A lot of the tweets that are quoted in the article have been removed. For example, Twitter employee Cristina Angeli is mentioned in the story for having tweeted an image of "staff members... flooding an internal Slack channel with blue heart emojis as they wait to learn their fate tomorrow", but that tweet is deleted on twitter itself because "This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules."
This is ironic if you consider all the complaining that Musk does in the public sphere about "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment only applies to government censorship, but Musk likes to pretend not to), but it's also significant because -
Smart journalists are going to stop relying on Twitter's API now. News and blog sites love to render Twitter URLs as a preview of the tweet; but if Twitter under Musk is going to start removing tweets that go against its corporate interests of the hour (is it against Twitter policy to post screenshots of any corporate Slack channel, or only Twitter's own?), then people had better take screenshots of the tweets they want to quote, just in case.
I think there's a much simpler and less juicy angle here: someone posted a screenshot of an internal communication, and it got removed. It's not surprising or controversial that Twitter would try to contain a leak of its own internal comms (a screenshot of their slack). This isn't "Twitter took down a disparaging post about Twitter", it's that they tried to stop the sharing of internal data.
That being said, I don't disagree with the sentiment here in the sibling comments, this just isn't the steelman you're looking for.
Best of luck to all remaining and recently parted Twitter folk.
The speech is legal, it just might break a contract between two parities in the US. It's a far cry from a discussion around what kind of speech is acceptable in a public square.
Twitter is using a privileged position to protect it's own IP. It's fine for a company to do, but just doesn't really sit with "we're just running a public square for the good of the world"
But by this logic we'd have to argue that Wikileaks is a public square. Real public squares have police, and those police have a mandate by the people to enforce contract law and private property law.
This is why hate speech I think is a much more controversial topic than copyright.
Continuing that, i think that normally the ball would get rolling with some kind of civil suit. The police aren't judge and jury on contract law just doing blanket enforcement of that on their own. The police might have to enforce a court order sometime later.
This is, to me, more like your neighbor ripping down your derogatory sign about them because he doesn't like what it says, and the neighbor happens to also be your boss and landlord.
> It's not surprising or controversial, but it's in direct opposition to the idea that Twitter should allow all legal speech.
The employees probably sign NDAs. It's only a civil suit, but I think that would still fall outside the realm of what he's been preaching. Note, I'm not taking his side or anyone else's.
> It's not surprising or controversial, but it's in direct opposition to the idea that Twitter should allow all legal speech.
The world is full of hypocrisy and Elon has his share. But I don't really care if the guy is a hypocrite; I'd be more interested in discussing if the move is right. If it violated internal company policy, or revealed internal identities or anything of that sort, then maybe it was the right move?
I'm just glad I don't have to make these decisions.
I think it violates private information policy. The last thing I want is my work name in a screenshot from an internal conversation posted on Twitter, reported by the news like I am a dissenter after getting terminated. I would want to be left completely alone.
Extreme cases i.e. leaked passwords are under hacked materials policy.
Also possible the user(s) deleted some themselves in order to not violate terms and thus retain their severance ---which typically hinge on such things.
Would NYT publish scathing remarks about itself, or publish leaked internal data on itself? If not, I don't think such a thing should be expected of twitter either.
The NYTimes has investigated itself from time to time and publishes remarks that reflect poorly on themselves. Last example I can remember is the Caliphate podcast scandal
Yea doesn't the NYTimes have a section pretty much devoted to retractions? I'll see them in their morning news letter and I think it's pretty common at most news organizations with integrity to understand that sometimes they'll get things wrong like we all do, and just be candid about it and post retractions where necessary.
The BBC certainly broadcasts criticism of the BBC from time to time. Here’s one of the more trivial examples (easier to bring to mind because it’s amusing): https://youtu.be/MBWfCV4PjyU
Crude, and hilarious to watch those two keep straight faces.
Have I Got New For You has very regular criticism of the BBC too, slightly higher brow but entertaining.
But is it what you're calling "legal" speech to disclose confidential info? If so, is it not just like they issued themselves a takedown notice and immediately executed on it?
IANAL but restrictions on confidential information only apply to government classification of information. Private classification isn’t a “real” thing, it’s just a breach of a private contract.
If you’re a “free speech platform”, who are you to adjudicate whether a leak of corporate information is malicious vs a brave whistleblower?
This is why we have a court system. Twitter needs to decide what they are actually trying to accomplish with their direction, because right now it appears that this was all about changing the censors, not removing them.
I am also not a lawyer, but it seems like there is a large gray area when it comes to theft of trade secrets.
For example, Anthony Levandowski was sentenced to 18 months in prison for copying a confidential spreadsheet containing Waymo status updates (out of the charges against him, that's the only one he pleaded guilty to - the rest were dropped).
Is your point that it doesn't matter if those "pictures of an internal slack channel" actually contain trade secrets of if they show some people posting blue hearts to cheer up their coworkers? IANAL but I think it does matter what those pictures contain.
I was responding to the parent's statement that "restrictions on confidential information only apply to government classification of information. Private classification isn’t a 'real' thing, it’s just a breach of a private contract."
This is not the case - you can be convicted of a felony and go to jail for taking a private company's confidential information. Nowhere did I call layoffs a trade secret.
All those employees signed NDAs that said they would not disclose private company communications… this is way different than censoring a user who is under no such agreement.
The difference is that Twitter does not enforce those agreements as quickly for any company that's not Twitter.
Hence what people are complaining about: one set of rules for Twitter (the company) making requests of Twitter (the platform) and another set of rules for everyone else.
And really, it's the own-goalness of this that's likely irking everyone. Musk wants to get the high ground of a public space... and then he/someone at Twitter immediately burns that narrative on something trivial that doesn't even matter.
The sheer stupidity of taking it down makes me think it's probably internal HR.
But that's because Twitter has no capabilities to enforce them at the same speed for other companies. If processing speed depends on proximity to their legal department, of course Twitter will be able to verify their own agreements faster. That's just physics, not necessarily double standards.
It's like complaining that Amazon ships faster to areas that are close to Amazon warehouses. Well duh.
That's the HFT/exchange problem in a nutshell -- if you want to claim an equitable platform, then you have to artificially slow some requests to what you can guarantee for all.
> Twitter (the company) making requests of Twitter (the platform)
Is this an actual distinction or just being thorough for specificity? I know some companies are like Mozilla having the browser and the foundation, but just not familiar with Twitter.
But does Twitter have a signed copy of all those agreements? No. How could they?
Either they comply without hesitation to all takedown requests, or they don't take anything down unless ordered by a court. Doing something in the middle injects a level of moderation that goes against their "free speech" principles.
But Elon Musk didn’t own the company when they signed those NDAs. He’s a “free speech absolutist”. Why would he allow such abominations to be enforced?
It's not about censorship per se.
There will always been censorship. Removing spam is censorship, removing copyrighted material is censorship.
There's a difference between removing a politically neutral piece content which violates some arbitrary rules and censoring political news which benefit a certain party.
This isn't how it works. If a website is hosting content that infringes on some NDA, then you are supposed to sue the website (and not the person who posted it to the website -- who are often anonymous and can't be directly sued).
So Twitter would need to sue itself to demand that it take down the content. And the judge would reject the suit and scold Twitter for wasting the courts time, and tell Twitter that if it wants something removed from its own website then it should just remove it.
I don't believe that's true. For copyrighted work, you can issue a takedown notice to the website - but copyright is federal law. NDAs are just private contracts. If you could sue someone for hosting/posting NDA content, then any leaks or whistleblower content could be hidden from the public just by suing the all the news websites.
Generally I think you can only sue the person who violated the NDA, not anyone further down the chain who posted the material. The same is even true for classified info in most cases - the NY Times won a famous Supreme Court cases about that over publishing the Pentagon Papers in the Vietnam era. Same principle that protected publishing the Snowden leaks, etc.
> If a website is hosting content that infringes on some NDA, then you are supposed to sue the website
> So Twitter would need to sue itself to demand that it take down the content.
is this how it actually works, or is it make a request to the website and sue if request is deemed unduly denied? if the latter, then some Twitter HR/lawyer person can make a request to a Twitter moderation person and the request would be immediately approved. At that point, there's no "difference" in the procedures for internal/external moderation requests.
> This isn't how it works. If a website is hosting content that infringes on some NDA, then you are supposed to sue the website (and not the person who posted it to the website -- who are often anonymous and can't be directly sued).
That's nonsense, because under that interpretation of the law no news agency could ever report anything with anonymous sources, or people "familiar with the situation", because under your definition they are now violating an agreement about which they know nothing.
You could sue the website, but it wouldn't go very far, because website operators are not liable for user uploaded content because of Section 230 of the CDA.
> But is it what you're calling "legal" speech to disclose confidential info? If so, is it not just like they issued themselves a takedown notice and immediately executed on it?
I think there are a lot of things that are legal that may cause civil penalties. E.g. there's no law banning the dissemination of screenshots of Twitter's internal Slack (so the screenshot is legal speech), but Twitter may have grounds to sue the leaker for breach of a private contract.
By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law.
I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.
If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect.
Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.
"""
I don't think it's reasonable to interpret this as referring to any speech which constitutes a civil wrong. There is simply no way for a third party to have the slightest clue based on the content of a tweet whether that tweet causes someone to suffer a loss, or constitutes a breach of contract,
Did the screenshot actually expose any confidential information though? Musk seemed fine with leaking confidential information when Mudge was doing it, but now he is suddenly concerned about it?
It's a potential antitrust violation to serve themselves better than other users of the platform.
This is what Google and Apple get in trouble for all the time.
Corporate communication is corporate property and fully accessible as it pertains to investigations of corporate wrong-doing. You can be certain Twitter's new legal team is looking at everything. The issue is whether the persons in question were communicating in the capacity of working for Twitter. It's very clear that they were, and it wouldn't be at all surprising if the clown show at Twitter did all manner of unethical things in conflicting with Musk.
> Corporate communication is corporate property and fully accessible as it pertains to investigations of corporate wrong-doing.
I guess it depends on your definition of corporate wrong-doing. If Elon just looked for all posts that include his name and he's firing everyone who was critical of him, that might stretch the definition for most people. That could even cross over into creepy big-brother like oversight and might dissuade people from working at Elon led companies (or maybe attracts people who want him searching their private messages for references to him).
Agree re: the less sinister explanation. I think only this particular tweet has been removed and the other tweets referred in the article are still up.
I think the question is - did the twitter employee delete their own tweet, regardless of their reasoning, or was the tweet deleted in the backend by a different twitter employee?
Any company can request that Twitter take down screenshots of their own internal communications. Both before and after Elon, I imagine Twitter would comply if the request went through the legal channels (i.e. lawyers sending letters).
