I had at least a year of liquid savings set aside. I've been through 2000 and 2008 and know how hard it was, even for talented engineers. A lot of people reading HN were born after 1992 or so and have never yet been of working age during an acute tech downturn. They have no idea what it's like when zero companies are hiring. It's not a joke.
It's not that bad yet, but please let me put that aside.
I get what you're saying about the hiring situation in the future, in general, in the tech industry. I would like to posit that the type of engineers we're talking about at twitter right now would be some of the top 5-10% of software engineers working on distributed web engineering, in general, in the world. Is that fair? They might not be in FAANG or whatever series of letters you want to use this month, we prob drop Facebook and elevate Microsoft, whatever, but I've worked with some open source twitter code and I've interviewed twitter engineers, they seem very very solid to me.
If that is true, I also posit there are a lot of second tier companies that would be falling over themselves to replace some of their B tier employees, and replace their existing under performing engineers with these twitter engineers. If the market is what you say, they should be able to get top tier talent on some kind of discount, yes? There are still funded startups as well, and adding a single experienced twitter engineer could elevate the whole team in a startup.
So, I see the choice as: stay at twitter... what does that mean. You're working for this dude who just axed all your colleagues for basically no reason, and it's a coin flip when he looks at you and your work if he decides to fire you. Even if you stayed through these two rounds. You're making way less money, as you don't have RSUs in a publicly traded company, you've got some kind of nebulous options in a fiscally fragile company that the CEO is claiming openly could be headed for chapter 11 + the fact that he's just driven away almost all the ad revenue. You look at subscriptions, 22,000 people signed up for Elon's blue check scheme, so you'd need a dozen million people signing up for that to shore up the gap he's created with the debt. You are now one of 3 people on a team that was 75, and lots of other teams are like that. How are you going to create features that will entice more people to subscribe, when you barely have the people to keep the lights on. So, you've looked at all that and decided to stay? Either you're on a visa, or there is something that isn't financial keeping you there (because... you're making way less money) and I would darn sure like to know what that thing is. If you're risk averse, you see this crap storm coming and bailed to find a new job already.
Add to that that all these people have had their options paid out just recently as part of the sale. They have cash. They are staying for another reason.
I don’t want people who are workaholics on my team. I want people who aren’t going to burn out and have a good work/life balance.
I don’t want people who are sycophants for a billionaire on my team. It shows a lack of good judgement.
I don’t want people who think laying off half the staff, revoking WFH out of the blue, and then giving a hazy ultimatum with neither option well defined is a smart move.
I want people who know their worth, will speak the truth without fear of reprisal, not mindless followers willing to sacrifice everything for a company or a person.
> I don’t want people who are workaholics on my team.
That's a big assumption. Maybe they had a great work/life balance before and they see this current imbalance as a temporary inconvenience that's not worth losing their job over.
> I don’t want people who are sycophants for a billionaire
Another unfair assumption. You could get this information directly by asking a good open ended interview question.
> I don't want people who think laying off half the staff, revoking WFH out of the blue, and then giving a hazy ultimatum with neither option well defined is a smart move.
I don't understand why staying on automatically means that you think that Musk's actions are smart.
> not mindless followers willing to sacrifice everything for a company or a person.
They were not willing to sacrifice everything since they were not willing to quit their jobs.
Good point re visa. Thats why i refused transfer offers to the us and generally speaking stayed away from h1b. It’s basically a form of paid indentured servitude.
This limited definition of "indentured servitude" would describe the analogs to H-1B visas in most Western countries, which I think does a disservice to other problems with the US system that aren't as common: its cost to businesses/employees, the inconsistency in achieving permanent resident status, etc.
The message to the world right now seems to be that you can fire 90% of SJW/leftist trash staff and the website just runs better. Maybe its time to take a look in the mirror bucko
Not long, but perhaps not for the reasons you think. With the code base frozen, no new incompatibilities can be introduced. That's how software (including operating system) releases worked for many years, and they did work. VM/container images are still basically this way, and they tend to keep running quite well too. One problem with both of these models is that existing security vulnerabilities don't get fixed, but that's not code rot. It's a serious but separate issue.
No, the way I think a frozen codebase will rear its head is when things that haven't been restarted in too long start to misbehave. When new updates are being pushed out frequently by a busy team, every machine (container, process, whatever) is being restarted regularly. People don't even realize what they're avoiding each time. Resource leaks, deadlocks, and timer issues can remain undetected a long time in that environment, then surface when the longevity increases. Even worse, some things tend to fail after a predictable amount of time, i.e. across most or all machines at once in a cluster.
I first saw this in 1990 at Encore, when our shiny new SMP version of UNIX became capable of staying up for a whole month at a time. Because of problems like those mentioned above, getting from one month to two took almost as long as getting from zero to one. I've seen the same scenario play out on many other systems since, and there's no reason to believe the systems within Twitter are immune.
I spoke to a HFT software engineer who said how useful the limited market opening hours can be - memory leaks are a non-issue, just kill it at the end of the day.
This is very true. I learned this the hard way when I moved from making games that only ran for an hour to making server stuff and wondering why I couldn't keep a site up for more than a day and how are you supposed to debug if it takes a day for it to reach failure point. I haven't had the issue in a long time but I can see that being an issue if you are used to break stuff and release quick.
"They didn't get run over the last two times they ran across the freeway, so running across the freeway is perfectly safe."
They developed those methods of dealing with JVM and scheduler issues because those problems rose in prominence against the background of a zillion other problems. They became the longest poles, most worth spending time and effort on. But those other problems still exist, with more appearing every day. Yes, even without code change, because environments and workloads change too. Anyone who has actually been responsible for large complex systems, not just in the sense of working at the same team/company and riding the coat-tails of those who actually understood it, knows that they require continued attention and always will. Entropy exists.
I had a job once, when TLS was new and half the internet was not using some form of SSL. We had to manually do keyswaps on a stack of machines to create a trust network for all the certs. IT really sucked. I made a note of the certificate expiry data and a calendar reminder 3 years into the future to start looking for a new job if I hadn't already.
There is absolutely no way in hell those aren’t autorenewed. I think the answer is “quite a long time” actually. Eventually disk/machine rot in DCs will take over but it can take many months or more
I'd be very surprised if disk/machine rot is what it would take for such a large organization to start experiencing major problems. Strange user patterns from all this and recent features/refactors that are suddenly not monitored would hurt something in the stack within a couple weeks if it was really abandoned. Having a few dozen senior engineers/SREs familiar with big chunks of the infra could make it months though.
Exactly. Things that are abandoned will eventually fail.
Not everything is automated. There's a finite amount of time to create new automation, and that time goes first toward the things that happen hourly or daily. The things that happen monthly still get handled by humans. Not everything is in the runbook either, and what is often ends up scattered among many wiki pages and help notes in tools, so it's not easy for a newcomer to find. So those monthly things have to be done by people who remember.
They remember how to clean stuff up when a quota/capacity limit is being approached, and who to call when they need more, and they can expect a response. They remember how to recognize when their service is approaching overload, or about to enter an oscillating state, and they know how to nudge it back toward sanity before the errors start to pile up. None of that happens when whole groups are gone.
Sooner or later, a service will start to run off the rails in one way or another, and the person who inherited that service will either not recognize it or not find the solution in time. Then it's Fail Whale time.
maintaining any reasonably popular web property is a constant battle of striking down spammers, scammers, and hackers. their basic server code might keep running for months, but unless their engineering teams have been doing some truly magical work up until now the quality of the content is going to rapidly degrade if there isn't active intervention to keep the bad actors suppressed.
What is up with the rage downvotes? It’s pretty easy to look at the replies to popular Twitter users. There are waaay fewer crypto scam bots everywhere. Why deny reality?
I ran certificates for a well known service with lots of users (and not many employees), and it was all manual until well after we were aquired. If you don't have very many different certificates, it's not that hard to do it manually, and it doesn't look like they have that many [1]. Digicert is pretty easy to work with on a manual basis.
Of course, even if it was automated, you still have to pay the bills, and if payroll quit as has been suggested in the thread, I'd be suprised if accounts payable is sticking around
Is your stuff on the internet? I agree that systems that are 100% internal can get by for awhile without much maintenance, but anything on the internet is a completely different beast. Add in that Twitter is a huge target for DDoS, zero-days, etc..., and I don't see how anything just 'hums along' without near constant monitoring.
To be pedantic, that just mean a script exists that can roll the new cert out everywhere it needs to be. There could still be a human who needs to initiate that script being run.
If you click on post timestamp you can favorite the comment ;) I guess I hold twitter infra in higher regard after all these years they’ve been in business but who knows…
I hold them in high regard but honestly there's just so many moving parts the odds of anything that complex being able to ghost ship indefinitely aren't fantastic. Apparently the NOC team is gone too. If it makes it 1 week without major outages/major malfunctioning the departed devs/sres deserve all the props.
What code freeze? Surely Elon will keep pushing the team to merge and deploy changes fast as long as there are any engineers left. They will break it themselves.
Here's a crazy idea: 1) get rid of most of the existing code base and simply re-implement and migrate existing content and remaining users to the new thing. 2) get some small team together that does this. 3) stop bleeding cash while that plan is being set into motion. 4) keep the existing code base limping along while that is being put into motion.
I'm pretty sure that that's the plan Elon Musk is executing. It's simple, brutal, nasty, and probably not very well thought through. And yes he's not being very nice about it (to put it mildly). But it's not completely crazy if you can get over how obnoxious he's being.
He's clearly not interested in keeping the current team. He's never going to win them over at this point and from his point of view they were part of the problem, not the solution in any case. He bought a company that was basically not profitable, bleeding cash, and fresh out of ideas on how to fix any of that for many years. And he's now on the spot to keep that train wreck going. So, first order of business is to just cut the cost. That means decimating the team to a fraction of its size.
The Twitter team is basically rage quitting at this point so that's solved. Again, I don't like how he's doing it but undeniably, there are going to be vastly less people on the payroll very soon and cost will be a lot lower. The law suits that follow will be interesting though. But my guess is that he'll just buy those off and that will be it.
Of those that remain, he can cherry pick a team to salvage/build whatever he needs and then re-enforce it with some outsiders. Building a micro blogging platform is not rocket science and Elon Musk is actually deeply into rocket science. So, I actually get his gut feeling that this simply should not require thousands of engineers obsessing about all sorts of arcane software bits and pieces that somehow implement Twitter. It's a micro blogging platform with a fairly simplistic feature set. And he just called bullshit on how that was done at Twitter. And we're talking about a person with a long track record of having absolutely no tolerance for bull shit.
Again, not liking his methods but I can see his line of reasoning here. He has no respect for the Twitter team and he actually wants them gone. He wants to rebuild Twitter in a way that is cost effective and interesting to him. And he is not a risk averse person. So, in his mind that means a small team that can execute fast. I kind of agree with that part.
Will this work? I don't know. I see no technical reason that this plan could not work. But the big question is if the Twitter brand name will be worth anything by the time he's done or if he's just going to shut down the whole thing and walk away from it. He can certainly afford to do that. But letting this thing coast along just never was going to be a thing.
> It's a micro blogging platform with a fairly simplistic feature set.
Yeah, you can do Twitter on a weekend… if you only use it yourself and a few friends.
But we are talking about a platform with millions of users, all of which want real-time access to tweets written from anywhere in the world, including image and video content. Just getting to “no outages” and “low enough latency” parts is going to take a lot of effort to build from scratch. Don’t underestimate the complexity of Twitter.
Yep, just like Whatsapp. That team had about 50 people when Facebook bought them and a billion or so users. Twitter as it exists today is complicated and bloated. Doesn't mean that that's the only way to do it.
I bet mastodon doesn't have thousands of very active committers. They are taking a lot of users right now. With a hacked together pile of ruby and javascript. Easy to forget that that is how Twitter once started out as well. The bloated org chart came later.
For one, the distribution patterns of Whatsapp are far more simple than Twitter. Whatsapp is mostly one-to-one and then one-to-some with groups (with those groups being limited to as little as 100 users at some point, the current 1024 user limit has only been implemented recently). Twitter is one-to-many, with "many" being "several million".
But also, how much time did Whatsapp have to get to that point? I'm not saying it's impossible, but that it's difficult and takes a lot of effort that shouldn't be underestimated.
> They are taking a lot of users right now.
And still less activity than Twitter, and with federation, and with some servers already locking new account creation (mastodon.social, the biggest one, doesn't let you create new accounts).
Again, it's not that it's impossible. It's that it's hard.
Isn’t the crucial difference with WhatsApp that it doesn’t store the actual message data? I thought that their servers just told what apps to send where. I may be completely off base here.
It's probably part of how they keep things simple. But you seem to imply that storing lots of data is hard. It doesn't have to be. I've worked with search teams that operate at a very large scale. You need lots of hardware but not necessarily lots of people.
The scale of Twitter is large but not enormous. Basically a few trillions of messages overall. Most of them pretty small. All of them immutable (well so far). And lots of images/videos with some CDN in front of that. It's a lot of bytes but not a whole lot of complexity. And a couple hundred million users and user profiles. I can think of a quite a few ways of dealing with all that.
What's hard is things like algorithms and good search. But that's a space where you can achieve a lot with a small and focused team with access to lots of hardware. And obviously this is also something where Twitter has maybe been a bit underwhelming and struggling. User growth and engagement stagnated years ago for them. This was not a healthy social network. It's not like they were nailing this. Throwing more people at the problem wasn't working.
Why Elon insists on actually running a company? He should hire competent people and stick to PR/bullshit thing. It works wonders in his other ventures, mostly. And no, competent doesn't mean Kimbal.
Musk hired people who wanted to change the world. His businesses at the time were the only place to push the envelope on space exploration to Mars and launching a commercial EV.
Twitter on the other hand will never get such motivated workforce
I have to say it’s weirdly satisfying that the rest of the world can finally wake up to how incredibly shit these two are. Hope this follows them everywhere.
Two of the dumbest people on tech Twitter. One of them, can’t remember which, wrote a ‘Capitalism is the best’ blog post that was something I’d expect my 13yr old self to have come up with. Just riddled with errors and motivated reasoning.
All these people are assuming there was no time but there's a huge difference between "try and keep the lights on until you have a team in place" and "burn the entire place down and blame there not being a team there to stop you".
With what money? He alienated all sponsors because anyone can successfully impersonate any brand in there now, and he's already spent >40b just to buy the damn thing.
Hire Oracle/Ibm to run the servers, grab some recently laid off Facebook moderators to do some moderation, and give it a quarter to figure out what the fuck to do.
Oh god, i know you’re serious but the ultimate in “enterprise” managing the ultimate in “overgrown disorganized startup” would be a ridiculous failure. It would take ten billion dollars and a decade to get something functional.
This seems to me to be a byproduct of the “hurry up and close the deal”. May not have had replacement leadership but felt the need to take out the executive team.
In my experience, this has stopped working as of at least a few days ago. I can request, but the button never fills. I'm happy I did it a few months ago, at least
"It takes 24 hours" is a clear sign that it's a human being looking up an internal documentation page and running the scripts it points to.
Unless I'm just not creative enough to reason why you can log into twitter from a country you've never been to with no 24 hour verification wait but fulfilling legal obligations takes 24 hours.
In their defense, if the backup requires accessing archive tape drive records, long processing queues in non-scalable systems, etc - this could easily take 24 "physical" hours of things getting lined up correctly.
It's one thing to show you the last 24hr of tweets. Another to get a complete twitter history for given uid.
Ah -- if you're logged in and have requested to download your data, it produces a PDF with a bunch of private account info, looks vaguely like that's publicly exposed, but it's probably not.
Might have given someone a fright, until they realized what was happening, and that it was dynamic content, of course.
EM->sr engs: "Why did so many good engineers leave?"
Sr engs: ...
(Because you're an a.h.)
People without equity should refuse to work like indentured servants for peanuts only to be told "they're not working hard enough". It's the only way to teach EM a lesson about hubris. $50 says Twitter will die down to a skeleton staff and be kept afloat by third-rate MSPs. No one will want to work on that creaky, steaming pile of poo for a billionaire jerk.
I'm sorry but are you reading what you're putting down here? These people are making ridiculous swathes of money doing piss easy work, let's not go overboard with the hyperbole here
I do hope Twitter dies a painful death, however, so I'm with you on that bet
Working for musk is NEVER piss easy work. That's the point. You could be a god-tier coder, able to literally rebuild twitter in a weekend, but elon is one of those managers that will try and micromanage every little thing you do, get pissed if you tell him no, not understand when you try and explain to him, and yet still find a way to call you stupid after saying literal technobabble to the aide next to him.
While I suspect this is the case, this is also looking like his first high-profile expensive failure. If Twitter survives, he might grow up a lot during the process.
I was really thinking about this sabbotage thing yesterday.
In these large companies, to make changes to a lot of systems, you have to have someone else also sign on to the changes (eg. code review).
If your aim is sabotage, you would have to find a like minded saboteur to work with you. In normal times, at most places, this is risky, because most others would not want to assist you, and would likely report you.
The equation has changed. Musk has turned nearly every employee against him. It is now much less risky to explore your social graph now to find people who are of like mind. The defenses that software companies have are completely inadequate to deal with this sort of situation.
The legal system still exists though and your changes would need to not be auditable or else you're going to get thrown in jail. And no matter how much you think you're smarter than the average bear, you're probably going to leave traces. And if Musk gets personally pissed off at some bit of particularly bad sabotage he's got enough money to hire some actual expert outside talent to manage the incident and nail your ass to make an example of you. Which he most certainly would do.
Employees interested in sabotage should not do anything stupid, they should just join the exodus.
"In the chaos of layoffs, firings, and resignations our security team was entirely gutted and as a result my login must have hacked by one of the literal billions of people on the planet with an interest in taking down this company, even if only for the lolz. The proof of our security issues, staffing woes, and public animosity has been extensively documented. Whatever traces of sabotage you may have found cannot reasonably be linked to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
Falls apart immediately when they get a warrant for your text messages and find you bragging to whatever human you have a sexual interest in or whatever.
And in general, all these "I'll just say <whatever>" arguments on the Internet will nearly always fall apart when you start backtracking under questioning and changing your story and they pressure you with evidence. Everyone always thinks that they're some kind of perfect sociopathic Patrick Bateman or Heath Ledger's Joker in their mind. You/they are not.
If you are relying on that argument, then they certainly have enough to arrest you and charge you, and the safe bet is that you'll crack.
[Also your argument gets much harder to make if they have you logging in with 2FA from an IP address that can be traced to your house or something like that--very hard for someone to fake that no matter how much fucked up chaos is going on inside Twitter]
> If your aim is sabotage, you would have to find a like minded saboteur to work with you
Or forty-four billion dollars.
There's no need to actively sabotage the site from the staff position. Even if there isn't a single critical disk slowly filling up somewhere, there is a lot of dependencies in there that will eventually have a CVE.
It doesn't even have to be active sabotage, techs notice abnormalities and incorrect requirements all the time, you can sabotage by just ignoring issues you see and not correcting people doing things wrong.
Why would anyone go and destroy their career by sabotaging an employer? Such person is clearly can't be trusted cause god knows what they do if they think their boss is an asshole. I quit two times not on the best terms with the management and the only "sabotage" was a zero-day notice and a two-week notice. It just never crossed my mind.
Not that this is at all significant, but these past few months of Twitter charades have erased any appetite for one day buying a Tesla, or any other Musk owned products. Luckily almost every automaker is coming out with their own EVs in the next couple years, so the market should be pretty competitive(in some ways it already is).
Same. I would have had a hard time imagining a way he could behave that would affect my feelings about a Tesla, but he found it. Seeing a CEO act so childish and cruel and emotionally unstable and antagonistic and conspiratorial in a purposefully public way makes me not only feel uncomfortable in the idea of buying his products, it even makes me feel worried about how that insanity might materially affect the product.
Yes. If Twitter still exists in the future he could tweet "The Model 3 is stupid and ugly and I hate it and we're not supporting it anymore" and there go all the replacement parts. He'd burn $44B just to try to prove a point (what point? I'm not sure) so it's very possible he'd hand Tesla owners out to dry out of spite.
Pretty much every model Tesla has grown on me over time, even the X. At the end of the day people will and should vote with their dollar though. Musk had a pretty big leapfrog on the competition for EVs but now that other makers are rapidly catching up, I am not sure what Tesla's competitive advantage will be in the future(production methods, better batteries maybe...it sure doesn't look like it will be management).
This is the one which sticks with me too. It's infantile bullying to make an accusation like that to tens of millions of people just because his pride got hurt. Then he even defended it in court.
More towards the latter because Musk seems to have some pretty crazy and awesome ideas for the future but now we seem to be going a bit off the rails, especially in a time where economic uncertainty might lend to a more conservative approach. Up until now I can see the vertical integration of Musk's ventures, being able to share tech between Tesla/Spacex/Starlink/Boring Company/etc...but the behavior at Twitter is really in left field, almost like he is going crazy.
There are a lot of people I like to whom I would not hand over $50k+ for a nice product. For that kind of expenditure I want some certainty that the future outlook and mission of a company is on solid ground.
Seems petty, but I don't think it would be an uncommon response. A Tesla-owning friend has said a couple of times, "Elon Musk is the worst part of owning a Tesla."
I don't see why it would be petty to have concerns. Buying a Tesla makes one very dependant on the company for repairs, maintenance, software updates, etc. Given the new information I have learned recently about how Elon runs a business, that kind of dependancy is horrifying to me.
A former coworker in my FB feed sold his Tesla at a steep discount because he was mad at Elon Musk. This way of thinking about the world is incredible to me. But here we are.
Sounds like someone made off with a great deal! At the end of the day Tesla has some incredible minds working on the product, it is quite unfortunate that the face of that work has to get muddled with whatever Musk's latest circus venture is.
I once wanted a Tesla Powerwall. If I do get anything like that for the house, it's not going to be a Tesla product. Though, to be fair, I made that decision before he set Twitter alight.
Elon's primary failure with Twitter was joining a behemoth and arrogantly assuming he knew better than the existing leadership, sacked them all and pushed sweeping changes in a nonsensical time-span.
At his other ventures he already has strong leadership in place that he's worked with so he just assumes everything's already great rather than second guessing everything. In practice he doesn't run them on a day-to-day basis. He's more like a chairman with an interest in engineering than a CEO.
> He's more like a chairman with an interest in engineering than a CEO.
This strikes me as a very apt description. Still though, he basically has free rein at those companies and there is always a chance he decides to get more involved. Maybe Tesla or SpaceX hits a rough patch next year and he decides to get more hands on and "fix" the situation. That fear is probably a lot more relevent in potential customer's minds these days.
Depends how he spins it and how much he will be able to control narrative.
I guess he will use something like - Twitter was broken before I got in and I could not save it anymore.
Being Elon, I would be more worried about the fact that Saudi's are supposed to be as one of the investors in Twitter and they already have trace of killing people. If Elon won't be able to spin the story as somebody's else problem and instead of it will be presented as his managing failure, well could be interesting.
That is not how the Saudis work. Losing mere money is a cost of doing business. It's losing face that matters. That's why they murdered Kashoggi. They're probably already being handed the DMs of critical people who they are going to be able to quietly murder without any outrage.
I mean, he may be finding himself a good reason to repay the Saudis their 44 billion dollars after mismanaging their investment that terribly or he may find himself having an "accident".
This is no threat, just a very real concern that I have for him. That is not the kind of money you blow.
My understanding was the Twitter financing was $27B cash from Musk, ~$5B from his pals, and $13B in bank loans. There was something like $500m in Twitter shares owned by a Saudi prince that were transferred to Musk as part of buying in, I think.
The $5B in pals included the Saudi and Qatari money -- Qatar put in $375M and the Saudis rolled over their stake which is closer to $2 billion (they're the largest shareholder after Elon).
I believe this is correct. The Saudi's will lose a decent chunk of money on this deal, but hardly an earth shattering amount relative to their overall investments.
they're going to have to rehabilitate him or make it clear he's not in operational paths
'chief creative officer' sort of thing with a sandbox
always wondered if he bought twitter to boost spacex IPO; for now, good thing that it's private or it would be getting hosed to mortgage twitter fail like tesla is
tesla build quality and self-driving snafus may get assigned to him as well
Who is "they"? Elon has controlling interest in SpaceX and all the largest other shareholders are largely his friends. At Tesla while he doesn't have controlling interest, he does have de-facto control because of 2/3 majority required on the board for certain actions that could remove him from control.
Short of some legal action forcibly removing him from the companies from breaking a law, he's not going anywhere.
I think that's probably a naive hope, if we carry on down the current path the only way that Musk can save face and avoid being washed out of twitter is to buy up the debt that he secured to buy Twitter. Ignoring the technical issues, the debt is the thing that really threatens twitter - if the business can't generate the revenue to service the debt the creditors might step in and take Musk's equity. So the logical move if you're all-in on fixing twitter (as Musk seems to be) would be to buy the debt, he can probably get it at 60 cents on the dollar, so that means he needs to come up with somewhere around $8Bn, and we all know where Musk will look for that kind of cash. That would be a very significant head wind for Tesla stock.
You’ve diagnosed failure after a month? How many puts have you bought at what price? This is the perfect moment to cement your reputation as a stock market expert.
> about: Investor, husband, father. Those weird spelling and syntax errors are thanks to Siri. I try to preserve my arthritic hands for higher value targets than trolling hacker news.
I'm not sure if you were trolling, but you probably are also getting downvoted because the idea that you have to put money on a bet against something before you are allowed to voice criticism, even scathing criticism, is not a good take. You shouldn't be required to play stupid games in a volatile stock market where you are just a bit player against behemoths just to criticize something.
I don't care for that guy. My problem is with everyone parroting rumours, spreading unsourced garbage and asserting stuff they cannot possibly know.
This seems like reddit thread.
And again, this isn't about Twitter but about the hivemind and virulent hate taking over a sane discussion.
I'd love to see that the same people overblowing this out of proportion say they were wrong if the tide turns and Twitter ends up being better. Not because I care for twitter but becuase I'd like to think this isn't just foaming-in-the-mouth hate.
The lawsuit from the previous management was to force Musk to go through with the sale when he tried to go back on the deal, they didn't make any attempt to stop the sale because they knew he was paying an absurd price.
I don't know that the board had much of a choice though, the best fiduciary sense for all current stockholders was to let him buy the company, what happens after that is of no concern to them. It's the perverse reality when a corporation only exists to make money for the shareholders.
It's free market capitalism, no? The fiduciary duty of the previous management was to its shareholders (as much as I hate that), if you subscribe to that line of thinking then the board and management did what was right for Twitter's shareholders: extract as much value as possible for the shareholders.
Don't think there was a better financial outcome for them.
Running fine just now. I waste a fair bit of time on HN and Twitter and remain unsure why Twitter needs 7000 people when HN does similar stuff with maybe two.
If it’s a conceptually complex system then the devs weren’t really that good in the first place. Yeah, technical debt happens, but you can’t have both that the system had good technical leadership and it can’t possibly stay up under replacement employees. (My impression is that it will stay up.)
What magical unicorn of a place have you worked at that could survive multiple entire teams quitting at once? Do you think the induction manuals literally jump of the shelf and explain themselves to the new hires that there isn't an HR team to hire, a security team to grant their access and a department to welcome them?