I can't remember the details now, but I remember a couple years back the New York Times published a big exposé on a screwup in the Middle East perpetuated by... The New York Times. My understanding is that this type of thing isn't even so uncommon.
It's much easier to have a rule that says "no public posting of internal communications" than "make a judgement call about whether an internal communication is vital or not". And with an upheaval going on at Twitter at the moment, nobody has the time to do the latter.
It seems far more likely removing this tweet was a response to the publicity it was getting, and was an effort to keep such dissent from being aired publicly (and thus a contradiction with Musk's stated principles and goals for this takeover), than that it was an ordinary moderation process that just happened to produce this outcome. The disruption you cite makes it far less likely that this is by the book, not more.
What makes that explanation more likely than the other? Imagine there was no optics problem here, and it was just a highly publicized tweet of some internal comms with no PR consequences, it would still obviously need to be removed, right?
That's not obvious to me, no. What I'd imagine is something like this being escalated, and that there would be reasonable cases to be made either way; that all internal information should be removed on principle, and that removing this tweet would harm the company without improving it's security posture. Twitter has historically been pretty reluctant to remove tweets, so I wouldn't be surprised if, under normal circumstances, they ended up keeping it up. But I wouldn't be surprised the other way either.
But closing our eyes to the optics of the situation would be a mistake. These are not normal circumstances by a long shot. Given the turmoil Twitter is going through and the heavy handed approach the new management is employing, it seems likely to me that very little work is being done through the normal channels (who's to say there's even someone on the other side of that channel?), while much is being done by direct instruction from the new management.
Isn't it more likely that organizational inertia is the culprit? Elon doesn't have the capability to change the day-to-day activities of 7,500 people following established policies and procedures in the amount of time that he's had the authority to do so.
There are some coarse-grained things that he can do, like fire the the top execs. The idea that he can strategize and effect change at the fine-grained level of emergent phenomena like a picture of an internal comms channel is bonkers, conspiracy theory stuff. He's got to lay off half the company to begin to even get some kind of handle on all of the machinations going on outside of his team's review.
I'm not suggesting he orchestrated a conspiracy, or even personally ordered that this tweet be removed, who knows, it's more likely someone else on his team, but the new management sure does seem to be able to change the day to day activities, given that they've laid many people off and eliminated the entire data science team. Why wouldn't they be able to say, remove this specific tweet, or perhaps, investigate this tweet for violations of our policy? That's not a conspiracy, that's what a company is; management is able to give instructions to the people who carry out the work.
On cursory inspection I'm not finding the articles I saw on HN about this, so I'm assuming you're right. My bad; thank you for calling it out. I'm barely over the time to edit my post, or I would remove that part.
> The idea that he can strategize and effect change at the fine-grained level of emergent phenomena like a picture of an internal comms channel is bonkers, conspiracy theory stuff.
You're right, but Elon himself is pushing this narrative. Remember when he pretended he was going to personally review the code of a bunch of Twitter engineers? There's also the Twitter blue pricing exchange and a number of other topics he's trying to appear deeply involved in the details for.
But it's one thing to have that rule and punish people that leak and another to delete the leaks from your platform. Particularly if you profess to be pro-freedom of speech.
Are you suggesting that Twitter will similarly remove leaks of other companies' confidential information? Or is this just a special case where they will be free speech absolutists for everyone else but carefully curate what people are allowed to say about Twitter?
Twitter has a responsibility to its shareholders to protect its information. Why on earth are people jumping to the conclusion they would take on any similar responsibility for another company??
Because not doing so would fly completely in the face of everything Elon claimed he wanted Twitter to stand for. They would be putting their finger on the scale to censor speech critical of Twitter, and Twitter only. (Or maybe other favored groups and politicians too, who knows? Starting off like this on day 1 kills any trust in neutral moderation immediately).
Edit: that said, I'm not sure it's been confirmed yet whether the employee just deleted the tweet themself - which would be a very different story.
> They would be putting their finger on the scale to censor speech critical of Twitter
That's an entirely different issue. The issue at hand here is Twitter removing Twitter internal confidential material that Twitter employees agreed to not publish as a condition of employment.
Twitter is a beast. I think it would be a mistake to evaluate what it "stands for" based on some edge case of who/what/why behind a single tweet. Consider the fact that most execs at the top of this thing we call capitalism, are routinely caught in ethical dilemmas. Even the individuals you have decided are on your "side" morally, are forced to occasionally compromise their ethics in the short term, to achieve a longer term goal that is far more complex than people are giving credit here when they use terms like free speech so casually.
It makes sense to punish or reprimand someone internally for leaking confidential information. Something like a firing could be appropriate.
But banning someone or their Tweets on Twitter for posting an internal corporate communication is wrong (at least, it's not the Twitter I want to see). That's using one's privileged position as steward of a public platform to enforce internal rules in an extraordinary way. If how Twitter moderates users on its platform is a free speech issue (I believe it is), this is just as much of one.
Of course it is. The contract is merely an agreement that you won't exercise your right. It's actionable in a civil court obviously. That however says nothing about your right to publish or that the content must be removed just that changing your mind might have repercussions.
Are the Twitter terms of use different for employees than they are for other users?
Cause if they use the service under a personal agreement with Twitter that is separate from their employment, then removing the Tweet isn't really so actionable under their employment agreement.
I mean, I guess it probably isn't separate, but I'm also not sure why people are so eager to pat Twitter on the back for using their position to control the public communications of employees/former employees.
I don't believe this is always true. For instance, whistleblower cases, or NDAs that can be broken by supeona.
Considering there is already some legal questions being raised about the firings - and I'm not arguing in favor of the merits of those cases - there is some possible scenario where an internal leak may be justified.
If you're really a free speech absolutist then this is a violation of that principle (not of a law, but of a principle).
Workers should be able to freely talk about their condition with other workers, both internally and externally to the company. And as an absolutist, then the ability of individuals to freely speak without any chilling effects must take precedence over the companies concerns. The employees are effectively being "cancelled" and much more effectively than the people who most complain about that actually have their ability to speak being impaired.
There is no expedience exception for free speech. If they want to claim to value free speech, they need to actually do so, and that includes making that kind of judgement call.
the fact there's an internal communication system and what stack it's built on, for starters. I'd imagine employees were required to agree not to disclose that sort of info but I could be mistaken.
> This is ironic if you consider all the complaining that Musk does in the public sphere about "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment only applies to government censorship, but Musk likes to pretend not to)
It’s not ironic or remotely unexpected if you’ve taken notice of any of his actual actions involving freedom of speech.
It's starting to feel like Musk is playing this political game to me.
Pretending he is championing the little guy, that he/twitter/everyone is somehow being repressed and they/he is fighting against it. His recent tweet on how 'activists' are the cause of twitters recent revenue drop for example.
Even with the blue check marks, he is framing it as it being open to all and the little guy taking the power back, all you have to do is pay him $8 a month for it. Viva la revolution indeed!
It feels like social engineering to me and the same game that has been played very successfully in division politics.
Or maybe he is just a dumb guy who believes his own bullshit but ultimately doesn't know what he is doing. How much do we have to hear about the chaos behind the scenes at his companies before people start to realize this whole thing possibly isn't a well orchestrated plan?
Distinction without a difference in this case. When you are as rich and powerful as Elon Musk, you usually get away with your own stupidity and it will ultimately turn to your benefits no matter what. The law of the accumulation of wealth also applies to social capital.
I think it's healthy to calibrate one's own beliefs to reality. So maybe you're right and there is no difference in outcome.
But strictly for my own mental model, I think it is far more accurate to model this as "super rich guy makes shit up on the spot and has no master plan" rather than "this is part of a massively complex plot that relies on second- and third-order psychological effects planned years in advance."
It is really human to over value intentions at the cost of the outcome. Even our legal system does this to a pretty large extent. However when looking and trying to grasp the amazing amount of share stupidity the rich folks do, we have to ask: „how does this much stupidity yield so high rewards?“
IMO it is way more damning to us as a society that people can be this stupid and still become so insanely rich, then if someone had an evil masterplan to manipulate others into making them more and more.
But at the end of the day, this concern is dwarfed by the fact that in either case we let them get away with it and ultimately reward them with insane wealth. This is the true damning of our society that these people are given all this wealth and power in the first place, and after the fact, honestly they can do whatever they like. And what they do isn’t pretty at all.
It is because you should separate the style of execution from the target effect: Musk sounds like a bumbling idiot but... he s halving payroll... it's gonna reduce the load tremendously for a while and if he stops innovating, swallow a loss compensated by paying customers for a while, it might end up surviving enough to provide him some returns.
The difference between me, clever socially but idiot as an entrepreneur, and Musk, the definition of asshole but with good instincts, is enough I suppose ?
> But strictly for my own mental model, I think it is far more accurate to model this as "super rich guy makes shit up on the spot and has no master plan" rather than "this is part of a massively complex plot that relies on second- and third-order psychological effects planned years in advance."
B.b.but a bunch of his PR guys convinced a lot of Redditors that he's the real-life Tony Stark who's saving humanity as we speak. What have you done? How could the PR not by true, if so many people repeat it?
> When you are as rich and powerful as Elon Musk, you usually get away with your own stupidity and it will ultimately turn to your benefits no matter what.
I'm yet to see how that idiotic "pedo guy" episode turns out to benefit Elon Musk.
How the accumulation of wealth works statistically is that when transacting with less wealthy players, you have a lot more to win and a lot less to loose, while the other player has everything to loose and—relative to you—hardly anything to win. Over time this results in gradual accumulation of wealth.
I see the accumulation of social capital no differently. This particular transaction might not have benefited him, he might even had lost some from it. But over time, other transactions more then made up for that mistake, and this one became irrelevant, which really is to his benefit.
All publicity is good publicity when you're in the game of monopolizing the world's attention market, c.f. the constant publicity stunts of figures like Trump and Kanye.
I have never in my life thought that Musk would champion the little guy. If anything, Musk will run the little guy over 5 times in the quest for interplanetary domination.
To champion the little guy has nothing to do with rhetoric, right? In my exprerience it's the uneducated masses that pretend to champion the little guy but don't understand that their actions have unintended consequences that often produce the opposite result. I would think people are starting to understand the inverse correlation between words and actions, at least where power politics are at play (not to mention specifically in corporate entities that make their dough by brainwashing)
It is quite common for some kinds of politics (you can deduce which ones) to create an enemy of the common people from thin air, and use it to justify your actions.
Elon is heavily dependent on politicians keeping taxes low for billionaires, and policy that pushes NASA and other government agencies to hire private companies.
Crony capitalism it’s called colloquially.
Marc Andreesen was tweeting a few months about the pressure from DC to curtail behavior that the politicians felt was undermining them.
Around the time Powell began raising rates, memes in finance changed to “save”, banks raised rates on savings accounts to get people to park cash they can leverage rather than get free cash from Powell they can leverage.
Pulling cash out of the economy means fewer lattes and avocado toasts; being a bit glib, but those are the workers most likely to be hurt long term.
So yeah it’s basically division politics. The only reason it works like this is because of memory this is how it works.
NPR reporter literally just said employers offering higher and higher wages is what’s creating inflation, and they want unemployment to go up to bring inflation down. Manufacturing consent by repeating “truth”.
Behavioral economics runs the country. Politicians prefer behaviors like fealty to politically correct traditions. They are protecting the net worth class based system that keeps them from growing potatoes and determines which families thrive or die.
I would say he (and other billionaires like Thiel) is immature in a very classical sense: he goes through the world like a child without appreciation for how difficult it was to create a society in which everybody could (say) engage in discourse safely; he sees some flaws in the system and thinks that because he is a special person and he saw what he thinks is a flaw he is entitled to pull it apart. But there is no methodical improvement being proposed. People like this are simply destroying the work of their forebears (of creating a stable pluralistic society) for personal benefit. It is not the behavior of responsible humans, much less leaders.
As just one example, not intended to be partisan: the elderly husband of the Speaker of the House was violently attacked and a sizable portion of the country either tacitly or openly endorses it. That is not a safe society. And it's very, very well-documented by now that social media in which violent / hate speech are not moderated are a key factor driving the increase in political violence and extremism. For people in positions of great power to ignore the complexity of what's happening to society, and to lean on populist (and reductive/misleading) arguments about censorship and freedom of speech for personal gain, comes across as either unintelligent or profoundly irresponsible.
Nancy, or Paul, Pelosi weren’t even engaged in any discourse on twitter with his attacker. It sounds like you’re saying in order for discourse to be safe, people with power over communication needs to regulate other people on our behalf? The big question is how do they decide? We do have some laws about direct threats, spam, fraud and negligence, but I’m not sure where your definition fits in. It seems like it is extremely difficult to get right and very easy to get wrong.
For Twitter users in other countries? Yes. Twitter had been the best of the social media companies (though still not perfect) at resisting subpoenas and other measures from the US government as well as authoritarian countries, but all the personnel involved in that have been fired.
Twitter's legal and human rights teams were more valuable than is commonly understood.
I don't know if this is necessarily true. There are plenty of people sitting in federal prison for criticizing Biden's legitimacy and his policies. I'd consider that torturous if I was in that situation.
And calling that “torture” is abusing language. The US did it in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay and it was a massive scandal because it’s against our values. Torture and executions happen routinely in some countries with no consequences or reporting.
A vast majority of protestors aren’t in jail. Entering the Capitol building and attacking police officers are two actions that caused many of the hundreds to be put in jail.
Bullshit. I highly doubt that 69-year-old Pamela Hemphill was attacking police officers. According to her court case, she was accused of “ demonstrating, parading or picketing in the U.S. Capitol building.” Or, in other words, criticizing the government.
Many of these people have been sitting in prison for two years without being charged with anything, and many of them who have been charged have only been charged with minor misdemeanors. Feel free to go look at ALL the cases, not just the handful cherry-picked by the Ministers of Propaganda.
Everything Musk does in the public sphere is a performance. He's putting on a show, and the show is always crafted according to whatever he thinks will sway the public in the direction he wants them to go.
This is a really tired take since it's not something that could possibly ever be known by you or anyone else not immediately close to Elon, and it's impossible for anyone else to refute it because they have the exact same lack of insight into whether Elon is putting on a performance every time he leaves the house.
Tesla was worth, at most, a few million dollars when Elon became their largest investor. They had no products. They had no sales. He turned a $2 million company into a $700 billion company, but he's not the founder because he wasn't in the paperwork for the first year of its existence in which very little happened? Ok.
Additionally, a settlement was reached to literally call himself a founder. At this point it's boring semantics of what "founder" means.
But go ahead and keep trying and failing to poke holes to push your unfounded narrative.
The same could be said of Ray Kroc and McDonald's, but it typically isn't because the McDonald brothers aren't the ones who made McDonald's ubiquitous on a global scale. Most of the time, Ray Kroc is considered the founder of McDonald's because he was the one to lead its global success.
Except in the case of Ray Kroc, he actually was the founder of the company that became McDonald’s. He didn’t pay the McDonald’s brothers for the rights to pretend he was the founder.
He bought the franchise for $2.7 million and paid the McDonald brothers a percentage of profits. I don't see a difference between Musk and Kroc in this regard. Without Musk, Tesla wouldn't be what it is today just like without Kroc the McDonald brothers' business would have remained regional and small.
The difference is precisely that Kroc is the founder of the company that is McDonalds while Musk is not the founder of Tesla.
It’s a fact that Musk turned Tesla into what it is today. It’s possible to get that point across without falsely claiming you’re the founder of the company. Words have meanings.
It's entirely valid to be allowed to judge other's behavior, and guess at their motives, especially the (former?) richest man in the world. Mental models of other people are a core part of being conscious.
There's a difference between an intelligent and meaningful observation of behavior to guess at motives and just outright calling someone a liar and manipulator without any real basis or evidence because you don't like them as a person.
I think Occam's razor applies here. In other words, it seems the more likely explanation is just that Musk is an egomaniacal rich guy. Imagining that Musk is playing 3D chess with the public psyche is overcomplicating things.
> "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment only applies to government censorship, but Musk likes to pretend not to)
Freedom of speech is not the first amendment and vice versa. Freedom of speech is an ideal that applies to all people and all spaces, public and private, while the First Amendment only applies in America and to the government.
People think they sound smart when they say freedom of speech only applies to government censorship, but they actually sound ignorant of the concept's millennia-long history pre-dating the discovery of America entirely.
The first amendment isn't even particularly strong protection - it only forbids Congress from restricting freedom of speech, but doesn't set out any specific rights, or preclude states from setting their own laws restricting rights.
E.g. the Portuguese constitution has much stronger guarantees. It explicitly recognises freedom of exprssion as a right, but it also explicitly recognises freedom of access to information as a right: you have a right to inform yourself, and the exercise of that right cannot be limited by any form of censorship.
It also specifically recognises a bunch more rights associated with media. Some rights protect journalists, such as the right to source confidentiality (which isn't even law in the US, let alone a constitutional right), and the right to elect representatives to their employers'editorial team. On the flipside, there's also rights protecting the public from media interference: regulators have the power (and responsibility) to prevent the consolidation of media ownership, and the media's ownership and sources of income must be made public.
> The first amendment isn't even particularly strong protection - it only forbids Congress from restricting freedom of speech, but doesn't set out any specific rights, or preclude states from setting their own laws restricting rights.
This has been true when 1st Amendment has been passed, but has not been true since SCOTUS ruled that 14th Amendment incorporates 1st Amendment for states. Today, states are just as bound by 1st Amendments as the federal government is.
> but it also explicitly recognises freedom of access to information as a right: you have a right to inform yourself, and the exercise of that right cannot be limited by any form of censorship.
That’s interesting, but what does it mean in practice? Can you give me an example of a situation where this right applied in Portugal? I want to know if this would actually protect us Americans from something that the government is currently not prohibited from doing.
> or preclude states from setting their own laws restricting rights.
1A on its own does not do this, but AIUI a subsequent amendment (I think one of the reconstruction amendments?) has been interpreted to apply the restrictions in the constitution to state governments as well.
The principle that the first amendment is based on goes beyond government censorship. If large numbers of people are afraid to express their opinions because they fear being cut off from essential services, that's troublesome to anyone who believes in the principle of free speech, regardless of whether the source of the censorship is the government, private entities, or some murky conjunction of both.
It's quite akin to opposing systematic racism from private businesses. You could argue that a private business should have the right to refuse service to anyone, for any reason, and it shouldn't concern any outside parties. But when these actions begin to interfere with the ability of large segments of the population to go grocery shopping, use the toilet, get a job, or get an education, it becomes a larger social issue that is deeply concerning to anyone who believes in the principles that underly a free society.
> You could argue that a private business should have the right to refuse service to anyone, for any reason, and it shouldn't concern any outside parties. But when these actions begin to interfere with the ability of large segments of the population to go grocery shopping, use the toilet, get a job, or get an education, it becomes a larger social issue that is deeply concerning to anyone who believes in the principles that underly a free society.
I disagree. Historically, the only time people were refusing service to anyone, the people being refused service were black. Hippies were sometimes discriminated against. We've come a long way since the 1960s, but there are more than a few politicians/people who want to drag us back into the 1950s.
In Colorado, such an act would be illegal. Which makes many people in today's polarized society extremely angry as they want to discriminate as much as possible.
Rule 20.4 (page 18 of the PDF):
> No person shall post or permit to be posted in any place of public accommodation any sign that states or implies the following:
> “WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE.”
> Such signage implies that management may rely upon unlawful discriminatory factors in determining access to a place of public accommodation and thus is prohibited
Every time this debate comes up, someone suggests that companies like Twitter are in violation of the first amendment when they remove a user's post. To me they often sound like the ignorant ones.
I've never seen this. I have seen people point out that Twitter isn't promoting freedom of speech and the somebody else conflating that with the first amendment of the U.S. constitution though.
The general sentiment is that if tech companies can censor arbitrarily their special section 230 liability protection should be removed. They are no longer acting as an internet service, but as a publisher that curates publications.
Maybe, we can see about that if it ever reaches the Supreme Court. Either way, it should be amended to fit that criteria, because the whole impetus behind the passing of section 230 in the first place was to protect freedom of speech. I'm sure little did they anticipate in 1996 that 2 or 3 companies would wind up completely dominating all of the content on the web. We don't allow AT&T to disconnect phone service just because they don't like someone's politics. We don't allow landlords to kick people out because they shared some disinformation with their second cousin in a phone call or because they supported the wrong candidate in a political campaign.
And they should focus on busting up these trillion dollar monopolies because the amount of propaganda power they wield is unbelievable and should be reeled in for that reason alone. But as long as they're in cahoots with the very regulators that are supposed to care about this, that will never happen.
More from The Intercept, here's a document from DHS on disinfo discussing using 3rd party non profits as a "clearing house for information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda." https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1587257992449208320 in the same thread there's a Draft DHS quad review, which plans agency policy, leaked that shows growing focus on MDM (misinfo, disinfo, malinfo) to protect homeland against spread of "toxic narratives." How the agency defines false info and what narratives are prioritized isn’t clear.