This is like the flight crew being raptured. The plane is going to crash.
This is the ground crew being raptured, the flight crew all exploding, the plane had an engine removed "to trim the fat", the company who sold you fuel pulled out of the deal, everyone on the plane who has ever played flight simulator dies and is replaced one of those people who know just enough to fuck up.
All could, and one of them passed through full employee replacement when it failed to raise a round of funding. They would have to suffer and hire good people, not miscellaneous cogs, but they would survive.
There's a possibility that it's a Rube Goldberg machine written by bad devs that is actually crap and deserves a rewrite, but it's the thing that currently Elon has. If it goes down and there's no one left to bring it back up, how is that not a disaster for him? Is he going to say "Just give us 3 months folks, we'll be back online with much better code, I've got the hardcore devs right h..."
Actually he'll promise a self-coding website within 1 month.. Another month, promise.. Just pay us 8 bucks now and you'll get it very soon!
Hum, idk, it depends on who left. I think I agree that never coming back up is a tall order. There ought to be enough competent people left, but I’d bet something like Twitter will set a record (at least for the past decade) for downtime in the next year
The commenters in an unrelated thread aren't the ones letting Twitter employees eat dirt... that's a single person that just laid off something like 70% of the organization in the past two weeks.
The rumor is something like 75%, which would definitely explain the panic actions. This also means they don't have to specifically cut off badges for laid off people, it gives them time to decide who's actually gone.
Does this mean that 75% of the remaining staff declined to stay on? If I'm understanding that right -- wow. Isn't Elon still trying to hire people back from the last fumbled layoff?
I read it as 75% decided to ignore that email. I guess one way to interpret that is that they decided to quit, but I don’t see it that way. It’s more like an ultimatum that they refused to respond to.
Checking that box was agreeing to work “hardcore” and add a bunch of hours to your day. I imagine a lot of people receiving that email guessed that their colleagues would also ignore the box and figured “he won’t fire all of us, right?”.
I think it’s a bit of a point of no return for both sides. Musk wanted all chips on the table, got them, and it turns out his hand isn’t as strong as he thought. There is no going back to status quo after this email stunt, it literally made clear that the majority of employees are just sticking around until they find something else, and would even leave sooner if at all pushed to. This is a sinking ship.
This all seems plausible to me, but if this is the case doesn't it weaken Elon quite a bit going forward? If a boss at any company says "Everybody do this simple thing or you're fired", and a bunch of employees respond by rolling their eyes and walking away, that manager has to either fire a bunch of people or become a joke. Or maybe both happen, issuing an ultimatum like that is usually pretty dumb.
Oh for sure. Some portion of non-box-checkers probably did think that. But 75% is such a high non-response rate that I’m betting another large cohort were just aggressively apathetic to the stupid email. Won’t play the game, but will collect a paycheck and do normal work as long as they’re allowed to.
Yeah, the 75% might have learned that the new management is really fucking clueless and the chaos isn't stopping soon. Even if they clicked "Yes", chances are tomorrow there'll be another fucking stunt and you're straight back to panicking about losing your job anyway.
Hey Elon, how about this: fire employees with long names, because they take longer to type in their login, and that's inefficient!
Word going around is as high as 80% of some departments are opting for the severance. And the blue check team seems to have quit today along with some critical infrastructure folks.
I can imagine that the only folks saying yes would be folks on visa and those who cannot be without health insurance or those who like working for abusive folks (there is a not insignificant number who does prefer some level of abuse in their life). For folks on visas things can get sticky rapidly without a job and they may not want to jeopardize anything until they've lined up the next job which takes a bit of time especially around holiday season.
My understanding is that laws covering mass layoffs have resulted in a plan to keep them employed normally for 2+ months (they just aren't showing up to work and don't have access to systems), and then the severance would be a lump sum after that. So I don't think Twitter would be liable to pay out 2-3 months of salary immediately, but that severance package is still going to be a big dent in the company's funds when it comes due in a couple months.
Did he actually send such a letter to everyone? That's really a dumb move cause there's no reason for key engineers to stay - they have millions of dollars and will be immediately hired if they want to.
If people are working 80 hours a week on sending humans to Mars, I definitely don't want to be one of those humans. People do not do their best work when they are tired and stressed.
Even if(when) we do - what's there? We are progressively failing a perfectly habitable world that even has a magnetic core. Moving to another planet will not solve anything for the humans.
"Explore" is different than "colonize". Musk has been adamant that we "have" to colonize mars for "the survival of our species", meanwhile DART just proved that deflecting a meteor is a valid strategy, and we are all still choking on our own burned dinosaurs, a thing he seems to have no interest in fixing despite owning a damn solar panel company.
I've seen some tweets saying that in some engineering groups 75% didn't click the 'yes' link. But those are tweets so... who knows?
https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1593154189345316864[@GergelyOrosz] Internally, there are polls at what % of current Twitter software engineers plan to stay, and these usually point to about 25% indicating to stay for Twitter 2.0, and the other 75% planning to take severance. Don’t forget: this is less than 50% of the original staff.
I wouldn't click it. Why would anyone click it? He fired your friends, probably eroded your earnings significantly, and is now demanding that you work absurd hours.
Between FTX and Twitter, I've run out of popcorn, and the local grocers are out of stock.
I think the best tweet on that thread is [0]:
"I was laid off from Twitter this afternoon. I was in charge of managing badge access to Twitter offices. Elon just called me and asked if I could come back to help them regain access to HQ as they shut off all badges and accidentally locked themselves out."
I'm not sure if it's true or not, but... sounds about par for the course.
Edit: As someone else pointed out, it's a parody account. Amazing that I couldn't infer that immediately.
Elon needs to step down and remove himself from the company. No one with any sanity would want to work in that environment right now. Proper leadership would be one great step towards fixing all of these issues.
It's probably too late for that. The skeleton crew left behind at Twitter isn't going to be large or capable enough to plug the holes that are about to start bursting. The next service outage Twitter has will probably finish it off.
I am chalking this up to Russia syndrome. Personality types driven to do great things aren't easily satisfied. Most are perpetually dissatisfied & they need to raise the stakes.
They win the war of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th coalitions. For the first time, they find that things are going fine. All they have to do is nothing. Pull back and consolidate. Maybe refine some things, tinker a bit. But it's not enough. It will never be enough. So they invade Russia.
In his life, Napoleon had success after success after success. Every step of the way, critics told him that he'd fail. But he did it anyway, and won 38 battles. 17 at near impossible odds.
How can someone like him be satisfied with sitting at home, ruling France? How could he be satisfied with puttering around in the countryside talking about his code with random farmers?
And so he decided to invade.
People warned him against invading. Armand de Caulaincourt staked his reputation on it, went with him on the campaign, and kept warning him. Warning him against wintering in Russia. He kept telling him to turn back. But Napoleon didn't listen.
They'd been wrong every single time. And he'd been right. Let them babble, his path was one set at a different level than theirs.
Except, that one time they were right.
It seems that when you are touched with greatness, you end up believing that you can do anything. And far more often than not, you can.
But Elon was fired from PayPal. He failed at Boring Company and Neuralink. He faked his educational credentials and was in the country illegally. He failed at Full Self Driving, the Roadster is nowhere to be seen, the Cybertruck is MIA and the Tesla Semi is years late. 95% of predictions he has made has failed to pass. As far as I can tell, he lucked out during the .com boom, then invested in Tesla and almost drove it into the ground—-saved only by government subsidies, cheap money, and fortuitous timing. SpaceX has raised $10B and is currently looking to raise more. Elon's MO is burning a ton of cash that his competitors aren't willing to do in order to be first in some space. That doesn't take talent.
I love how the goalposts keep shifting all the time - "Tesla can never manufacture a mass production car", "Elon cannot run a hardware company", "Electric cars can only sell when subsidized". The truth is Tesla and Elon pushed an entire market forward. Tesla paid back their loans while other car manufacturers didn't.
SpaceX was not the first in the launch business - they were in fact the only one who attempted to break into a monopolized market that no one dared to touch. It's remarkable that they not only fight their way in, but also did it so well that they became the largest launch provider in the country, and in some cases the only one in the United States - SpaceX saved the tax payers a ton of money by reducing launch costs.
You don't have to either hate or love a guy - Elon fucked up multiple times, often talks shit, but give the man credit where credit is due.
I mean it's well known that Tesla has a insane profit margin (in the car manufacturing market) when compared to other players. The could sell a car around 30,000$ (adjusted for inflation) if they want to - they in fact came pretty close to that a while ago.
The question is, why would they? Why would they reduce their price if they can actively sell all the cars the manufacture? They in fact had months of wait time until recently. Why would they sell a cheaper car when there is no serious competition cutting their market share? It's no different than apple not reducing the cost of their iphone - they have no incentive to do so as long as they are making money and have no serious competition under-cutting them.
Tesla's pitch is partly 'electric car good for climate' yes, but at the end of the day they are a for-profit company and their main objective would be to maximize profit.
> at the end of the day they are a for-profit company and their main objective would be to maximize profit.
The Tesla master plan was from the beginning to reinvest these profits into manufacturing a cheaper car. They did this with the Model 3, but now it kind of looks like they've given up.
I thought they sold a very small number at 35k, and certainly the implication is that price point (at least adjusted for inflation) would be maintained. What's the cheapest Tesla you can buy now.
I can contribute one more data point: Space X invented a new alloy steel to drive down the cost of the surface material of Space X rockets to $4/kg. That's some serious science and engineering. And this improvement is probably a very small one compared with thousands of innovations made by Space X.
IIRC, Musk explained it in a SSB-BPA joint meeting last year. They considered carbon-fiber, aluminum lithium alloy, and 301 steel. It was a fascinating discussion. The materials were great under low temperature, but had other issues as well as degraded performance under high temperature. For instance, carbon-fibers can leak gas (or react with the percolated fuel?). Starship eventually used 30X, a steel alloy.
Cool, that’s a significant improvement. I’m not sure how often magnitude-scale improvements occur in material sciences, but my instinct is that it’s rare.
> I love how the goalposts keep shifting all the time
Which ones? The ones where cars would self-deliver five years ago? That Mars colonisation would have begun this year? That Cybertruck would deliver three years ago?
My own personal take as someone who actually commuted on 85 with my wife and saw more and more Teslas on the left lane as the years went on, is that electric cars being allowed on the carpool lane provided a huge initial boost to Tesla sales. All the rich folks buying Model S so they could avoid traffic.
But I am bitter. I was actually commuting with 2 people on the car while rich folks bought their way there (totally on purpose, so the electric cars become more popular, I know)
From what appears to be a change in sentiment, with younger people, over the past 10 years or so, we appear to be heading into a slump of extreme risk aversion.
No, HE didn't do that. Teams like three levels under him did that based on a vague goal he set and some people under him refined. Why should "let's do something hard" lifted up as some kind of magical ability? Where were all the people praising Kennedy as the smartest man alive for telling NASA to go to the moon?
I don't entirely understand why people are debating this point. The taxpayer doesn't pay for what he needs, he pays for what the government does. There are endless benefits to space for the consumer, but even if there weren't he's still paying for them.
Don't like endless wars? Thanks for your feedback, now give me 30% of everything you earn so I can pay for them.
Not per se, but it does seem like the volume of stuff launched into space vastly exceeds the need for it. And the environmental effects on the upper atmosphere of the increasing number of rocket launches is worrisome.
I’m excited for the Methane leak scanning project. There’s probably a lot of little projects like that that wouldn’t have been possible before the current launch market.
The Boring Company didn't fail. The boring company was a scam to delay and distract the california high-speed rail project. and it continues to delay and distract other public transit projects around the country to this day. it's been a resounding success.
Minor note: The Boring Company is a completely separate idea from the hyperloop. They instead proposed what's essentially a Personal Rapid Transit concept ("The Loop"), which has been shopped around a couple of times, but has seen no takers other than the Las Vegas Convention Center. The only public transit project it seriously competed for was one iteration of the O'Hare/Loop express transit system, but that was a zombie project that had already died a decade earlier.
The main arguments being used to militate against urban rapid transit (i.e., metro systems, regional rail; not inter-city HSR) these days tend to be "automated taxis will make all of this imminently obsolete," although that may have died down in the past several years given that a decade has passed since it was first trotted out.
Doesn't it get exhausting to jump through so many mental hoops to minimize someone's accomplishments?
I don't understand what people get out of this, is it really that painful to admit that some guy has done some pretty cool things with his life? All the effort it takes to research all the negative things about someone could've been spent doing something productive. Being willing to admit that someone did something awesome could've been exciting or inspiring.
And yet people work so hard to think around all the good things, and take the most negative view possible. Ugh, I don't like this part of human nature.
It is the opposite. It is exhausting to hold a nuanced, balanced view of things. It is much easier to think "I don't like this person, therefore everything about this person is bad". The brain does it for you.
I agree btw, I have watched people go from worshipping Elon to suddenly deciding he's a fraud and a talentless hack and every one of his accomplishments were some kind of fluke. It's so strange.
It makes sense if you decide that Elon is guilty of "wrongthink", at that point for this mob nuance and context out the window and they will burn anyone at the stack. Works the other way, if you are say the right things then your actions don't matter. Say the right incantations and get away with murder/robbery, no one cares.
If it was someone other than Elon, this entire community would be flagging this kind of stuff with a resounding unity.
Everytime, someone comes up with these arguments, I cannot help but to think "Wow, you must be really bent ideologically to come up with this".
We're in a massive ideological warfare and people who perpetuate hate like this needs to be condemned from all sides. It is making a rather normal forum like this into a vile, toxic and unwelcoming place.
I don't know what it is about certain topics here that brings the worst of people.
> Elon's MO is burning a ton of cash that his competitors aren't willing to do in order to be first in some space. That doesn't take talent.
He's had failures before. But this line seems unfair. He was neither the first person in electric cars (a few notable failures before him) nor in rockets (e.g. Boeing)... but he was able to lead a team that figured out some of the key tech and the business models to make these things viable. Even with a lot of money, this is no small feat.
If you want to get an idea, why not listen to some engineers that have worked with him? There are plenty of those around, for example, Andrej Karpathy talked a bit about working with Elon recently - https://youtu.be/cdiD-9MMpb0?t=5668
Unless it was off the record, I wouldn't. There are all kinds of potential conflicts of interests. These include ownership in companies where valuation is directly connected to Musk'a perceived competence and his ability to help/hinder their career.
Andrej doesn't work at Tesla anymore, but it sounded like he would want to leave the option to return open, so presumably he wouldn't want to burn bridges. I think most people prefer not to criticize people they know well publicly, anyhow.
He also started both Tesla and SpaceX with a "fortune" of about $300 million. $300 million is of course a lot of money. The reason I put fortune in quotes is because he was looking to get into aerospace. An industry where NASA, and their near century of experience, ended up paying an aggregated cost of more than $1.6 billion per flight, over 134 flights.
A guy with a vision and a few hundred million, in this context, has what many would have said would be a 0% chance of success. Many people somehow seem to have this view that if you just have enough money you can solve any problem in existence. It's probably just the consumerist mindset taken to its [not so] logical extremes - where literally anything is for sale, even that which doesn't exist.
Tesla at the time Musk took over was literally three guys, a cool name, and some big ideas. He then took over on design, direction, and development - as well as starting to bleed money trying to make it all happen. And ultimately the others would be out of the company before their first product hit production. They deserve a footnote, but their ultimate role in the company was effectively zero.
He effectively did start a new company. Their entire series A funding round was $7.5 million in total, of which $6.5 was Elon. So he became the near exclusive owner of a new company with a few like-minded guys of a similar background.
I don't think he had some nefarious plan to kick them out from the get go. Sometimes personalities and ideas just clash, as theirs obviously did.
It could even be a fucking pet monkey, he still didn't start it.
And that is the fucking problem. More and more shit if coming up about him (latests I saw today was an 'expose' about his degree and maybe even being illegally in the country, which I don't know if it is true or not) but people seem to believe whatever shit comes out of his mouth over facts. Was he pard of the success in Tesla, yes. Was he a founder/started it? Absolutely fucking not. Was Tesla be able to succeed without the government tax credits/investments, absolutely fucking not. But now that it is in a good path, he even moved state to avoid that 'government' issues. He is a fucking liar and a psychopath, but because he has money, people keep gargling his balls like they taste like candy mixed with wild truffles.
Since those failures he's aged, become more entrenched in his ways, no longer as scrappy or nimble as he once was, surrounded himself by yes-men and blasted off on an ego-trip from his success at Tesla and his shoehorning himself into every global drama. He's gotten addicted to the attention and now his primary pastime and way to blow off steam is trolling the media. No longer focused on the daily grind of building a business.
That may be true. But the guy also landed rockets from orbit (on ships!). And then flew them again. The implications of having easy access to space to our civilization really cannot be overstated. SpaceX is the real deal, and will probably be worth more than Tesla eventually.
Musk clearly isn’t successful in everything he does, but he’s not a failure either.
At best his skill set includes hiring smart people, raising money, and being a good manager. Which is exactly what you want from a good CEO and nothing to sneeze at.
But people give him way too much credit for Tesla and spacex imo
People act like this asshole out there wrenching on Raptor engines or something.
No. He sits at the top and commands, like a king. And yet he is apparently solely responsible for engineering achievements? The guy who gave "cold gas jet thrusters" on a tesla a legitimate idea for more speed, or using rockets for fast travel on earth, or "humans drive with just two eyes (and a millennia of evolution and experience) so we will replicate that with just two shitty off the shelf CCDs that don't even compare to eyeballs, and oh btw we are removing ultrasonic sensors and I promise it's not because we are cheapskates trying to balloon profit margins to meet our absurd overhyped valuation". Has he ever said anything of actual engineering value?
Like come on. He doesn't even technically run things at SpaceX, they literally had to hire someone whose job is to stand between Elon and any semblance of control of the company.
It would be like if you went to mcdonalds, got a burger, and thanked the statue of Ronald Mcdonald on the way out. That's not how the world works, ronald didn't make your burger.
As the saying goes: “I don’t know how to captain a giant cargo ship, but seeing one stuck in the Sues Canal, I can tell something is not going as planed”.
Just like we didn't need to be devs at twitter to know 7000 devs were probably too much, we don't have to be the CEO of twitter to look at it's burning body and call for the bucket brigade.
Because the engineers wouldn't have come anywhere close to achieving their dreams without a rich kid who made money from Paypal and was open to spending it all on hard engineering problems instead of living a good retirement life.
Tom Mueller, arguably one of the key engineers behind the success of SpaceX and designer of the Merlin engines, was working at TRW in a role not related to rocket engines before he was at SpaceX. He was building the rockets out of his garage for fun, until Musk convinced him to join him in what was considered a crazy idea back then.
Lars Blackmore, the engineer who was key in developing the the control algorithms needed for landing Falcon vertically was working at NASA, where his work was in theory going to be applied on a future space mission of much smaller scope compared to Falcon. He was able to apply his research (http://larsblackmore.com/iee_tcst13.pdf) on a revolutionary reusable system that changed the launch industry only because a rich kid was willing to spend his money on testing what seemed like always failing rockets, instead of buying a new Yacht.
> Tom Mueller, arguably one of the key engineers behind the success of SpaceX and designer of the Merlin engines, was working at TRW in a role not related to rocket engines before he was at SpaceX.
This is what Wikipedia says about Tom Mueller at TRW
>For 15 years, Mueller worked for TRW Inc., a conglomerate corporation involved in aerospace, automotive, credit reporting, and electronics. He managed the propulsion and combustion products department where he was responsible for liquid rocket engine development.[1] He worked as a lead engineer during the development of the TR-106, a 650,000 lbf (2,900 kN) thrust, throttled, cost-contained hydrogen engine designed in 2000.
This comment says more about capitalism than it does about Musk, if everything depends so much on the whims of rich kids, and everyone else lives or dies by those whims, including the engineers who are forced to sell their dreams and their labor to said rich kids.
I have not had a joke backfire that caused me to buy a company at several times its value. I have not fired people, cutting off their healthcare, during a recession. I have not made my family hate me. I have not lied repeatedly and without punishment in public. I have not been sued by the SEC, Twitter, and countless other parties.
There are different kinds of people here. Some of us believe that you need to be a sociopath to make it as a CEO of a large corporation. So, no, I wouldn't want to be one.
It takes talent to fail in many of those ways, notably, it's mostly papered over by the success of Tesla and Space X, which will probably be just fine on thew whole.
His antics were 'sufferable' in the context of Tesla/Space X, but for a variety of reasons, not at all with Twitter whereupon he's essentially going to be perceived a toxic entity - rightly or wrongly.
He needs to find an excuse to get out of there, find someone he can get along with to take over. Put some nice terms in there, probably including that he has to 'not talk about Twitter publicly' and get back to his more tolerable shenanigans.
If Twitter was his only gig, I can see him digging himself out of this hole over the long run, but with other things to do I think it's going melt him.
He's doing 'Operation Market Garden' for no reason; time for an 'orderly withdrawal'.
> He failed at Full Self Driving, the Roadster is nowhere to be seen, the Cybertruck is MIA and the Tesla Semi is years late
No, stop it, that's ridiculous. Tesla is an immensely successful company. It just is.
Multiple things can be true: Musk can be a chaos bully driving Twitter into the ground and the CEO of the most successful heavy industry startup since the end of the second world war. I'm no doubt as horrified as you are at what is happening at the bird site, but I still know my car is great.
His time plan might have failed, but that doesn’t mean that full self driving has failed. That’s like if I said: “I’m going to make 10 million dollars by the end of next week”, and then people would call me a failure for only making 5 million in a week.
Or do you mean that full self driving actually has failed, not taking into account any time plans? I think the full self driving capabilities of Teslas are downright incredible. Not fully ready for robotaxi territory, but extremely impressing.
That's not really a comparable analogy. More like "Here is this cool feature I'm going to make by the end of the year, pay me $5,000 for it now." and you never actually get it. It's fraud.
I think it's closer to saying you'll build a bridge in a week but you build a bridge where the roadway ends part of the way across. You can still get to the other side using the steel girders but it's really not useful. FSD sort of works but fails in unexpected ways and at random times so you have to pay just as much attention as if you were driving.
Failure is never an issue. Don't shame people for failing, especially when they fail royally. Because we ALL benefit from it in the long run. Don't shame people for failing.
I’ll give Musk credit for the two decapitations caused by his involvement in self driving technologies. We developed technology and research protocols on how to make self driving safe all the way back in 2007, and Musk thinking he knows better has predictably lead to deaths. That’s on him.
French historian Jacques Bainville, who I admire for providing amazingly accurate 20-year predictions [1], advocated that Napoleon had no choice but to invade Russia [2].
When the revolutionary politicians in France submitted to Napoleon, during his coup (1799) and his subsequent coronation as an emperor (1804), it was under the implicit premise that he would be the one who would be able to militarily keep Belgium, because the Revolution had seized Belgium but wasn't able to hold it.
So Napoleon's power was tied to keeping Belgium, although England would never allow any continental state to be that unbalancedly powerful.
Thus Napoleon has no choice but to subjugate England. To that end, as his fleet had been hit hard in Aboukir (1798) then smashed in Trafalgar (1805), he could not rely on an old-school invasion: thus he tried to subjugate all of Europe and cut commercial links with England to besiege the island at a continental scale. This was called the Blocus Continental, and it was bound to fail as long as Russia wouldn't participate. Thus the desperate attack in 1812.
---
[1] Les conséquences politiques de la paix_, (https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Cons%C3%A9quences_politi...) is a book in which Bainville predicts, in this exact order and in the year 1919, that Germany will annex the Sudeten, then Austria, then Poland, then attack western Europe, and that Italy will be their allies.
> They win the war of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th coalitions. For the first time, they find that things are going fine. All they have to do is nothing. Pull back and consolidate
Pull back and 'consolidate' as Britain keeps propping up Russia to attack the French from both sides. Meanwhile making use of the aristocrats and their still present economic and political power inside the continent.
I've only seen twitter through tweetdeck for the last decade, and I believe it hasn't seen a new feature or design (both in functionality and form) change in at least 4 years ? It has become bug riddled (but I still use it), but all timelines are still linear.
(example: polls have never been ported to tweetdeck)
I don't think tweetdeck has seen active maintenance in years.
I'd consider that a good thing. I avoid updating apps as long as possible because they inevitably add features that degrade the experience (ads, etc).
Prior to the Tweetdeck URL, I used the OSX client which I also really liked, mostly for the ability to just copy and paste an image straight into a tweet. So functionality wise, I feel like my experience has actually declined since then.
TheVerge was already reporting on getting no PR access after the team was fired, like one or two weeks ago (damn that feels like a long time in this timeline...)
Twitter has no PR department left, it's not random speculation [1]
> GroupM didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment. Twitter no longer has a communications department to reach out to with such requests. The internal message seen by Platformer says that Twitter is “working through” GroupM’s requirements with leadership.
What's going to happen is that we'll find out either of these are true:
1) Elon will run this thing to ground and site will disappear one day, and entirely stop working for days. Elon will call up ex-employees with 2x overtime pay to help fix it. They might not. It will be a major news event since most politicians these days are on Twitter and Elon's reputation will be forever tarnished. Other CEOs and leaders will join the mocking gang.
2) Elon will show to the world that Twitter can just run fine with 75% less work force and all you need is highly motivated, talented (and compensated) employees. It will be a direct testament to the fact that these woke corporations in SF/SV are totally dysfunctional and they've had a good ride so far from the adtech boom.
We'll have to return back to your comment and see how it ages. Stakes are high.
Life isn't usually that spectacle. More likely scenario is that we'll see more frequent small-medium outages from Twitter, Elon frantically tries to bring/borrow engineers from everywhere (likely many from Tesla and SpaceX) to make it barely survive from all the fiasco. Then Elon will finally learn that there probably was a good reason for all the 7500 people in the hard way then finally re-invent the wheel from the scratch.
1) Twitter stays up without a hitch: A testament to how relisilient Twitter architecture is even with someone actively trying to fuck it up. Elon clearly does not want Twitter to survive, but thanks to ex-Twitter employees who built such a great resilient system.
2) Twitter goes down in flames: This is what happens when a megalomanian billionaire takes over a complicated distributed scalable system. These billionaires have no idea how complex systems work.
They will, until the first company actually has serious issues after cutting staffing and then they will get very skiddish and hyper conservative about everything again and it will just be another decade of stock buybacks.
most big tech companies have more than one product that has not meaningfully changed or added competitive features in 10 years. twitter is being run like it's world of warcraft when it is actually ffxi.
Trying to be objective, isn't downsizing what all tech companies are doing? There's a lot of PR mismanagement here, but it seems to be in line with the rest for the moment (leaving aside EM bs). And Twitter is no Meta. There are no alternative products to bring in cash revenue, so hardcore downsizing it is.
He is pushing the limits (and maybe finding them) of how quickly you can correct head count in a larger company. We won’t know if his actual vision for the product is bad until he gets done with this transitional period and can start releasing updates. Basically I’d argue not much happened yet but HR meetings.
Have you ever worked on a large org with a main product that kept getting updated under the hoods to support more and more "invisible" features that ultimately drive how the product works?