Ironically, "free speech" as a broader principle can also be interpreted to mean a private company should not be compelled to carry or broadcast anyone else's speech if they don't want to. Any private company can choose what kind of community norms and tone they want to set, and moderate accordingly. Some platforms may allow hate speech, others not. Some may allow porn, others not. Taking editorial control away robs that forum of its own free speech agency.
Pretty much. There are also limitations to freedom of speech the principle if not first amendment or freedom of association.
John Stuart Mill specifically calls this out in the harm principle. From what I've observed, people who invoke "it's freedom of speech philosophy" rarely understand that even as a philosophy, free speech not a blank check to be able to say whatever you want w/o consequence. Or they equate it to freedom of reach.
The concept outside the context of legal sanctions is an odd one though. It's much like the anti-cancel culture argument. It seems some want freedom of speech with absolutely no chance of any consequence whatsoever. I think there's a reason why the more broad sense of freedom of speech has never been codified.
The broader concept of "free speech" is not a legal one, and so is a lot "mushier" and more nuanced. "There should be no negative consequences of any kind for anything anyone ever says" is obviously way too strong. I think "free speech" is more like: "there's value in hearing ideas that are new, different, or that we actively disagree with, and we shouldn't discourage people from expressing ideas like that".
If you want a free society then that's the only way. If published in today's age, Samuel L. Clemens would have been cancelled by mercurial cry bullies.
I disagree. My ability to apply consequences is a necessary part of freedom. The consequences on their own shouldn't be illegal (e.g., murder), but applying those actions shouldn't in themselves be illegal when applied as a consequence of speech.
For example, if I'm in line at McDonalds and the cashier tells me that I'm ugly and he hates my family, I should be able to say, "I've changed my mind, I'm not going to eat here". But not being able to apply consequence to speech prohibits me from doing even this simple act.
> But not being able to apply consequence to speech prohibits me from doing even this simple act.
Going a bit further: not being able to apply consequences to speech is itself curtailing your speech, so you literally can't have one without the other!
> (...) not being able to apply consequences to speech is itself curtailing your speech,(...)
No, not really.
Your right to speech isn't infringed if someone does not share your personal opinion. You're always able to express your mind about how profoundly you disagree or how wrong you feel everyone around you is.
What you cannot do is go around strong-arming people to shut up or stop expressing ideas you don't share. That is not a way to protect your right to free speech. That's just fascism 101.
No one is suggesting anyone get strong-armed. Unless doing things like writing letters or boycotting is strong-arming. Physical violence, or threats, or denial of service, etc... are all out-of-bounds. But saying that me and my group of colleagues is no longer frequenting your establishment because you said you support our extermination is fair play, IMO.
"Showing someone the door" is just indicating that you would like them to leave. How much authority do you need to do this? If you believe the person being shown the door should have the right to say whatever they want, do you believe the other participants in the conversation don't have the right to say they would like to stop hearing from him?
> Showing someone the door" is just indicating that you would like them to leave. How much authority do you need to do this?
Not really.
I have no right to show you the door at the local library or cinema or car wash or local cafe, or at your own home. At most, that lies in the right to property,which only applies to things I personally own. Consequently, in a free and open society "showing someone the door" is a right that's only at the reach of private property owners or people mandated by said owners to manage some aspect of it.
Even then, that right to "show someone the door" because you don't like their opinions is not all powerful and is limited in some jurisdictions which also recognize the right to equality and non-discrimination. Think about it for a second: how can you have a free and open society if you do not have tolerance?
This argument comes up over and over in this debate, and it seems like the result of some misunderstanding. You’re certainly allowed to react in a way that’s punitive as long as it’s a legal action, you won’t be violating the law, and I don’t think anyone claims otherwise, but you’ll be violating the cultural norms of free speech by engaging in repression. If you generally believe in the freedom of speech as a principle, you believe that people who you disagree with should be able to say their piece, without your feeling the need to retaliate, because you know that that’s what’s necessary to maintain a culture of free speech and open, honest discourse. But when you try to punish or retaliate for someone airing a view you disagree with, you’re going past civil discourse into actions intended to harm them financially, emotionally, or otherwise. And that’s frankly harmful to democracy.
If they say they hate your family directly to you, sure, don’t eat there. But most speech that people disagree with and try to retaliate against the speaker isn’t on that level - it’s bits of speech taken out of context, indirect expressions of opinion like donations to candidates, etc. People are being manipulated by professional propagandists, and they’re following along enthusiastically. It’s polarizing the country, and it’s actively harmful to the stability of the democracy.
I don't understand this argument though. For example, "People are being manipulated by professional propagandists, and they’re following along enthusiastically."
Are you saying that pro propagandists don't have the right to their speech? Is the ability to persuade the problem? It seems like half of the reason why we speak is to persuade.
We both stated in our posts that the reactions must be legal on their own. So lets take illegal actions out of the picture. But if it is legal for me to start a boycott about your product, I think it is problematic to say it is now illegal to do so as a reaction to something you said. If boycotting is so problematic, just make it illegal all up.
The problem with our country isn't the speech. Its the fact that people are easily manipulated with bad data. But I don't see how prohibiting legal actions resulting from free speech is going to be helpful. All you've done is infringed on another "freedom". We should instead just be actively working on better educating people. Critical thinking and logic skills should be fundamental in our education system.
I don't think anyone is proposing making it illegal to boycott, it's just counter to a culture of free speech to try to punish people because you disagree with their opinions. That culture isn't legally protected, except the part where the government can't infringe on it.
If companies do something I don't like I'm not gonna buy their shit. I am not violating free speech by choosing not to buy their shit. There is no right for a business to have my dollars.
And... that's really what it comes down to. Billionaires wanting to keep their profits.
As far as going after a person personally, I don't agree with that, but that's usually not how this plays out. Some idiot says something stupid, then advertisers stop advertising, because they know people like me actually give a shit about this stuff and I can make do without random piece of shit #726 cluttering my house.
This isn't actually sufficient to uphold free speech. Rather, you need to fund your opponents -- buy them a new house, give them your car, retell their opinion to everyone you know, saying that you agree with it and that they should too, so that it can be seen in the most favourable light and have the most possible reach, and that they can put their full effort into it without having to prioritize their views against eating or housing etc.
Just not adding punishments to one side while granting money, privilege, and respect to another is the current state of propaganda for folks like Bill Gates.
If you make something that agrees, you'll be showered in funding, attention, and branding, but if you make something that disagrees, you're on your own. It's a retaliation for disagreeing
Just like Joe Rogan (most popular podcast in the world, btw), Tucker Carlson, Rush Limbaugh, John Stewart were all cancelled, as opposed to being wildly popular, but divisive media creators..?
Obvious example is that Jews don't have to stay at the party where someone is yelling nazi slogans. And their friends can leave too. Neither have to wait till first physical attack starts.
I intentionally picked obvious example instead of anything nuanced.
> Freedom of speech is an ideal that applies to all people and all spaces, public and private
Private spaces? Nonsense. You can't go in to a restaurant and start ranting about the Jews or whatever, and then say that they're violating the "ideal of free speech" when they kick you out. Free speech means you get to espouse an idea, not force people to hear it.
The disagreement is about whether Twitter is a public or private space. It seems to me to be pretty obviously private, and AFAICT the people who argue that it's public don't have much justification beyond "I want it to be, because I or someone I like got kicked out."
Freedom of speech isn't a law, it is a concept. If you are in a private space and insult someone, they may choose to not 'turn the other cheek'. Does that mean 'turning the other cheek' can't be applied in private spaces? They are both concepts, not laws.
This is so abstract as to be meaningless, I have no idea what you're arguing or what you think "applied" means in this context. Does the concept of "free speech" mean you ought to be able to scream the n word in a Wendy's without being asked to leave? If not, my point is that Twitter is no different; if yes, then you and I mean very different things by "free speech".
It is abstract, and the argument is semantic. Freedom of speech is an concept, turning the cheek is a concept. Most people agree neither should be applied absolutely, but they both can be applied or ignored in any space, private or public.
There are laws that try to codify the concepts. The 1st amendment is one of such laws, but it only applies to the US government. It doesn't mean that the concept it is based on is held to the same restrictions.
> Freedom of speech is an ideal that applies to all people and all spaces
Is it though?
Those outside of the US who subscribe to this ideal seem heavily influenced by US culture in my experience. I'm not aware of non-US sources of the idea.
Add to that I've never really seen anyone espouse this ideal that actually understood (or could articulate) what "free speech" even means...
Certainly in the context of Musk's campaign, neither he nor most of his followers are genuine in their support for "free speech". Musk in particular has been a staunch supporter of censorship in practice, and has only paid lip service to free speech for clicks.
> Those outside of the US who subscribe to this ideal seem heavily influenced by US culture in my experience. I'm not aware of non-US sources of the idea.
In ancient Athens they spoke (ancient) Greek, so no they didn't have an ideal of "free speech", as in the modern US, they had ideals of isegoria and parrhesia - separate concepts that Athenians at least recognised were often irreconcilably in conflict with another. Any such nuance is completely lost in most modern applications.
> Those outside of the US who subscribe to this ideal seem heavily influenced by US culture in my experience. I'm not aware of non-US sources of the idea.
Freedom of speech isn't a "wholly US topic". It's understood and accepted in most democratic countries.
> The right to freedom of expression has been recognised as a human right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights law by the United Nations. Many countries have constitutional law that protects free speech.
> The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted during the French Revolution in 1789, specifically affirmed freedom of speech as an inalienable right.[7] Adopted in 1791, freedom of speech is a feature of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution
> Those outside of the US who subscribe to this ideal seem heavily influenced by US culture in my experience. I'm not aware of non-US sources of the idea.
No, not at all. There are plenty of countries who go to greater lengths to protect their individual rights without the US even registering as a suggested influence. Most countries which managed to transition away from authoritarian oppressive regimes did grew political antibodies to ensure the right to freely express your ideas without being subjected to persecution as it happened in the not so distant past.
>Is it though?
>Those outside of the US who subscribe to this ideal seem heavily influenced by US culture in my experience. I'm not aware of non-US sources of the idea.
Individual rights of expression predate the US and are part of a collection of ideals in a long tradition that finally exploded in the Enlightenment in Western Europe. Don't forget how much of a grip the Church had on suppressing books and ideas, including meting out punishment.
The erasing of the history of freedom of speech including, within the US, forgetting the facts within the 20th century where it was primarily conservatives who advocated for suppression and censorship, is a very awful misreading of a general principle, especially by, today, people who identify as left.
Freedom of speech is an ideal intended to protect unpopular opinions. It's an individual right in the sense that the individual may be at odds with others, and just because it is a minority view it should not be suppressed.
Today the Zeitgeist is saying: freedom of speech is a silly American concept, and it's just to defend people on the hard right who should be deplatormed.