Because if you did you should know that updates are constantly happening...
Twitter's longest standing and most valuable users access it solely via 3rd party smartphone apps, which use an API that's not been updated for many years and have zero new features from twitter in that time.
The service is identical to 2009 or something as far as I'm concerned, and still appears broken as far as video embeds go to this day. It's one of the heaviest and slowest loading sites I can think of.
To be fair, that design and engineering staff took over a year and couldn't deliver an "edit" feature. Project Veritas caught some Twitter engineer on camera claiming to work 4 hours per week.
This is not an endorsement of Elon or anything he's doing with Twitter, but Twitter's core product is not complicated. For some comparisons:
Rumble has 35 employees
When WhatsApp was sold to FB in 2014 they had 55 employees.
WeChat has about 1400 employees.
My guess is you could successfully run Twitter with a few hundred employees.
Internal reps for large advertisers and agencies alone would exceed that number. Long tail advertisers can self-serve, but ad platforms need their whales and whales expect inside reps.
I posit brand ads require more staffing, because they require more sales efforts to get advertisers to buy. Direct response is easier to measure the ROAS, but for brand ads, it's a really good idea to have someone selling ads constantly to your existing clients. Otherwise, many clients in the mid-size space ($100k-$5M/year, approximately) probably can't measure their return, which means those budgets are always at risk of being cut.
With direct response, even data-naive decision makers can figure the value of.
According to Wikipedia WeChat's parent company Tencent had 112,000 employees in 2021. That company has many different products, but where does the 1,400 number come from?
WeChat does push to talk voice chat, image sharing like snapchat, broadcast messaging, video conferencing, video sharing, and digital payments. What is Twitter doing behind the scenes that justifies multiple times the amount of employees at WeChat?
WeChat has always been part of Tencent. It was piggybacking on the infra of what was already one of the biggest tech companies in the world. That's like comparing the number of Gmail employees to Twitter, sure it serves lots of users, but it doesn't have to worry about so much of what a standalone company has to deal with
They weren't making money with those 1000 employees, either. Revenue 10X'd since then (along with cost).
WhatsApp/YouTube were in the same boat when purchased. Good at getting active users but monetizing takes a lot of employees and they hadn't tackled that yet when acquired
I just think he is trying to get rid of employees with low morale or those that don't want him as a boss. Twitter will be fine and there's a good chance it will do better under Elon's management.
This has to be the end. The engineers keeping the wheels from flying off are gone. Twitter just needs a technical hiccup that Steve or that one guy who manages a team to fix it is already putting out applications. It’s over.
I'm kinda glad to see this. Twitter has been a cesspool for years and it negatively impacted society. I'm glad to see it crash and burn. It took $44 billions to do but what the heck.
Is there not just a bit or irony here that exactly 7 days ago Elon was ordering "all employees back to the office" and today he's ordering "all offices are closed"?
1: Fire top managers & half the workforce, the criteria behind the firing being "just coz"
2. Threat the remaining employees with bankruptcy.
3: Ask the remaining workforce to work 2.5 (Very likely to cover the other half fired, that were very likely already working their asses off)
4: Profit???
I'm no industry expert, but I wouldn't trust EM with my mom's bakery.
Ugh, as an outsider, I originally liked the idea of Musk protecting free speech better, but this is some epic mismanagement. I can't imagine why anyone that can find a new job would want to stay there, he seems like a terrible boss.
It seems like he's taking a "burning your ships" approach. So maybe the company can run with a far smaller but more desperate team. What I'm not sure about is how people will get to like social media again. Will it really be a larger company that innovates in this space, rather than a startup that will turn Twitter into the next myspace.
A lot of what he's tweeting and or replying to is completely fabricated trolling everyone stuff.
Maybe he's trying to burn it to thr ground to hide something ... pardon conspiracy theory but it's just weird that someone goes and spends $44 billion and takes negative action after negative action against your new shiny toy.
Though maybe he knows what and who is needed only to run Twitter and all the others were just sitting at home or on the beach working an hour to two a day yet getting paid $150 to 500K a year for a full time job they far from worked.
No. This is just a dirty, yet ingenious, strategy to fire the most of employees without paying severance. It's the cheapest way of removing the "dead weight" from the company without spending too much money.
Over the last few hours, I've seen numerous tweets displayed as deleted or not available, only to resurface later on. (Both embedded and directly linked.)
It's marked as "unavailable" when I view logged in to Twitter, but it's there in incognito mode.
Edit: Actually I just tried refreshing a couple times and it seems to be stochastic as to whether I can see the Tweet or not. Sometimes it's there, sometimes it's "unavailable".
I'm curious about the HN algorithm and why this post hasn't been closer to the top of the front page? It seems like there are so many comments and votes, it should be higher
I find it curious that Musk has simultaneously demanded that all employees cease working from home and return to the office whilst also locking them out of the office.
Yes, but only because of the way Musk went about changing the WFH Policy. Musk is quoted as saying "If you can physically make it to an office and you don't show up, resignation accepted". He was placing the onus onto employees to make it to an office at all costs, else they would be out of a job. To then lock employees out after such histrionic demands seems ironic.
If I was Facebook or any other competitor, I would swoop in and poach everyone that is actually still there, mostly people afraid to leave because of visa issues etc.
Because visa employees are basically shackled to their organization. They stupidly cheap compared to a fare market value. There's probably like 1000 at most, and not all of them will bite. It would be a cheap way to get really reliable and CHEAP devs to replace the 10k they just dropped.
God knows what is going on on the minds of remaining employees. I guess most of them want to quit but couldn't for variety of reasons (such as visa issues). And some may be too deep in awe of Musk to quit.
What I find so amazing about this dumpsterfire is how easy the plan to maximize Twitter revenue would have been: fire 80-90% of developers over the next year and just optimize the system to reduce infrastructure costs by 95%. Be transparent, humane and not an asshole while doing this.
When you then have a leaner organization then you can go nuts.
Musk acted like an impatiant child, all the while being mostly right.
> fire 80-90% of developers over the next year and just optimize the system to reduce infrastructure costs by 95%
"just"
The presumption here is that 90% of the staff weren't doing anything useful, and that 95% of the infrastructure costs were wasted, and both of those would be extremely surprising?
Also very non-efficient-markets-hypothesis, that a public company would just sit there wasting almost all of its money.
Why would it be surprising? Without any pressure to cut costs engineers find countless ways to "be useful" that ads little value while adding massive complexity to the organization, ballooning maintenance costs in the long-term.
I've heard so many bullshit work stories from FAANG friends that I'm not sure why you'd expect markets to be efficient regarding these hugely subsidized tech companies.
Same reason he didn't do due dilligence before offering them $44b; He spends most of his days sniffing his own farts, telling himself he's awesome, and being adored by legions of random people on the internet.
He's basically a twitch streamer in terms of behavior and pleasure response to attention, so expect him to act like one.
Paul G: "It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX." https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961
I don’t think they walked it back so much as Elon did. The early leaked communications did say that it was the norm to have everyone back except for people who can’t or are exceptional.
"NEW: The designers leading Elon Musk’s Blue verified project are out, along with the lead web engineer. Many Twitter employees who maintained critical infrastructure have resigned. This is going to look like a very different company tomorrow."
The snowball has gained too much momentum now. Especially with Thanksgiving coming, I don't see how Twitter is realistically going to keep the lights on, quite literally.
God I hope it was as many engineers, designers, IT, and general employees as possible that said no. I mean, they get three months severance and get to give one of the biggest adult children in the world a piece of their mind by simply not clicking a button.
I would obviously not want to work in such an environment, but. Given that he fired so many people, yet the site is working unchanged and works exactly the same as before, maybe he’s not that crazy?
I can log in to the website and see no difference; nothing is obviously broken. Maybe he’s right and most people were doing nothing? I don’t know.
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I think what he means is that, things are basically on hold there and nothing has broken yet.
So I think his point his kinda valid, Twitter doesn't need that much employees to work as expected. It's possibly a very low maintenance platform that can go for days without the need of any sort of maintenance.
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I don’t understand how anyone here can be supportive of the idea of the richest man in the world coming in, immediately firing half the staff, trying to get another significant portion of the staff to resign by demanding they switch from the promised permanent WFH to working from the office in 2 weeks, and then encouraging them to resign by giving them a highly fishy spammy/pushing email with an external link to a form to decide whether they want to work with this company or not within 48 hrs.
This is horrible and destructive. We should be against this on principle. For us to not be against this is making us the ultimate Beta Cucks who are willing to take it WM the throat as long as the pretend Alpha is showing it to us.
Regardless of your feelings about Elon Musk as a person, this kind of behavior is absolutely crazy for the leader of a company. I can't imagine what investors who signed on to do this with him are thinking unless their goal was to simply destroy the company.
Agree. Mostly I feel for the people working at a place that chaotic. Life is hard enough for many, no need for an eratic, eccentric billionaire with a short fuse to make things even more complicated.
It's how to murder morale, demotivate people, and force high-performers out. There's no such thing as "creative destruction" when it comes to leadership or teams. And so there's no salvaging EM's or Twitter's reputation at this point.
He should stick to engineering and let sensible, mature, secure adults run companies.
Production environments are genuinely isolated from the internet and accessible either only physically or through very secure channels. In order to sabotage these environments you have to be physically present. Unplug servers, intruduce malware via usb stick, etc.
I think the goal was to destroy the company. Twitter has become such a cesspool and liability for a lot of important people and governments. Bring in someone like Elon Musk to blow it up in spectacular fashion.
Spouting off conspiracy theories aren't evidence of anything. Occam's razor would suggest he's more likely to be an arrogant, incompetent manager who's had a few successes here and there but is ultimately out-of-touch with reality and triumphally operating well outside his limited experience.
This one goes for those who are positive towards EM right now (honest question, no ill intentions here): is there any way at all to look at his actions in the past weeks in a positive light from an administrative perspective? I mean, ok, you could argue that Twitter was in a bad shape and so on, but anyway, is there any real objective justification for such a messy, chaotic approach to its reorganization? Can anyone really expect to improve a company this way? He recently tweeted a meme of twitter burying twitter, and to me it really feels like the kind of thing a teenager would do, "oh shit, I made a mistake with this acquisition, let me blame someone for it".
I'm neutral because I don't care, I'm only watching it when I'm exposed to it through others, so essentially like a popular TV show.
What I've read some say is that it's a strategy to drastically reduce head count and keep only those people on who really want to be there and are not just there because it's a well-compensated position and they've figured out how to appear busy without doing much. Those people might leave when it becomes a chore to keep up appearances ("this feels like work, if I wanted to work I could've just done my job"), they're self-identifying and you're not paying severance when they quit. Of course, you're probably also bleeding out some talented and productive people. I don't know if "it's a mess, but it's the challenge of a lifetime" and the chance to work for Musk is enough to recruit good people, but it might be, not everyone has a family and needs to be home by 5pm and wants work-life-balance.
Trump was elected president riding on a wave of lots of people hating him and the media covering him 24/7 in a constant scream of GOTCHA and it worked out for him. Musk has claimed that Twitter usage is peeking among all of this. It kind of looks like a Wrestling show with lots of crazy things happening, only that not all participants are aware of what's happening or willing to participate. I have no idea whether it works out in his favor.
Worry not as the Optimus production will start by the end of this year and the robots can keep Twitter up at least 10 times better than human employees! It’d be financially insane to employ anything other than an Optimus robot!
The next tweet in the thread: "We're hearing this is because Elon Musk and his team are terrified employees are going to sabotage the company." Um, I can think of one person who is definitely sabotaging the company.
So here's my understanding of what happened, appreciating corrections:
* Twitter was known for liberal corporate politics, most employees liberal
* Purchased by center-right billionaire in the name of freedom of speech (modern liberals against freedom of speech)
* Twitter employees amuse themselves by making billionaire's life difficult
* Billionaire delivers ultimatum, many employees out
* Unclear if sufficient knowledge to maintain systems will survive
It seems like with the benefit of hindsight, the correct play for Elon would've been to avoid major moves at first, let far left employees quit, replace them with new hires excited by working at a Musk company. Then eventually, maybe, deliver an ultimatum once new Musk-enthusiast hires had absorbed enough knowledge to maintain systems.
I think the hard-charging approach Elon took was likely the correct one for Tesla/SpaceX, since employees at those companies mostly knew what they had signed up for, but Twitter was a much different management challenge since the existing workforce has/had an active dislike for Elon.
Regular people have been trying to explain this to the "center-right" for a while now: Twitter's moderation policies weren't primarily dictated by their political views, they were primarily dictated by building an advertiser friendly platform. Which Musk exploded almost immediately by endorsing a far right homophobic conspiracy theory about a violent attack on the family member of an elected politician.
You can say "with the benefit of hindsight" but I would put to you: with the benefit of foresight, lots of people told him exactly what would happen. The problem isn't the management structure, it's that Musk is unfamiliar with pretty basic facts about twitter, such as its engineering architecture, its business model, and its position in the market.
From what I understand, Twitter's moderation is noticeably more left-wing than that of Facebook. And yet Facebook makes a lot of ad dollars. So I do think there's a discretionary element there.
I agree that Musk hasn't been behaving in a way that's advertiser-friendly.
I'm sure we can find someone, somewhere who correctly predicted in advance how things could go down, but I'm skeptical that it was a widespread prediction. Certainly feel free to prove me wrong.
Facebook is a very different business from Twitter in 3 ways - firstly scale, they're more than 5x the size, secondly in engagement - they have enormous amounts of demographic and behaviour data about their users and they track them extensively across the web, and finally business model - Twitter does brand advertising whereas Facebook is much closer to point of sale, an advert on Facebook is likely to directly convert to a sale, whereas an advert on twitter is just mainly brand advertising - Facebook's type of advert is far more valuable. So it's difficult to directly compare them.
But more importantly there's a big difference between how Facebook and Twitter work - Facebook is default closed, people can't interact with you unless you're putting yourself out there - either by friending people or joining a group, so there's a natural barrier against the spread of harassment, brigading and the toxic behaviour becoming public. There is a whole load of toxic neo-nazi stuff on Facebook, but it's out of view, and because ads are highly targetted there's no concern about brand safety. On Twitter it's default open, so if people are going around loudly spreading far right homophobic conspiracy theories about a violent attack on an elected official everyone is going to know about it - that's why Twitter has to be so careful.
There were a lot of people who have been in social media who explained in a lot of detail about how these things work when Elon first got involved. For example, Yishan Wong ran reddit back in 2012, at the time he had an extremely similar free speech maximalist view similar to Musk's current view. He did a very clear explanation of the dynamics of why that approach simply doesn't work - https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440 .
>But more importantly there's a big difference between how Facebook and Twitter work - Facebook is default closed, people can't interact with you unless you're putting yourself out there - either by friending people or joining a group, so there's a natural barrier against the spread of harassment, brigading and the toxic behaviour becoming public. There is a whole load of toxic neo-nazi stuff on Facebook, but it's out of view, and because ads are highly targetted there's no concern about brand safety. On Twitter it's default open, so if people are going around loudly spreading far right homophobic conspiracy theories about a violent attack on an elected official everyone is going to know about it - that's why Twitter has to be so careful.
Interesting point!
I'm not totally convinced though, I'd expect there are a lot of neo-nazis on Facebook who make their posts publicly viewable. "Hey look guys, there's this terrible neo-nazi post!" -> some FB users see an ad for their fav brand above the post.
It's also worth remembering, Facebook has about 15,000 paid moderators. Because they print money they can just solve the moderation problem with brute force. It's pretty funny when you think Facebook employs twice as many people just for moderation than Twitter employed in total at its peak, obviously the moderators are cheap, but still funny.
Both internal and external review of twitter shows a bias towards the right. It is probably still "more left-wing than that of facebook" but still distinctly rightwing.
He started firing people day 1 and bragging about it online. Of course his remaining employees are going to shit talk him.
The “ultimatum” sure as hell wasn’t in response to this either, I don’t know if you are implying that or not. He pulled this exact same stunt at Tesla just a few months ago.
The dude is a raging asshole surrounded by yes men. If you value your health and your family you should not work for this man
I think the Twitter ultimatum is the kind of thing you send if you suspect most employees don't support your leadership / are not pulling their weight. Similar to the Zappos philosophy of offering a generous severance to everyone who quits, in order to have an office full of enthusiastic employees.
They were a remote-first org dude. Many had no childcare set up, long commutes, or were on H1Bs as well. This isn’t a “if they don’t like it, quit.” Type of situation. It’s being manipulated into padding the ego of a billionaire with no gain.
I hope you don’t manage a team or have any responsibility for the well-being of others. I’m quite shocked at how little sympathy you have for strangers
My statement referred to Tesla. I agree that it sucks for Twitter employees who depended on remote work arrangements.
However, 7500 people is way too much staff in my opinion. As I mentioned, I worked at one of the world's biggest websites and it had about 1% of that staff.
Realistically, if an unprofitable company is getting acquired, the acquirer is most likely going to cut a lot of positions. One way to do this is to be really demanding and let people self-select out of the company. 3 months severance is a decent period of time to find a new job.
You're missing a significant bullet point which is that in-between Musk arriving and Twitter employees resigning, Musk fired 50% of the workforce. That seems like a much more significant factor in whether systems can be maintained.
If you need half of 7500 people to maintain a system like Twitter, something is fundamentally wrong with the tech stack and the tech people that work there.
Agreed. I used to work at a top 200 website (also social media) and we had about 30 engineers and another 30 non-engineer staff.
I think cutting workforce was the correct move for an acquirer, but he probably should've moved just a bit slower (e.g. using a more sophisticated metric for employee productivity than "# lines committed"). And of course try to make cuts in a way that doesn't harm the morale of those who aren't cut.
Good point. And that also probably creates fear/resentment among the remaining employees.
I guess Elon is a weird combination of being very good at the "visionary" aspects of leadership (inspiring people with "Occupy Mars") and being very bad at the "managing" aspects (creating psychological safety & high morale for employees).
This leadership style doesn't work unless your employees believe in your vision.
Granted, I don't know this person is actually an engineer as opposed to a troll. And she doesn't claim that she or other employees actively tried to create trouble.
So there was an aspect of me reading subtext into her tweet + Elon's ultimatum. Maybe incorrectly.
That is a joke post. That person was never a Twitter employee. But even if they counterfactually were, big deal if the grunts at the organization you take over have a nickname for you.
* Musk didn't really want to buy Twitter. He screwed up and got locked into a contract he couldn't figure out a way out of.
* Having figured that he vastly overpaid, he panicked and tried to cut down the fat. Problem is that he hasn't spent enough time there to figure out where's the fat.
* Musk fundamentally doesn't understand what he has bought. He doesn't understand that Twitter's business relies on pleasing advertisers, who don't give a crap about free speech ideals and are very risk averse.
* Musk doesn't understand that what he bought is far more about people skills than anything else. Managing an online community is an exercise in cat herding. At Twitter's scale you also have to content with thorny legal issues. None of that is fun. Many forces push things into a familiar direction, and "free speech" is a very tough direction to pick.
* Musk doesn't understand even the basics of the platform he bought, like why the blue checkmarks provided any value. He proceeded to immediately throw a huge wrench into that system, to nearly no economic benefit.
* Musk is trying to have his cake and eat it too. On one hand he wants unrestricted free speech, on the other hand he wants to make money from advertisers that don't care for free speech. You can pick one or the other.
* Musk seems not to understand that Twitter isn't SpaceX. There's few places where you can work on a rocket, but a lot of places where you can maintain a backend. You can sell the dream of colonizing Mars to rocket engineers, but Twitter employees can go most anywhere else and do mostly the same thing.
* Musk seems not to understand that since his employees have plentiful options, he can't strong arm them. They can leave. They're generally well paid, and his takeover provides plentiful options for them to organize, help each other and start lawsuits if he breaks any laws.
> He doesn't understand that Twitter's business relies on pleasing advertisers, who don't give a crap about free speech ideals and are very risk averse.
That's a good point, true free speech fanatics are extremely rare. Most everyone in reality thinks that their group is being silenced, and wouldn't mind silencing their ideological opposition.
Oh comeon. Musk acted like a douch to his employees. Actively trying to make their life crap and shitpoating on how bad they are.
This had nothing to do with politics. More like ppl with other options taking them to avoid being treated like crap.
For what it’s worth, your post is wildly inaccurate. To me it reads like the understanding of someone who consumes a lot far-right stuff and cannot discern between online talk show narrative and factual real world events. You might consider enriching your media diet.
I think this comment from you is a bit too high-level to be useful though, maybe it'd be more helpful to identify the bullet point which is most inaccurate and explain why, with citations.
I'm not the person you replied to but when I read your comment at the top-level it suggested that "far left" and "liberal" people were a problem at Twitter and that they needed to be somehow removed from the org to fix it. This is a fairly common trope among the alt-right and far-right - that the damn snowflake liberals want to take away your freedom of speech (and take your guns, and turn your kids trans, etc etc), and to be honest I raised an eyebrow. Though it could possibly be that you meant it to be read as "ok assuming Musk thinks liberals/left-leaning employees are the problem, here's how he could have booted them in a less chaotic way ..."
Well Elon has a lot of haters, especially among liberal people, so it seems pretty reasonable to deduce that many Twitter employees were Elon haters? And yeah, a company full of employees who hate the CEO isn't gonna function great. So in that sense, it's a problem to solve independent of the damn snowflake liberals angle.
Is there a specific "enriching my media diet" thing I'm missing here? Like I feel like that paragraph ^ is just common sense.
I don't know, it just feels that every time someone uses "liberuls" and "far left" they are repeating the mantra of the alt-right. It was kinda uncalled for given that these terms have wildly different meanings depending on who's saying them, usually the alt-right co-opted them to be "anything that disagree with us".
It's just exhausting, you could have brought up the same issue without having to resort to divisive discourse :)
And every place I've worked at there were people who hated the CEO, it's just natural, it's a position of power and people don't have to like the CEO to work for a company, even less if it's a large one.
I don't think that is a problem you need to solve at all. Who cares if your employees don't like you? There are thousands of CEOs worldwide and likely most of their employees resent, distrust, dislike or even hate them - but they need to work with each other and usually manage (if begrudgingly) to do so.
I didn't say you should enrich your media diet - I don't really care what you watch or read.
Sure, maybe a better way to put it would be: at high-functioning companies, workers believe in the CEO. So if you want to create a high-functioning company, and lots of workers are never gonna believe in the CEO because they think he's a "psychopath" (term used elsewhere in this thread for Elon because he wants employees to work 40 hours in the office!), then it makes sense to encourage those workers to leave on some kind of timetable, same way Zappos offers a nice severance so they're left with only the most enthusiastic employees
He fired ~3700 after a couple of days - that’s not encouraging anyone to leave on some kind of timetable, that’s a mass layoff. It certainly doesn’t make him a psychopath, but it does make him a boss that I would not want to work for - so I completely understand the exodus that this (and a few of the other questionable moves) appears to have started
> * Twitter employees amuse themselves by making billionaire's life difficult
Elon got them to print out their code and pissed off the advertisers that where paying them. I don't think it was the employees that made life difficult.
1.) Twitter was not biased for liberals. That part is just not true, no matter what grievance machine says.
2.) Musk intentions were not free speech by any meaningful sense. He does not have track record of valuing it. He values only speech of those he agrees it and is super eager to punish whoever disagree with him. The first departments that had to go were the ones where actual free speech issues are dealt with.
Like, human rights team. Free speech is more then just saying n-word or ability to harass your opponents. It is also not giving your details to law enforcement and policies related to nonwestern countries.
3.) Twitter employees making it difficult for him is just not true. The worst that happened was few people disagreeing with him about technical matters. The free speech advocate was unable to process even technical disagreement.
4.) The idea that it ia far left employees leaving or that there was even that many of them is bonkers. Conservative people think about their employment conditions too. They dont necessary like being humiliated, they are not all doormats and natural born yes men.
The core of my argument is when Elon tweets about how he's in favor of freedom of speech, it makes many liberals squirm. The argument doesn't depend on these sort of details related to whether "freedom of speech" is a purely legal concept, vs one that also makes sense in the context of a social media platform.
> ... freedom of speech, it makes many liberals squirm.
I think this meme can be quickly disproved by looking at political subreddits. All right wing subs of which I'm aware have rules which filter out speech which does not toe the party line.
I find the reality of the freedom with which I am allowed to discuss my ideas in righty subs to be extremely hypocritical when they are supposedly all about "free speech."
It's the same in Europe with the refugee policy, if you dare question that maybe it isn't best for Europe to blindly accept tens of millions of refugees from American wars whilst our economy is in complete freefall, you are branded as racist and cancelled.
His biggest mistake was saying that he would allow Trump back. In the minds of many left-leaning people that makes him a sympathizer in a coup attempt, and those left-leaning people succeeded in creating an extreme amount of pressure against Twitter’s customers (the advertisers) to starve the company.
Musk clearly thinks of himself as creating a platform for free speech, but when it comes to coups there is really no such thing as a middle ground or neutrality.
Can you provide a source for Musk saying that he would allow Trump back? Last I heard, he formed an advisory board, and said account reinstatements were pending discussions of advisory board.
In any case, I think you're correct that this is an important subthread.
Generously, Twitter was worth half what he paid, 22B at the time he took over, given the decline in the market from when the Twitter tender offer was made.
$13B in loans
$7.1B from equity investors (did they have a liquidation preference?)
How much has he degraded the value by scaring away all the advertisers?
Just to nit pick - Musk didn't pay 44B for Twitter. The total value was 44Bn, that was structured as 13B debt secured against Twitter. So let's say Twitter goes bankrupt (not totally ceases operations) - files for chapter 11.
You'd have to find some way of restructuring the company to pay the creditors. In the most simplified approach, the most likely the only way of doing that is to sell the company. If the company sold for more than 13Bn (perfectly possible, although not hugely likely given the damage he's done) then anything above that would go to Elon and his equity investors, but we'd be talking about them walking away with close to nothing. But it's also perfectly possible that Elon just steps in and buys the 13Bn debt and continues to run the company.
Given the mountain of technical debt under the previous administration's focus on growth over everything else, as detailed by Mudge, I don't know how the wheels hadn't already fallen off the system.
I fail to see how a networked system with nobody left tending it is going to last.
Is there precedent anyone can point to where these sorts of wild dramatic moves under new leadership led to turning a large company around into success?
Jørgen Vig Knudstorp was tapped to take control of LEGO when its business was on the verge of failing (in such a way that the founding family themselves did not know they were so close to the edge).
Entire departments and ventures were cut.
Guy Roz does a very interesting interview on Wisdom from the Top about it.
Steve Job's return to Apple was not like this at all. For all his faults Jobs was never as erratic as Musk, and he never pulled stunts like causing 80% of the staff to be fired or leave, nor did he ever lock the buildings in Cupertino.
What did Steve Jobs do? He wasn't even at the company for half the layoffs that happened, and wasn't CEO until they were over. He killed some boondoggles 6 months after being formally named CEO (and over a year after NEXT was acquired).