The first amendment has very little to do with the "freedom of speech" most people are constantly arguing about. But they are conflated so the first amendment gets dragged into the same old tired conversations.
To me the first amendment is much more interesting. Its roots in ancient Greece. Its importance in sustaining a democratic government. The paradoxical nature of trying to extend its reach to private entities...
And freedom of speech also includes to the rights of private individuals and companies to determine what they share on their own platforms, and what they can or cannot be compelled to host or say.
Twitter is not a product designed to reflect the beliefs and opinions of the company. If it was some sort of editorial platform that argument would hold a lot more weight.
It's impossible to deny freedom of speech (or freedom of association) to a company without denying those same freedoms to the people forming the company, or its customers or users of its service. That's one of the reasons companies do have freedom of speech, and exist as quasilegal "entities" in and of themselves. Rights don't cease to exist in aggregate.
Any legal pretense one could use to deny freedom of speech and expression to a company could also be used to deny any group - political parties, religions, specific races or genders, the press, etc.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.“
Right. We're probably all aware of the text -- this is a US-centric site, after all. But I think you make the GP's point all the more necessary: The first amendment to the US constitution restrains one party from introducing rules abridging freedom of speech. There are plenty of other parties who may or may not seek to introduce and/or enforce rules allowing or prohibiting various forms of speech which are not the US government. My own government, for example. And Twitter.
That an action doesn't breach the first amendment to the US constitution doesn't say all that much when it comes to whether it's consistent with the stated ideals of proponents of freedom of speech.
"Freedom of speech is an ideal that applies to all people and all spaces, public and private"
Since we can't agree on a definition of "freedom of speech" this doesn't mean much.
In practice it seems to mean something is a "freedom of speech issue" when a speaker wants someone to not face social consequences for some action (For example an Elon Musk fan saying he shouldn't be charged with investor fraud because "freedom of speech"), and when a speaker wants someone to face social consequences they stay conveniently silent. (Say, an Elon Musk fan not complaining when he fires an employee for something they said).
>Smart journalists are going to stop relying on Twitter's API now.
Yay! Journalists that do nothing but build a story around Tweets is not journalism. That's BuzzFeed. The fact that legit news sources decided to follow BuzzFeed is just a very sad comment on the state of affairs we live in now.
I know I used the formal capitalization of the specific site BuzzFeed, but it is a pretty good phrase if used as buzz feed. "Journalists" that try to make a story out of "what's the buzz" is more of the underlying point. That's just an aggregator. There's not complexity to the story that a journalist has pulled together. There's no getting a feel for the person being interviewed to feel if they might have more info to be pulled out to expand the story.
Having said that, there is a time and a place to a feel for the buzz, and places like BuzzFeed are perfectly adequate at doing that. But to confuse a buzz feed as a piece of news/journalism is just insulting to journalism.
Many of the child posts assume that Twitter deleted these tweets. That isn't clear to me. It's possible the original authors did (happy to see proof either way).
When one is laid off, there are often clauses in the severance agreement that forbid disparaging the company or leaking secrets, or similar things.
If I wanted that severance check and someone pointed out to me that the tweet may be in violation of the severance agreement, I would delete it too.
> This is ironic if you consider all the complaining that Musk does in the public sphere about "freedom of speech"
Another ironic thing is the number of people who lectured anyone disagreeing with twitter's content moderation decisions that twitter is a commercial enterprise that can do whatever it pleases (usually this means yielding to activist pressure) and who are now acting indignant when Musk acts like he owns the place (which he does).
Is that fair? The criticism about these deleted posts seems to be pointing out the contradiction between the claim of widening the speech available and the way that it is being limited here, not that Twitter has no right to do it.
I don't know! Probably not. It is all a political struggle and Musk for sure pursues his own goals in it. But if all this results in a twitter that is more interesting, open and less prudish than before, I think it is worth it. You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs.
Yeah, have you ever noticed that most people only complain about free speech when the voices they agree with our silenced, and never complain when voices they don't agree with our silenced?
It may not be violating "twitter rules", but it's likely violating company policy not to expose internal dealings (even as trivial as screenshots of slack emojis).
So Twitter's corporate interests can trump the free speech ideology. What a surprise.
Leaking a private slack can be political activism for worker's rights. I'm not saying these particular heart emojis are, but here Twitter is still in position of judging whether particular tweet was acceptable or not.
But who's judging whether she is or not? Twitter is, still.
The whole point of free speech ideology is that corporations aren't supposed to be unaccountable judges and executioners, and this should stay up until she is actually convicted of breaking some law.
Wait a minute, corporations can't police their own platform? Sure they can. "Freedom of speech" is a political freedom -> free from persecution from the government.
If Twitter (or Elon as owner of his private company) wants to take down a post that exposes internal dealings then they're completely within their right to do that.
But that doesn't relate at all to the other, more important conversation of Twitter limiting certain voices (Trump, et al). Stop mixing the two.
I remember some years back when Microsoft fired an employee for taking pictures of some boxes of brand new Macintosh computers on their campus and publishing it on the internet as a way to lightly smear the company (for using non-MS products apparently). MS was fully within their right to do that and nobody screamed "freedom of speech" back then.
The irony is that Musk was proclaiming that Twitter is now going to focus on free speech (as in, everything non-illegal goes), and just now they removed an instance of non-illegal speech.
Maybe a court would decide that heart emojis aren't a company secret covered by an NDA, but are expression of solidarity with workers which is legally protected speech regardless of what the employer thinks about it. Or maybe not. By the free speech ideology you can't know, and are supposed to assume innocent until proven guilty, and keep it until a court orders taking it down.
But here a private company is executing its own unilateral judgement by their own clearly biased moderators.
The definition, applicability, scope, etc., of tech industry standard NDAs is very clear cut. Presumably Twitter didn't insert some uniquely odd clauses.
Trying to create vagueness where there is none seems like motivated reasoning
If a non-Twitter employee posts a tweet with an image of their corporate internal communications, does Twitter take those tweets down automatically or at the other corp's request or does the person that made the tweet have to remove it when their corp overlords demand? I honestly don't know the mechanisms for getting a tweet removed that is deemed to violate some policy some where.
It's a truly strange conspiracy theory to extrapolate that Musk will simply delete Tweets he doesn't like. About a billion of those get posted each day. It's extremely unlikely he called for it on this one, sounds more like a HR policy.
Smart journalists destroy their own relevancy? Barely anybody reads their articles, that's why they post and link to it from Twitter. And thereby grow a personal audience they can take to any other newspaper.
>Smart journalists are going to stop relying on Twitter's API now.
I somehow have a feeling that this is not the first time in history that an embedded Tweet in a news story has been removed, either by Twitter or the author.
As the old joke goes, we have freedom of speech in the USSR. We too can go to the middle of the Red Square, and denounce the American president there, with no negative consequences.
It's not very interesting to see an alleged champion of free speech allow speech he likes. It's far more telling to see what he does about speech he dislikes.
People who post to drama sites routinely take screenshots of tweets and posts from other sites because it's an easy way to have permanence even in the face of hostile moderation. This will just extend to normal journalists now.
There are tons of subreddits that are devoted to catching some person or another with questionable tastes or interests in saying something they shouldn't. In these instances, rather than linking to the post (which may result in a moderator taking it down or the poster realizing how badly they're being dragged), they instead take a screenshot since it's a bulletproof way to retain the content.
Musk is pro free speech, when it is speech he likes and finds funny. Not at all with speech he dislikes.
It is stupid, but free speech became codeword for "my opponents should shut up while my friends can arbitrary harrass them". And that is me being euphemistic about it.
> "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment
Freedom of speech is different than the first amendment. The first amendment prohibits the government from limiting freedom of speech, but the concept itself is more general than the law.
> consider all the complaining that Musk does in the public sphere about "freedom of speech"
It is a bit frustrating how people refuse to understand the difference between "you can't speak this because we don't like what you said" and "you can't post internal company privileged information while being employee at the same company". Supporting freedom of speech doesn't mean Musk would endorse anybody doing anything, including divulging company's internal communications publicly (and without permission from people whose communications are getting revealed, probably).
> then people had better take screenshots of the tweets they want to quote, just in case.
That has long been the case, Twitter was removing and blocking messages (and people) for much less reasonable causes than leaking private communications of Twitter employees.
Just looking at her account, her tweet about being fired/laid off is still there. I don't know what it originally was, but it seems like a picture was posted and depending on what it was might have been the issue. Like if it was a bunch of her coworkers in the office maybe that was against the rules for whatever reason.
If there’s a current publicly-stated Twitter rule that prohibits screenshots of an internal Slack channel full of blue heart emojis, I’m not aware of it; it’s not abusive, it’s not hateful conduct, it’s not illegal, and presuming there wasn’t personally identifying information in the screenshot, it’s not private information by Twitter’s own definition as linked above.
If this was a screenshot from a Slack channel of any other tech company, do you really think Twitter would have quickly taken it down? I honestly don’t.
Is it because people feel special advertising that they're part of some elite/secret ring of true knowledge sharers? Literally if the phrase was excluded, it's factualness would still be true.
Basically, I find people who say "IYKYK" to commonly be completely insufferable performance artists.
Can you imagine complaining about being fired from a company after publicly declaring that you were abandoning its product and that you preferred their competitor's product?
>This is ironic if you consider all the complaining that Musk does in the public sphere about "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment only applies to government censorship, but Musk likes to pretend not to), but it's also significant because -
He hasn't made any major changes to algorithms / policies yet. They're tripping over their own pre-Musk rules.
IMHO freedom in US is usually in fact 1) free for people who have $$ or 2) poor people who advocates for 1) for whatever the reason.
Basically freedom means less regulation from governments, which is only good for super riches and large enterprises. If you are not you should welcome more government regulation to counter the other elephant in the room. Two evils is always better than one.
Yes, regulation is often pushed to protect the peasants from the aristocrats, to protect workers from the capitalists but by far not always: Regulation is also pushed to manifest the power of the powerful ... which means there are also freedoms for the weak to protect.
It is a centuries long battle to find the balance in always changing times.
I want to buy a book that shows every single Tweet from Donald J. Trump, ever since he descended that elevator to announce his candidacy, through Biden's inauguration, and a little beyond...
...annotated with fact-checking, and historical context.
Probably with a few lines from speeches thrown in as well. To really document the heck out of how insane those years were.
My favorite was the Twitter account to see if it would get banned by only retweeting Trump's account(s). They wanted to show how the rules were applied differently between accounts.
Here is what happened, the documents gets split into 5000 tweets. Twitter will randomly include one tweet in a feed and someone will respond. For example one person said what npr is calling to overthrow the government because the specific text has a reference to that.