Looks like I'm not the only one who made the association:
David Heinemeier Hansson
November 5, 2022
Apple fired 4,100 when Steve Jobs returned in 1997
https://world.hey.com/dhh/apple-fired-4-100-when-steve-jobs-returned-in-1997-57ed6bc6
GE became profitable, it was just not GE anymore but some monstrosity that became a finance firm instead of an engineering one.
You can see some similarity to Boeing after having MD's management taking over, accounting-wise it's working, engineering-wise it's fallen deep into a pit of issues.
Presumably you'd build a coherent plan for what the future company would need, figure out which employees are best suited to get you there, and then make strategic layoffs to non-core services and teams outside of that scope. Or you could send a Google doc to every employee with two days notice saying "Click here to work yourself to death for uncertain reward" and then be surprised when hardly anyone agrees.
considering that Black Friday, Qatar World Cup and Christmas are all in the next 30 days, one might have thought he'd want to capitalize on the increased traffic and advertiser interest in his first week on the job.
It doesn't even look like there will be any advertisers left by the time the dust settles.
Apparently usage of Twitter is growing, instead of decreasing. So you as an advertiser will just ignore a platform with a massive user base just because you don't like the owner?
Advertisers can buy ads anywhere. Twitter has always had the least amount of bargaining power of all the ad-driven social networks.
It was up to Musk to assure Twitter's biggest revenue sources that he would lead with a steady hand. He hasn't done anything except publicly revel in firing people, then ignore the issue of trolls using his $8/mo. feature to impersonate corporate brands.
Digital ad campaigns have budgets, and they can be shifted around platforms without much hassle. The money will be shifted to platforms that actually listen to what advertisers are asking for, which is basic brand safety.
Anecdotally, it's been interesting to me to watch how quickly my Twitter social network is rebuilding itself on Mastodon.
Twitter and its ilk don't have their hardest challenges in the technical space; they have their hardest challenges in the same space as the SCA. "You rule because they believe."
And do what with them? Completely rebuild Twitter in prod? Loyalty has nothing to do with the requirement of being one of the most exceptional programmers in existence.
It would be funny if Musk just launch a mastodon instance, points Twitter domain there and call it Twitter 2.0. He probably could run it with just a dozen staff.
I'm wondering at what point would the bag holders with whom he went into this venture start telling him to shut up and let an adult run things. Because all he's doing right now is burning the $44B.
> What do people mean when they say Twitter is gonna shut down? Doesn't it kinda run itself? I feel like engineers are for changes not to just keep it running? I also don't know anything. Hey @elonmusk wanna do a Twitter space with me? Im confused. - Dave Portnoy @stoolpresidente
> The best people are staying, so I'm not super worried - Elon Musk @elonmusk
As bad as I feel for all the Twitter peeps whose lives were upended by this whole mess, it sure does feel satisfying to watch that weasel Musk get his comeuppance.
Going "hardcore" can be an amazing experience. Some of the most exciting and fun times during my career were when I was on a tiger team.
Elon Musk is approaching this in a horrible way though. By using hardcore as a default setting, and quiet firing anyone who doesn't sign on to it, he's signaling hard core must be forced thing. "hardcore" itself has negative connotations.
Think of how different the news cycle would be right now if he had said the following:
* "Twitter's engineers have done an amazing job, and everyone is getting a 2% out of cycle bonus in stock"
* "Those who want to do an even more amazing job and enter beast mode with me (crucial that he work the same hours), will get a 10% bonus in stock each year they do, with the first year's 10% after the first month of beast mode. For me beast mode means 60-70 hour weeks, one or more pushed commits per day, and being on-site at least two days out of five."
* "Those who don't enter beast mode are still Twitter engineers, among the best in the industry, and will not be penalized in any way. We recognize that different people have different needs when it comes to work-life balance, and we value diversity at Twitter."
* "We do need to improve our platform in some ways though. To this end I am putting a 3 month freeze on hiring, firing, and new features. Our focus during this time will be improving performance, improving security, and fixing bugs."
Good point, I was primarily thinking about companies in general. You can issue private stock - it only gets issued to employees and investors, and sale is controlled. Though, not much point though if the company won't be going public some day.
A couple weeks ago 50% were laid off and nothing happened. Now I read on Twitter that Twitter died and it's at a record high DAU. Make it make sense!
It may be bumpy in the short term, but then all of the supremely confident naysayers are going to look ridiculous and spiteful if it turns out that Twitter can operate with 80-90% fewer employees.
I can pretty easily keep a mysql instance running. I cannot easily do that while adding features to it. Scale that up a lot and you can see how Twitter can keep running with much less people while not delivering anything.
The fact that a site that big hasn't broken yet shows how good they actually were and in the end he did fire good engineers while not even tackling Twitter main problems which none were technical. Bots are still rampant, moderation is gone, monetization is non existant and advertisers were scared away.
Unless things change what you're seeing is not a success, it's a zombie.
Then the company can hire more engineers? Even if devs in SF virtue-signal on Twitter about how they'd never work under Musk, a competitive paycheck attracts outsiders.
Except Musk's companies are already known for underpaying, and the Twitter is stuck servicing a colossal debt from the purchase.
Any engineers capable enough to rescue this trainwreck will likely be able to secure better compensation elsewhere without having to endure Musk's new indefinite "hardcore" death march.
Twitter is going to operate on a skeleton staff of H1B's dependent on their employment for their visas (who are probably already floating their resumes) and whatever underqualified graduates they can hire.
Who is gonna onboard those new engineers? I subscribe to Peter Naur's view of programming as theory building, the knowledge of what these applications running inside Twitter do is being lost on a fast pace, the code itself doesn't tell the whole theory behind the code.
Institutional knowledge is necessary to sufficiently onboard any new hire, without that you have headless chickens running around trying to figure out what exactly are they working with. How do you solve Chesterton's Fence when there's no one around to tell you why the Fence is there?
His antics were fine in the context of material growth at Tesla, and SpaceX.
There are incredible aspirational aspects to those businesses, and they have massive support from Big Government, and crucially, people mostly knew what they were getting into aka they went to work for him.
It's the opposite at Twitter.
This is looking more messed up every day, and Elon is messing with other people's money and they won't stand for this for very long.
When he says 'we could be out of business next year' as a bit of a fear/motivation tactic, that's going to make his backers uncomfortable.
If this keeps up Elon will be replaced and it's hard to fathom by whom.
I suggest he will use the excuse of 'need to work on Tesla/Space X', but the terms of his continued oversight of Twitter will be interesting.
Much like the otherwise 'normal' people who worked at the White House during the Trump admin, it's alluring for people to be that close to power, even at the cost of having the wrath of toxicity hanging over them. Any reasonable person taking over Twitter will want to have a pretty big firewall between them and Musk.
I suggest it will be better for everyone: Musk can get a few points in for reform which is his prerogative and there's nothing wrong with that, and Twitter will have a chance at operational performance without the constant contradictions between Musk's populism and the basic operating civil culture at Twitter.
There are so many uphill battles to fight before Musk can even try to get some of the reforms that he wants (which are a bit glib because most things at Twitter exist for a reason), and he's going to spend too much time just getting back on the 'right foot' ... I suggest that it's probably a good idea for him to just step down.
You know if we look at this from a product building perspective....
1. Twitter was attempting through out its history to tell this narrative and do this:
Twitter's core was citizen journalists and
verified journalists and being responsible enough
to guide the conversation in what was allowed
and not allowed as far as hate speech and
misinformation.
Elon bought it and had a new vision that the Twitter product should be a free speech conversation and that advertisers should be ditched as product consumers of Twitter.
The problem for Elon is that he did not do enough of story telling about the new product vision and INVITING people on the journey
Its not a type of journey you can crack a whip to get people to sign up for that journey. And certainly his product adviser, Jason Calacanis does in fact know this from his miss-steps with Mahalo.
Why? He failed to make Twitter profitable for years.
If you look at Twitter, under Jack Dorsey, as what it provided, I can see the point. If you view Twitter as a business, it should have been allowed to fail years ago. Musk does seem to take the speed run approach to trimming down Twitter, with the risk of killing it altogether. Working for Twitter can't be a pleasant experience right now, but the employees where on borrowed time already.
I might be completely wrong, but my feeling is that in 5 years we'll look back and see Twitter as a novelty of the 2010s. See humor in an old ad with a Twitter handle on it, or watch a clip from a news show where they "jump to the Twitter comment" and remember that was a thing.
There is no good way out of this for Twitter. Regardless of what he actually paid, Musk vastly overpay for for the company. They've been burning a $1B a year for a decade, and now Musk is stuck with the bills for next year. It's not that I think he's doing a good job, but he has to do something. Otherwise he'll be burning hundreds of millions of dollars every year, keeping Twitter running, and that's after having wasted billions upfront.
Well if you've read Jack's interaction with Elon about Twitter (part of the lawsuit), it's because the board was very risk adverse and against big changes. Jack actually supports what Elon is doing now, because it's not something he could do while he was in charge.
Software developers who choose to stay at Twitter after the lack of respect and asymmetrical demand for respect that Musk has demonstrated towards them are just like Ted Cruz licking Trump's boots and kissing his ass after Trump called his wife ugly.
The current thread ended up spending 10 hours on HN's front page. IIRC it was flagged by users and we restored it. I didn't see your comment till just now. (@dang doesn't do anything—if you or anyone want to tell me something, the reliable message queue is hn@ycombinator.com.)
I agree that this is a major ongoing topic (MOT) and needs to be discussed. At the same time, so many of the submissions are repeats of things already posted. This is a classic situation that comes up a few times a year (the FTX saga is another going on right now).
Obviously some of the gazillion Twittermusk stories contain SNI [1], and some (most) are just follow-ups [2] or repetitive angerwars, and we have to make a distinction between the two or HN's frontpage will consist of nothing but.
With user flags and the flamewar detector also downranking stories, it's possible for this strategy to get overapplied, in which case a MOT ends up getting insufficient oxygen. That's not good for HN either! It isn't because of sinister plutocracy or anything like that—it's a failure mode of the strategy I just described. User pushback is helpful!
I really appreciate that, considering that the two of us have been arguing (nicely!) about these things since long before I was dang. Thank you as well!
Dang, what is the deal with accounts being unfairly blocked from submitting links? And can mods apply this punishment arbitrarily?
Some accounts are allowed to submit links frequently, even a few minutes between submissions, while other accounts are being blocked from submitting and can only do so once every few or 24 hours. "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." Is this some type of new punitive action?
It also looks very unfair, when applied to accounts that are clearly not spammers (and maybe submit a few times in a day or week) or appears as a punitive action because of some difference of opinion with a mod.
We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars, as your account did recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33578462. Rate limits apply to all posting (i.e. both submissions and comments).
We're happy to remove the rate limit when we believe that an account is going to use HN as intended in the future. However, you just broke the site guidelines badly a few minutes ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33686024. Posting like that will get you banned here! — regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are — so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make sure not to post like that in the future.
Once you've built up a track record of not breaking the site guidelines, you'd be welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll take a look and hopefully remove the rate limit.
I see. Have to avoid the low quality comments and involvement in flamewars. The original comment was removed as well, in addition to the ones after and before the one linked. Understood.
It is a little strange that I have seen almost no Twitter stories on the front page in the last week. Has dang or anyone talked about why that might be? Is it getting caught in the flamewar algorithm? Are they treating this as one big story so any individual article gets removed as a repost?
Paul Graham and some of the YC partners have been surprisingly defensive of Musk's actions.
It's been massively disappointing to watch since Musk's behaviour has been abhorrent and has resulted in a lot of unnecessary hurt and despair for innocent employees. The same employees who may end up running future startups.
At first I thought paulg must have posted that weeks ago, but no, it's from yesterday. I wouldn't expect such a vote of confidence on Musk after all the data points we've received since he took over the company.
I'm not even sure what paulg's point is. Are people actually claiming they'd do a better job than Musk, or are they simply commenting on the missteps and bizarre behavior. You don't need to have run a successful tech company to know that spending your time as a CEO antagonizing your employees on social media, and then threatening your remaining employees with an ultimatum is not a good idea.
Sheesh. First of all, we already know that because people have already died due to Tesla software not working right.
And second of all, he thinks Twitter can’t lead to deaths? Let’s say the Iranian government was given unfettered access to DMs and metadata for all Iranian citizens with an account. Not hard to imagine scenarios that end in death.
> It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX.
Then the next tweet says
> In both those companies, people die if the software doesn't work right. Do you really think he's not up to managing a social network?
Well we know that after an ultimatum, enough employees quit that Musk is now asking some of them to come back. The number of employees leaving is also so high, that they're shutting down access to offices. There's also been reports of features like 2FA not working anymore after the first round of layoffs.
Not exactly the results I'd expect from someone who really knows how to run a company.
If one of Musk's middle managers had messed up this badly, Musk would have fired them already. But Elon deserves the continued benefit of the doubt for some reason.
All that you've mentioned may or may not matter eventually but it's not any sort of evidence of how Twitter did. The only things that matter are revenue, expenses, and growth. This tweet was made two days ago and nothing has happened since to provide any sort of evidence of how these actually important factors will unfold. To say that this tweet has "aged badly" is just nonsense.
when you spend your whole life acting like a genius because you made a bunch of money, then a richer guy shows how incorrect that is, you are going to squirm.
Half this comment section is people going "Nonono elon couldn't be dumb, there must be some angle to this". It's the american way to call a rich person smart and a smart person a threat.
> Paul Graham and some of the YC partners have been surprisingly defensive of Musk's actions.
Thing is, I agree that Twitter needed to be shaken up. But, Musk has made the wrong choices every step of the way. It's like he's giving a masterclass on how to be a terrible leader. It's amazing the miscalculations Musk has made. First, his longest tenure, most experience employees likely just got a huge payday on their stock/options - so of course they will peace out. Second, his antics are driving up the price of hiring new employees. Third, Musk still had a lot of goodwill before taking ownership that he's now squandered. I could go on...