Didn't see any unAmerican comments. Saw comments like tweeting 5000 tweets is a stupid thing to do.
Not sure if nutjob should be used in 2022 to label someone you disagree with as having mental issues. Mental illness is a serious issue and using it a weapon is not something to be casually used
I think you a few words there, but if you read that link and think the people who responded to NPR sound informed and reasonable, then you and I have very different definitions of those words.
Do we know that the company did it? Or did the tweeter do it after it was suggested to them by someone knowledgeable that posting internal company communications might violate the NDAs and corporate policies on company owned communication platforms? And why are only some of the tweets being removed?
Always a lot of assumptions in the comments of every Twitter story I have read over the last week or so… and so far most of the assumptions tend to be pretty wrong when the dust settles.
But they have zero proof about being real. Using the API was proof. I can make any tweet from any user, take screenshot and you can’t prove it was not real.
You're reading news sources where you think it's a serious threat that the journalists might fake a tweet? Why would you care about what any site with that low of a reputation has to say?
It may not be an issue with established, reputable news sources you're already familiar with, but it certainly could be with every other website out there.
It does not provide any additional value, since that can be faked as easily as the screenshot. Any validation requires something from Twitter end-point, that they check and verify publicly that it actually existed at that time… but that does not work since we are going against removals made by Twitter in the first hand.
I'm sure the BBC did exactly that for ages, iirc because somebody who got their tweet embedded by them changed their display name to "big dogs cock" or something.
Sure, but there's no reason Twitter/whoever couldn't decide to offer a parameter like `at=<timestamp>` - which is really not that different to, say, a link to a file on github at a particular commit.
Sure. I don't think Twitter has such an "look up as of effective date" enterprise feature though. Have you been able to access that data that way either through the UI or API?
I didn't mean to suggest that it would necessarily be possible today - I doubt twitter keeps a full history of username changes, for example, and they'd probably need to introduce more restrictions around changing them if they were to do so. That can all be part of the 'flaws' in the embedding technology I referred to.
No, I don't use the API (or twitter at all, for that matter). I was just reacting to your statement:
> There is not snapshotting of data - it's simply a URL that renders at request - an HTML iframe.
"Simply a URL", the resource to which it refers being rendered in an iframe, could easily be a snapshot - as it is on other sites. Hence to me this read like a non sequitur.
Wayback Machine will remove archived tweets. For example, Taylor Lorenz’s tweets were erased after she requested it.[1] Other archives get removed if the people running the Internet Archive dislike the content. Similar to how Paypal isn’t a bank and eBay isn’t an auction site, The Internet Archive isn’t an archive.
Tweets are subject to copyright so I doubt the Wayback machine has any legal leg to stand on for continuing to host someone's tweets after a takedown request.
When copyright expires in 125 years or whatever if the archive still exists they can publish them again.
Usually your employer has confidentiality and non-disparage clauses in your employment contract and separation agreements. So "This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules." probably would be more like "This Tweet violated your contractual agreement to your employer".
This is exactly right and it's ridiculous people don't see this. Free speech isn't equal to breaking confidentiality agreements on a platform owned and operated by the company you work for.
Free speech and breaking confidentiality agreements are orthogonal to one another. The latter might result in legal action or firing but it has nothing to do with the right to publish.
But so does this mean on Twitter, leaks and whistleblowing about Twitter will be censored but leaks and whistleblowing about any other company will not? Because that sure doesn't sound like the neutral "free speech" moderation style Elon has been talking about so loudly nonstop for the past months.
Where do our free speech rights say that you are entitled to publish an opinion / statement on a particular channel or someone's private media outlet?
Somehow the notion of rights is being expanded as a catch-all of various hopes and desires, misunderstood or expected to put obligations on people or entities that those rights do not apply to. This makes rights soft and hard to disagree with, and actually less clear and less valuable.
You have the right to say something. You can go say it at politicians making a speech, you can write a letter, publish an article in some newspaper that will publish it. Not the right to say it on Twitter. Or the New York Times, or whatever outlet. You don't have the right / specific private entities are not required to enable your opinion.
my suspicion is “the censors” are highlighting how elons actions are proving in real time that they’ve been correct all along: that the “free speech absolutist” position has always been detached from reality.
he is, as we speak—and will continue to prove in the future—that “the censors” have been correct all along, social spaces of a certain number of people, if you don’t want the visitors to flee en masse, will need moderation to keep things from breaking down.
And so the grand experiment begins. I feel bad for the folks losing their job because that always sucks, and I hope there's a decent severance package.
Now we'll see what happens to Twitter... I hardly use it, so if it implodes it won't bother me too much. But I am curious to see if all the "how do you need X people to do Y?" commenters are correct in this case. The app is simple but doing simple things at scale is hard. I wonder if we'll see more downtime and issues now.
I think this is also a great experiment for everyone who either thinks Elon is a genius and the greatest thing to bless this Earth, or those who say he's overrated and Tesla and SpaceX were successes independent of him. I think Twitter has been around long enough that we've all formed impressions of it. Let's see what this single change of replacing ownership actually results in.
Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years?
It will be interesting to see how Elon defines success. Twitter in it's current form is a dead end, and there's no way "more free speech" is going increase either revenue or users. So if you think Elon is going to succeed at making Twitter a better Twitter as we know it, then I'm confident this take is wrong.
Which is why he's focused on the everything X app or whatever. Now, I wouldn't want to underestimate Elon, he is good at min-maxing, but I don't know that Twitter has a great competitive advantage to build on. It's one of the smallest social networks and Twitter as Twitter, i.e. the one big open forum with politicians, journalists scientists etc _is_ it's competitive advantage. So I don't know how you get from Twitter to X when almost every other social media does the things X would do better than Twitter. The biggest thing Elon would have to do is build trust with users and partner companies and that certainly does not seem like the direction he's heading. On the one hand I wouldn't bet against Elon, on the other hand the deck seems stacked against him. He'll have to prove he can run a SASS Twitter with minimal staff, which may be possible. But I don't know he does that and goes into al these other areas (payments, advertising, trust and safety) that seem very hands on to build relationships with partner companies, PCI Compliance, handle customer concerns, fraud etc.
Managing people requires people. He wants to make the moderation process more transparent? He'll either have to invent perfect text analysis AI, or he'll need people to process and respond to abuse complaints and petitions.
> Twitter in it's current form is a dead end, and there's no way "more free speech" is going increase either revenue or users.
I think this is failing to imagine how bad things could get societally. Imagine if more consumers and advertisers start enjoying consuming and being associated with malevolent, hateful, and violence-inducing speech.
Many in the 1930s-40s enjoyed the hateful caricatures of Jews that the Nazis produced in their propaganda, and hateful people also buy refrigerators and sneakers today.
Yes, that would mean a majority of people would have to adopt those perspectives - to the detriment of society at large - but it's happened before in many parts of the world, and could happen again. That is a long-term goal of fascists anyways - to re-normalize that kind of thing, and to re-combine industry and media with a religious ethnostate.
At the very least, the previously quiet pre-existing enjoyment of malevolent speech has been exposed for all to see over the last several years. The question is whether it has a growing audience.
I'm not saying that's Elon's goal, but accelerationism seems to be something he is aligned with as long as it doesn't come at a cost to him.
> Imagine if more consumers and advertisers start enjoying consuming and being associated with malevolent, hateful, and violence-inducing speech.
Why imagine? Twitter is full of malevolent, hateful, and violence-inducing speech on any day of the week. That has long been the case. True, some instances of such speech which went contrary to political ideology of Twitter employees and management was deleted, but other instances, that aligned with their ideology, were flourishing. And consumers of Twitter and advertisers don't seem to mind too much.
Ironically? I think in order for this to happen we would have to be _less_ polarized. I don't think in the current state you could _increase_ revenue from it's current place by splitting the customer base.
On the one hand if this keeps going bad maybe he just says fuck it and goes accelerationist like you said. On the other hand, there's a lot of people who put money into this. I truly hope it remains sensible, and do still have faith that our nation isn't this bad off.
My read on the libertarian, free-speech Twitter pitch was that the mainstream media typically uses a straw man to dismiss it.
If you start with the proposition "Anyone should be able to post anything on Twitter"...
... and want to get to "Everyone enjoys reading Twitter," then there's a lot of black box space in the middle.
You can have the most vile things on your platform, but your userbase self-censors. E.g. crowdsourced shadow-banning / down-voting. Or reputation with verified identities underneath.
Or just... more transparency.
Empowering the public to data-mine Twitter opens some interesting windows to a platform that has terrible things, but empowers interested parties to fruitfully research who they're coming from.
Only because the left has been running from this idea as fast as they possibly can for the last decade or so. It used not to be the case. The left used to be the free speech movement. But then they decided they have no use for it anymore - banning and deplatforming is much more fun. And here we are.
Free speech rallies have been customarily labeled by the national media (and not only) as white supremacist, for example. Regardless of whether this has merit or not, whenever you say that you “support free speech” (without a “but”) you’ll be now suspected of being one of them.
> Free speech rallies have been customarily labeled by the national media (and not only) as white supremacist,
You have that backwards.
White supremacist rallies have labeled themselves as "free speech" rallies in an attempt to normalize their cause. This is a well documented strategy [1]
However, exercising one's free speech rights by rallying for a cause (i.e. Charlottesville's "You will not replace us") does not automatically make that cause synonymous with supporting "free speech".
True, but before about 10 years ago, the reaction to that was mostly "well, those people are wrong in everything, but they right in this - this is free speech, and we value it, even if we hate those people". Now the reaction is "well, everybody knows "free speech" is a code word for "Nazi" so no wonder...".
The latest impression is driven by conservatives' current messaging that "big tech" is censoring them, coupled with their belief that the tech mores used to calibrate that censorship are coastal, and therefore more liberal.
Ergo, free speech is conservatives' right to say conservative things.
In the 60s and 80s and 00s, it was liberal. Give it another few years to swing back.
> conservatives' current messaging that "big tech" is censoring them, coupled with their belief that the tech mores used to calibrate that censorship are coastal, and therefore more liberal.
It's not a "messaging", it's an observable fact. Look at political leanings and donations for Twitter or Facebook workers. Over 80% goes to the left. And that's before we consider that the power is not distributed equally there and if you look at the people in power it's more like 100% to the left.
> Ergo, free speech is conservatives' right to say conservative things.
That's a completely wrong conclusion. Free speech is everybody's right to say their things, but conservative's rights are infringed much more frequently, so they complain more.
> Free speech as in Twitter bans and complaining about cancel culture is largely the far right.