The only thing I can think is he looked hard at the financials and the debt load he saddled the company with and panicked.
they are heavily moderating it. I only saw a couple of front page stories last week, and these events have been headline news internationally.
i hope the reason is because of the risk of flamewars, rather than YC leadership's desire to protect the reputation of someone who is hagified in SV circles and currently crashing and burning very publicly.
I agree with you all that some of these Twitter/Musk deserve HN threads (though many don't). That said, it's a feature-not-a-bug that stories making "headline news internationally" don't automatically show up on HN.
It would surely be the flame war algorithm. Throwing some numbers out there, would this be too exaggerated? There have been 30 stories this past fortnight here with over 700 comments, mostly repeating the same love/hate musk battleground playing out across every other website. I think it’s a very interesting topic that’s unfolding but if dang wants to limit the frenzy from consuming here as well I certainly understand.
Hard disagree. I think the best discussions can be had with chaotic circumstances, because they provide a new surface for thought. A very small percentage of the comments in these threads are appropriate for HN [1]. These comment sections look like they're straight from reddit.
> Has dang or anyone talked about why that might be?
I’ve personally been visiting new and flagging all Twitter/mastodon posts I see (i started doing this after getting sick of all the Twitter/mastodon posts hitting the front page).
I don’t want the front page to be all Twitter all the time, and most of the posts boil down to speculation and gossip and the ones that don’t, usually don’t offer anything meaningfully new and interesting.
I'm with you. I've seen some fairly low quality discussions on HN, many of which fixate on Musk. The Twitter situation is magnifying it to stupefying dimensions.
Are the goings on at Twitter relevant to "the industry"? Sure. But, the inability to have serious discussion about it speaks poorly of the those that populate that industry.
Somewhere between the 10,000th iteration of "see how billionaires are evil?", "see how Musk is a genius?", "see how Musk behaves badly?", and "Look at what's Musk accomplished?" nothing new is said. Anything novel or serious that does manage to pop-up gets drowned out in the sea of noise.
I join you in downvoting all of these. There are good discussions on HN, but these discussions are them.
In principle, sure, but this submission and all the others I've seen is clearly in the "speculation and gossip" bucket. The only non-speculative information here, that Twitter offices are closed tomorrow, is moderately interesting at best and we can see upthread that nobody's really interested in talking about it except to feed tangential speculation.
You're right, and the people complaining are also right because the story does deserve oxygen—just not all the oxygen. It's our job to balance this so it gets some oxygen but not all the oxygen.
The system tends not to be able to do this without human intervention—either the flags win (in which case the story gets smothered) or the upvotes win (in which case HN becomes Twittermusk News with a side dish of SBFTX). Human intervention is needed to keep the teeter-totter from teetering one way or tottering the other*.
We're super open to feedback. If you (or anyone) want to influence the balance, you should make your case to hn@ycombinator.com. That's the only reliable message queue.
Normally the penality on Twitter links is such that a good number of upvotes can still rescue it; now, it seems that penality has changed and there's a very strong penalty, which I strongly disagree with given the industry impact of what's been happening at Twitter.
I agree that it's wrong to penalize these topics. I don't normally get caught up in the drama of the day, but this trainwreck has really gotten my attention. Whatever the outcome, these events are going to have a major effect on our industry and the broader economy. The reckless absurdity of it all makes it even more newsworthy; major developments have been happening almost daily.
It doesn't hurt that this episode has brought some friends around to agreeing with my dismal view of Elon :)
It probably IS expensive to host because it’s written in a language no one uses without an optimizing compiler, and apprently most of the “db” is flatfiles on disk, some of which get read on every request.
Computers are fast. This isn't a particularly demanding workload; pages for users that aren't logged in are cached, and there probably aren't a ton of people logged in.
Last time I looked, Let's Encrypt had one big beefy Postgres database to issue pretty much every single TLS certificate on the Internet. Computers are fast.
Now you’re getting somewhere. At this point HN has hundreds of undocumented features and isn’t the technical cakewalk you think but sure, factor out the tech part. Just do the math on moderation costs vs. revenue generated by text-only ads with zero visual distinction.
Moderation as good as HN would require at least 3 costly staffers, fully loaded cost something like $30K-$250K each, fully loaded depending on where they live.
If doing HN were easy there would be a dozen awesome competitors.
You are wrong on so many levels. HN IS the ad. The whole point of HN is to push VC narratives and "Greed is good" style things onto nerds and less-nerdy but more business hungry folks. It's not meant to generate any revenue at all, it's a marketing funnel.
Moderation is pretty much JUST dang.
HN DOES have competitors, lobste.rs is pretty much directly competing, and more importantly, this very concept of "simple board to post links and comment" was borrowed to build freaking REDDIT
I know it might be hard to believe, but I assure you it's not the point of HN to push "VC narratives" or "greed is good". The strategy is much simpler and has a bunch of nice properties, one being that it works even better if you tell people what it is. It's simply to keep the community interested and happy. That's not easy, but it's the way to maximize HN's value—even if you look at it in the most self-interested way from YC's point of view.
dang has done a phenomenal job at moderating this site, and I trust his judgement. It is heavily moderated, and that's a good thing to keep it focused. Too much twitter drama would be lame. But this feels like an important moment.
I generally agree, but I also think that a certain subset of political beliefs get upvoted here that creates a real echo chamber, and that there's this idea of a "middle path" rationality that is assumed, but doesn't actually exist. It's a class of problem I think could be classified as a "I don't have an accent" problem. I wrote to dang directly about this, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30252817
I think there's probably a certain class of articles, critical of paulg and hn and the hn community's "accent" that get flagged and downvoted here, by people and moderators. And, a certain class of articles that always get uncritically upvoted.
One interesting thing I heard recently was this idea that even in communities of the most rusted on free speech absolutists, there's still a recognition that spam and flooding are not acceptable - and the question is, why?
It's totally possible to believe that unrestricted free speech is the best policy and to also not implement that policy.
> there's still a recognition that spam and flooding are not acceptable - and the question is, why?
Flooding and spamming are hated by everyone and are otherwise unimportant, there's no controversy about them. Generally free speech maximalism is about allowing all controversial speech for various reasons which tend to include the importance of dissenting voices.
>...Flooding and spamming are hated by everyone and are otherwise unimportant,
Free Speech absolutist don't put any concern the listener may have on the content, but the fact that the speaker is being prevented from distributing their message. Not to mention, one of the points cited by free speech absolutists is "who determines facts/truth/value" and who determines the entity who gets to do that. That means you can't make a judgement value about the spam being spam and have to treat it as something SOMEONE somewhere might desire.
It's not that simple. A lot of censorship happens under the guise of "removing spam". For example, dang regularly censors HN comments promoting viewpoints he doesn't like by claiming that they are "flamebait" or similar, which is to say, if enough people dislike something then it is spam.
Doing it right requires the intellectual honesty to draw a line between these two comments: "lol hitler did nothing wrong gas the **s! 1488 woo!" and "Hitler did nothing but implement some social control policies which would be widely accepted in today's society, if presented differently."
I obviously don't agree with either sentence. But the second one should be permitted and vouched against downvotes while the first can be deleted without a second thought. Honesty required.
HN is definitely not a free speech zone. It doesn't need to be, and I think they let a lot of legitimate discussions take place, but in no way shape or form is this a free speech discussion forum, it's a business (a I personally think a decently run one, as for moderation is very difficult).
I don't think anyone would consider hiding information about one of the largest and most well known tech platforms in the world to be an example of beneficial bias.
I don't intend to be mean, but I think your statement is trivially disprovable:
$4.8B annual revenue, even if every advertiser spent $1M annually, that's 4,800 advertisers who all require inside reps. If each rep can handle 100 clients (unlikely; that's less than 1 hour / month attention), they would need 480 inside reps alone just to keep ad agencies happy.
Yes, good catch! Add in maybe 20% for management and it's still a manageable amount of headcount. The $1M/advertiser does a lot of the lifting here - so I looked into it a little more. In 2016, Twitter had 130k advertisers[0], some can self-serve but many need inside sales reps.
Fermi estimates are crude, but the point is there are many non-engineering functions that are absolutely critical. Many HN folks seem to think like Elon, that these roles are unnecessary. I disagree.
Who the heck willing to drop millions without having access to sales rep at all? Even Google, known as the king of self-service, still has account managers for large ads, workspace and gcp customers.
It was 1,000 people and 50% fewer users -- and notably, no revenue. If you think they're going to be able to keep any substantial portion of that $4.5b in revenue by telling advertisers to self serve...
I don't think you ever worked with advertiser directly at that scale, I worked in a company that did on a smaller scale and it was hell on earth, no way to automate that, we had 10 people just for them and they were overworked
Both of your statements are just absurdly wrong that they're not even worth engaging with.
12 years ago we didn't have stuff like GDPR or CCPA or any number of data compliance laws that require a full team around to prevent getting fined into oblivion.
lets remember that tesla was a mess at its inception and that musk also kind of had this bossy behavior that made many people reluctant to join its vision. those who joined him became millionaires if not more and contributed to create the greatest automobile company in recent history. and that was after building paypal.
the press and many people in those comments are making a mistake thinking he is a fool and behaved in a stupid way. that is not donald trump. he doesn’t care about people that don’t buy into its vision and he doesnt care if twitter sinks to lower lows in the following years.
for musk, the last years of twitter are a disgusting and corrupt way to deal with democracy and the way business was handled at twitter was totally corrupt. Wether you agree with the democrat agenda or no is a thing. that you want to push your cult into the minds of everyone on twitter while censoring alternative ideas is the problem and does not align with the vision of what a medium of communication should be in a free world. YOU ARE NOT in the side of good because you repeat the woke things that pelosi and its cult are repeating. and your oponents are not NAZIS. mankind is much bigger than your small conflicts and politics and the vision musk has for twitter is bigger than the beliefs of a few corrupt politicians and your voice should not be more important than the one of another human being.
In five years I am pretty sure many of the people that are commenting here will put a lot of money into twitter stock when musk will make it public agaibn.
I always scroll to the bottom of the HN comments to see the non-woke take. I was not disappointed!
Elon is about the most capable entrepreneur of the 21st century. He could start from scratch and have something more awesome and profitable than Twitter in a few years. He had an extreme culture problem though it seems. The company had been taken over by ideologues and was losing 4 million a day.
He had to get rid of everyone who wasn't aligned with his new vision. He had to depoliticize the company which meant firing most of the staff. He'll probably have to move it to Texas or make it fully remote if he wants to finish depoliticizing it.
What does depoliticizing even mean? It making the company about maximizing profit, not transforming society based on the political value of its actions.
I'm a little bit confounded that Twitter's current culture is such that a large number of people contemplate sabotage as an appropriate response to changing employment conditions. I mean, maybe the company culture really is broken.
Who said they are contemplating it? They simply took their boss’ offer up, and it is the boss who is so paranoid about the reaction to his actions that is locking up the place. Musk and Musk alone caused this and is now getting people like you to somehow blame it on the employees.
Everyone who didn’t click the button has probably already moved on with life, unlike Musk, who I bet tries to back out of the promise of three months of severance.
I haven't seen any reason to suspect or expect sabotage per se, where are you getting that? And if you did want to sabotage it, what could you do that would be more effective than what musk himself is currently doing, short of straight up shutting it down?
> maybe the company culture really is broken.
Well it certainly is now!
I could maybe see an internal group trying to seize it. It is a very significant connector of people, I can imagine how you could believe in it passionately as a product/movement/force in the world. I don't, but it's not a big stretch. And if you did, I think also that from that perspective musk clearly does not care about it in that capacity, and has done great damage to its power and potential. The pieces are definitely there so that a "true believer" could justify a takeover.
Twitter isn't going anywhere because of two critical facts: a) attention whores and rage/doom scroll addicts b) Those people can easily find each other and talk to each other.
Mastodon and Activitypub decentralize which means it is a lot harder to proverbialy whore yourself to the attention of the masses and and those attention whores (politicians, journalists,etc... not just celebrities and influencers) can't have the same reach with them or with truth social and other copycats of twitter.
Mastodon should have let server operators flag other servers but not refuse federation with them, letting users decide if they want to avoid content from trash servers but of course user moderarion by server operators is fine. Also, like many ideology-first solutions, it catered to small disconnected communities. It should have created corporation separate from the main project that hosts a public mastodon server that directly competes with other social media (and ffs, it's 2022, no more email for anything!).
On that note, Matrix can replace twitter and a lot more if they weren't chasing seemingly random features. Not just twitter but email also can be replaced by matrix, the api amd federates architecture allows for it.
If I was Kelon (Karen elon), I would compete with tiktok, timing is great with all the talks of banning it. They mercilessly murdered Vine back in the day as they did Periscope. Those are the types of features where you can charge content creators for content types and for advertising in people's timelines. They made those separate products instead of part of the regular twitter experience. Also, be less crass about it and charge for award tokens like reddit instead of upfront cash and high priced awards make it to the top of the reply chain.
I don't blog so let me know what you all think lol.
> On that note, Matrix can replace twitter and a lot more if they weren't chasing seemingly random features. Not just twitter but email also can be replaced by matrix, the api amd federates architecture allows for it.
What random features? https://matrix.org/blog/2022/08/15/the-matrix-summer-special... is what we’re working on currently. Pretty sure the Matrix community would accuse us of losing focus if we were investing tine in cloning twitter or email over Matrix at this stage…
The core matrix team is fine except for stuff like thirdroom. But even then new features are driven by trying to compete with slack,zoom and signal all at once. It's the Vector/Element side of things I am talking about, the client/products not the core protocol.