It’s hardly the far right. People from all 3 political groups are scared of cancel culture. Painting this as far right serves only to label anybody that cares about such things as far right. You’re attempting to shut the conversation down. This is part of the problem and is literally misinformation that could cause violence against those labeled “far right” in the future.
> Imagine if more consumers and advertisers start enjoying consuming and being associated with malevolent, hateful, and violence-inducing speech.
> Many in the 1930s-40s enjoyed the hateful caricatures of Jews that the Nazis produced in their propaganda, and hateful people also buy refrigerators and sneakers today.
I may be sidetracking the conversation here, but I must admit I find it fascinating how “hatefulness” online is almost always assumed to be right-wing extremism.
Have everyone forgotten the BLM and Antifa riots going on for months where innocent people had their property, livelihood and in some cases even their lives taken?
That was fully encouraged and endorsed by the left, en masse, and especially so on Twitter.
I heard somebody got fired by Antifa because they had a second job with BLM. Both organizations really micromanage people. I think we should start holding the leadership accountable.
Can you show me where the left was, en masse, supporting people having their livelihood and lives taken? Which prominent members of the left were cheering on killing? Biden? Bernie? Hell, was it Internet personalities like Vaush? I didn't see that at all.
Can you show me the same for the right? Not some misinformation spin (the hate/division parent is talking about), an actual en masse cheering of killing people from the right?
Why is what BLM and antifa always excused? Why can’t you condemn it so we can fix the country? Some of us are over the left v right politics and want the left to realize their problems so we can all move on.
I suspect you may be less over the left v. right split than you think you are. The person I was replying to was making specific claims about what folk on the left were doing, en masse. I asked to see it. The person making it "v. right" is you (and him).
They are, often but “the left” is not one organized group of people.
This is actually a fundamental problem with discourse that I don’t know how to solve. There is a reasonable moderate left that struggles with these kind of issues, and its pretty large. Most maybe even!
Why is it you’re acting like there’s only one “left voice”? There will always be communists and SJW’s free speech doesn’t work if you act like the extreme voices are the mainstream or only voices of value.
> They are, often but “the left” is not one organized group of people.
This is actually a fundamental problem with discourse that I don’t know how to solve. There is a reasonable moderate left that struggles with these kind of issues, and its pretty large. Most maybe even!
I actually completely agree with this.
> Why is it you’re acting like there’s only one “left voice”? There will always be communists and SJW’s free speech doesn’t work if you act like the extreme voices are the mainstream or only voices of value.
Because increasingly they look more and more aligned. And regardless if personal beliefs, the non-extremist still vote on the same lines as the extremists. That’s why we’re coming up on a recession now.
You are correct. There is no difference between oppressing people, and fighting against oppression. Nazis are the same as anti-Nazis, racists are the same as anti-racists. Remember when India rebelled and cast out the British? Literally no difference between the two sides. Racist police versus civil rights marchers in the 1960s? Hey, both sides were mad. Totally the same.
It may be obvious, but just in case it isn't: Everyone think they are fighting the good fight. Nobody sets out to be evil. Liberals thinks they are fighting for positive change. Conservatives wants to preserve what they think is good.
Ofcourse the people burning the city down and looting think they are doing the right thing, or at least doing it for the right reasons. Ofcourse the black people "taking the streets back" feel entitled to it, after whatever backstory there was.
But during the Antifa and BLM riots, actual businesses, owned by innocents bystanders got ruined. Innocent people got murdered. There were real tragedies to real people, mostly white.
When that gets cheered on at social media-sites like twitter (or live on CNN!), it's hard to frame it as anything except hate against white people.
Maybe they thought they were fighting oppression. But at the same time they were oppressing. They became what they claimed to fight.
Who are to say they are better than the people they claimed to be fighting, which didn't burn down cities, didn't kill innocent civilians?
The ends does not justify the means. Not in a lawful society at least. These were hateful acts. EOT.
Which cities did BLM protestors burn down? What crime did George Floyd commit that merited his public execution? Or Breonna Taylor, who was shot by police while sleeping? What was she guilty of?
BLM protestors looted and rioted many cities. It was all over the news. They even took control of a police station and part of a town. It’s concerning you’ve forgotten this portion of our history.
George Floyd’s killer was found guilty and sentenced. Does that mean nothing?
Breonna Taylor was with someone that shot at police. It’s unfortunate what happened but perhaps one shouldn’t associate with people doing such things if they want to avoid these situations.
>>BLM protestors looted and rioted many cities. It was all over the news.
Sure, which cities did they burn down? The person I replied to made a specific claim I was asking about. You don't seem to be able to list them, either, despite them being all over the news.
>George Floyd’s killer was found guilty and sentenced... Breonna Taylor was with someone that shot at police.
And? The comment I was replying to said that the people BLM claimed to be fighting hadn't killed any innocent people. What was George Floyd's killer convicted for then? What did Breonna Taylor do that left her guilty?
I understand that situations are more complicated than what they end up reduced down to. But op made specific, false claims.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to rank acts by the threat they post to the Republic. The left wing riots you speak of were a problem in few very limited locations (parts of a few cities). They didn't threaten to end democracy. Major parts of the Republican party are actively trying to bring American democracy to a close. It's hard to see the benefit of both-siding in the presence of that threat.
I'm not taking trying to take any absolute sides. Even the best of people will do bad things. You can find dirt on anyone, if you like.
What I was originally responding to was the fear of twitter allowing hateful speech, which ofcourse had to be right-wing "hateful" speech.
My comment was more directed towards how I found that (default) assumption weird, since I see tons and tons of clearly hateful content and attitudes from all sides of the political spectrum online and in social media.
When I see people complaining about all that "hateful" speech online from one end of the political spectrum, I have a hard time seeing that as something else but denial about the hateful speech their side of the political spectrum themselves are promoting, or worse deliberately ignoring.
The fact that you find someone else's opinion disagreeable, distasteful or "hateful" is not a blanket-license for you yourself to act disagreeable, distasteful or "hateful" in response. It's a chance for you to be a better person.
If you want to fix our divided world, you need to show people there's a middle way, and you do that by calling out bullshit on both sides.
It's easy to say "I'm not trying to take any sides" but way harder to practice. For example, repeating the same rhetoric used by the hateful right-wing groups, while having to repeatedly put "hateful" in quotes, as if those groups aren't hateful or something, is taking a side.
It’s also very hard to convince the left they have a hate problem as well. Read your comment again, you’re claiming that hate only comes from one side. Republicans have been called Nazis, facists, ultra mega MAGA, uneducated, all to sow hate against them. Are literally all republicans Nazis? Or facists? Or is the left being extreme and spreading hate?
You actually did, the hateful rhetoric from the right tells all anybody needs to know. If you think hateful rhetoric comes from the right then you are the problem.
Government fetishism. The threat they "post" to some abstract concept like "the republic" is not more important than the threat they pose to their fellow man.
> Major parts of the Republican party are actively trying to bring American democracy to a close.
NO! This is extremely dangerous misinformation. Nobody on the right is trying to end democracy. This is a lie started by the left media in order to convince the left to get out and vote. If you keep spreading this misinformation, you will likely push people on the left to violence.
No one "burned down cities" and the vast majority of protests in the BLM movement were peaceful. In some cases, property damage and at least one actual murder were traced back to right-wing provocateurs, as well. You have to take that into account when framing things this way.
The damage from the riots is estimated in 1-2 billion of dollars. Nice for you to handwave it as "in some cases, property damage" and the classic "fiery, but mostly peaceful" of course. For some people who lived through it and witnessed it, however, it sounds like nothing but apology for lawlessness and wanton destruction. When you will ask yourself "why politics is so polarized in the uS" - that's why. When people hear that for you burning down their business, or trashing their car, or making their city unsafe and unlivable is just "mostly peaceful and some cases of property damage and actually it's probably all right-winger's doing anyway" - they would not trust another word coming from you, ever. Because if we can't agree on something as basic as "arson and mayhem is bad", then there's nothing for us to agree on.
Indeed, yes. It was sarcasm/parody. I felt it insulting to include the /s but may have been wrong.
I realize it's not HN-appropriate, but once in a while I break down and make fun of those who see no difference between oppression and fighting against the oppression (or fundamentally don't understand the difference between "being mean" and "systemic oppression")
Their comment history doesn't demonstrate trolling or false equivalency making, so by principle of charity I will believe it's sarcasm, until proven otherwise.
But such equivalencies appear to be an idea you've promoted though, if I'm reading your past comments correctly.
> It's one of the smallest social networks and Twitter as Twitter, i.e. the one big open forum with politicians, journalists scientists etc _is_ it's competitive advantage. So I don't know how you get from Twitter to X when almost every other social media does the things X would do better than Twitter.
Being the elites' gathering place is indeed its biggest advantage, and the fact that consumers can get public visibility on issues they're facing helps companies with their public image. There are many times where I or friends have posted about issues after exhausting the standard support channels, and quickly cut through the bureaucratic red tape and got our problem solved. I think that's a monetizable angle.
I think something similar would apply to other elites as well. Politicians can get direct feedback from constituents, music artists get direct feedback from fans (see the recent Lizzo "spaz" thing), and so on. However, in the current climate, elites are getting skewed feedback, so "more free speech" could actually help, if it's done right.
Maybe, but most of these things would require "brand safety" which is in the opposite direction of free speech. Maybe if twitter had billions of users like facebook, they could strongarm companies and get away with it, but all of the things you describe are probably going to require twitter directly interfacing with said celebrities/politiians/journalists, which will require lots more employees and a different tact than Musk seems to be taking.
Besides the fact that "more free speech" seems to involve making fun of trans people and bringing back donald trump, which do not correlate with more accurate feedback to elites.
We'll see how it goes, but "making fun of trans people" is an unfair summary of the situation. Megan Murphy and Rowling were not making fun of trans people, for instance.
You are correct, my purpose was to diminish the value of so called “free speech” for a platform like Twitter, not to diminish the negative impact on those targeted. I did not mean to exclude those targeted by death threats but you are correct that there are many other consequences of “free speech”, and I also don’t believe death threats provide value to twitter as a platform.
I have no doubts that a super app will succeed in the US like Pinduoduo has in China but I highly doubt that's going to come from the environment that Elon is already establishing at Twitter. You can't successfully build dozens of new products by laying off a big chunk of the staff and telling people to work 12 hour shifts 7 days a week when they've gotten comfortable with a reasonable work-life balance (I know Tesla and SpaceX are notorious for rejecting work-life balance in general but they aren't software companies).
Exactly. Why would you want a single app that has other apps? You could easily go download a standalone app from the app store that delivers a superior experience. There would need to be some competitive advantage or economy of scale of the single app. But what that advantage is remains to be seen.
Just as an example: both Facebook and Snapchat (and I'm sure others) have tried adding games to their platform. Both efforts have failed because you can get a better gaming experience by playing a standalone game. If you want to play with a friend, you can message them and say "hey, let's play X." There is limited upside to playing in Facebook or Snapchat, and a lot of downsides (limited catalog, performance restrictions, etc.)
One exception to this is any feature that requires exposure to an audience. Social media is very good at exposing people to content. Something like Facebook marketplace can be successful because sellers want their listings to be seen by people and buyers want to go to places that have the most sellers.
This is true, today. But look at things like the Digital Markets Act in the EU; there is a significant chance those "super apps" iOS and Android are forced to submit to government regulation in the future, which will create new opportunities - if/once the App store monopoly is removed for example, the ability for any app to become the "super-app" is greatly enhanced, even if very hard. Twitter as brand and platform I could imagine playing in a post-mandatory App store landscape - but so too will a lot of others of course.
I have no desire for a super app and I don’t think anyone else does either tbh.
The Chinese internet is heavily restricted and censored and regulated by their government. It simply cannot be used as a model in the west. Technology progresses in cycles, and the Chinese and American internet cycles don’t line up. Eg China uses QR codes for payment everywhere because they cycled off cash while the US largely missed that train, but has near universal credit cards and NFC availability. Americans would never pay at a cash register through QR codes.
Android and IOS are great at providing a moldable surface for apps. A super app aggregates censorship to one entity, which isn’t a market force in the west. The “chat bot” style super apps also didn’t take off in the west because our technology is more expensive. We’re richer so we have, on average, higher end devices that can render more AND we can pay to build more feature rich native apps. We aggregate app data at the operating system level (notification center, Google home app, Siri, Uber integration into native mapping app, etc). China can’t because most of android is created in America, and they’d essentially have to hard-fork it to build changes their way (again those changes largely include censorship choke points)
996 (72hr weeks) apparently works in China, so why wouldn't it be made to work here, especially if all the rich companies use the economic headwinds to collude and reduce compensation/QoL/perks?
Also a massive fraction of young US techies are Chinese immigrants -- are they as vulnerable to 996 in US or are they a select group who escaped it?
And can Musk and others staff up in China (if US and Chinese politics/government allows it)?
I think you'd have to provide a lot more research to "996 (72hr weeks) apparently works in China". What type of companies, what type of jobs, ubiquity etc.
China has a vast vast oversupply of software engineers.
In order to make 996 work in the US, there would need to be a pretty big oversupply of talent (and a lower standard of living) to make people desperate enough to give up their entire lives to their work. Unfortunately, I think we may be getting close to that about now or at least heading down that path.
What makes you think that there is an oversupply of (good) Software Engineers? All I see every day is that it's still pretty difficult to hire good people.
> you can't successfully build dozens of new products by laying off a big chunk of the staff
Considering the leadership culture that grew twitter to nearly ten thousand, for Twitter, I don't think "dozens" was anywhere near feasible. I suppose it depends on your definition of "product".
The one thing Twitter has going for it is network effect. Tons of people are trying to spin up competitors and encouraging people to go there based on political leanings or other reasons. The fragmentation will just lead to Twitter remaining as the place where everybody comes back.
I’ll be shocked if it doesn’t work out for him because network effects are really hard to overcome.
He won't need PCI compliance. He's going to attempt to make a wechat with cryptocurrency as a method of payment in collaboration with binance. We'll see if it sticks.
There's a lot of porn on Twitter. The "paid videos" feature that you get with a blue check seems to be focused on this crowd.
Can you imagine someone as volatile and vain as Elon Musk having your porn viewing history? There's a good reason why most sex entrepreneurs stay off the radar.
I personally can't wait for him to kinkshame a Twitter influencer who makes him mildly upset.
Pretty much, although Musk might be more persistent in the face of being lolnoped by regulators than Facebook and the financial institutions they invited along to try to add credibility to their project.
>Twitter in it's current form is a dead end, and there's no way "more free speech" is going increase either revenue or users.
Twitter was on its death bed until Trump signed on and became the shit-posting President. This is not an endorsement of Trump or bringing him back, but the type of "free speech" people are talking about saved Twitter, made it a pile of money, and made other media/press companies billions of dollars covering the chaos.
I do not have that impression at all. Twitter was made more relevant by Trump's presidency but you'd have to show me revenue numbers that somehow he saved it.
Trump announced his run for the Presidency and began shit-posting his way into the White House in 2015, the year Twitter had over a 50% increase in revenue.
If the guy can make a fully self-driving car, he can make a fully self-moderating social network.
He'll either be the GOAT or the goat, but the gamble is clearly on the table, and Musk being Mush will declare victory before the dice even start to roll.
If the guy can blow enough hot air about self driving cars to make people buy the hype, he might be able to blow enough hot air about a self-moderating social network to make people buy the hype.
Unfortunately, eventually you need more than hype before the public and regulators come for you because you haven’t delivered.
I dont understand the SpaceX argument since he was an actual original founder if I'm not mistaken, I could see the Tesla argument, but those people never provide any true insight into how he is riding on Teslas former success whenever I run into those (not to mention, if it was so good... why did they need a new CEO). I think it's pretty obvious he is a capable individual, overly ambitious at times, but hey, he somehow makes it work.
I try to be neutral about him, but as a Software Engineer, he is easy to admire, he is able to work on various tech related companies at once and make it work. That is no small feat. We have discussed on HN before that companies like Amazon having employees peeing in bottles usually those sort of issues come down from the top (CEO tier) and trickle down to the bottom, if that's true, and Elon is awful, it would show in all his companies, but he manages to delegate correctly enough to keep a few large companies going.
As an ex spacex employee I can definitely say that it wouldn’t have been half the company today if Musk want in charge. Not a fanboy but trying to give an honest evaluation. Space is crazy hard and doesn’t happen without brilliant people so of course the credit for the success of the company goes to the engineers and everyone that gave some of their best work to making it happen though that type of success doesn’t happen without Musk at the helm. When it comes to space, he is truly a visionary that pushes for the craziest ideas and then challenges these brilliant people to make it happen. He truly loves space and has embraced learning everything there is to know about the engineering side of things so it’s not like what he’s proposing is impossible. It’s just batshit crazy, moon shot type of ideas and then the brilliant people that he’s been able to recruit are able to make it happen. It’s a BRUTAL work environment from a work life balance perspective but you don’t mind because you’re working on SPACESHIPS with some of the most brilliant people you’ve ever met and doing some of the most impactful work of your life.
I try to separate the visionary tech genius side of him from the public crap that he’s done to ruin his public image. He has achieved the impossible so many times that he’s developed a god complex. I can’t speak to the electric car part but I’m impressed that he was able to will the country into caring about electric cars. He literally reinvented the space industry and made it cool again. But personally he’s a shit show that has gone unchecked for too long.
When it comes to Twitter I doubt his magic is going to carry over to running a social media company. His style works because of the culture he’s able to build and the vision that he’s able to sell. From what I can tell he’s ruining the good parts of the Twitter culture and he doesn’t have a vision. Good luck to anyone working there. The years that I spent a working at spacex were the best years of my life that I’d never want to repeat again.
Thanks for sharing your ex-space-x perspective. I too, am skeptical about any good coming from this.
I observe that Musk’s biggest wins is where he has used his enthusiasm and large cachet of celebrity capital to challenge the status quo. Tesla and SpaceX both embody elements of society that sci-fi has been dreaming since we were kids. Self landing rockets flying all the time! Electric robot cars that drive themselves! He challenges entrenched industries to do a thing that people wish they would do, but the bean counters say isn’t worth it. It least that’s how the fanciful narrative goes.
The problem with Twitter (or any social network/super app) is that it is not clear what that “go big, go beyond, dream big” trajectory is. For me personally, it’d be about open source, open walls, federation, and above all no fricking advertisement/surveillance economy. I don’t see how Musk’s acquisition here achieves that or any other “dream for the stars” aspiration one has for Twitter.
He has talked about open sourcing Twitter's algorithms.
And His dream for the stars aspiration for Twitter is a public square where people exchange communication and ideas freely, civilly and honestly. Some might argue that is a crazier dream than autonomous rockets, Mars and electric cars!
"It’s just batshit crazy, moon shot type of ideas and then the brilliant people that he’s been able to recruit are able to make it happen"
you can read this sentence and come away with the conclusion that he doesn't do anything, or that he is responsible for everything. To me, it mostly seems like he has a bunch of money / financing so he can pay people to try lots of often very dumb ideas and some might work. His core "skill" being an accumulation of immense wealth.
you might say "you need both ideas and execution, and he is an ideas guy", which is correct, but i think the level of credit (and compensation) is wildly skewed towards the "ideas guy" in this case
You can’t have one without the other. If all it took was assembling a team of ace engineers then Musk would be unremarkable and we’d have no end to amazing things. Musk doesn’t propose ridiculous things. He’s an engineer at heart and truly understands the science of space flight to an insane degree so when he proposes something it’s within the realm of possibility but no one else is doing it because it’s never been done and the chance of failure is so high that any sane business would shut it down. He can’t achieve anything without his employees but those employees wouldn’t be doing a single moonshot idea without leadership willing to invest in those ideas.
You say his core skill is accumulating wealth but that’s a reductive way of looking at the world. His core skill is his ability to sell you on his ideas. He sold the world on electric cars and he sold the best rocket scientists and engineers on his space ambitions. He’s a tremendous leader and you’d be foolish to underestimate him.
Again, I don’t fanboy him but I do give credit where credit is due. I worked there and I even briefly worked with him on a project that he cared about. He’s brilliant at some things but his god complex is off the charts. He’s an asshole and his deadlines were insane, but he’s not selling snake oil. It takes a team, and that includes leadership.
Our culture tends to deify leaders when it’s really a team effort. Don’t blindly hate the guy because others fawn over him. He’s human, and a deeply flawed one at that, but wow can he motivate a team to achieve the impossible.
the number of things he has proposed that were lies / scams (solar tiles, tesla self driving), or incredibly stupid (hyper loop, whatever these shitty robots are now, boring company etc) is too high for me to think he is a particularly gifted engineer. he is a salesmen as you say. to me he is more elizabeth holmes than nikola tesla
"If all it took was assembling a team of ace engineers then Musk would be unremarkable and we’d have no end to amazing things" ever heard of bell labs?
> is too high for me to think he is a particularly gifted engineer.
These people and quite a few other experts in this field disagree with you.
> When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn't come just from hanging out with people.
Robert Zubrin - aerospace engineer
> Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years.
I've said the same about Branson and Virgin Galactic. He's been trying since 2004 to commercialize spaceflight and I don't think they've done anything worth mentioning. It seems to take more than an eccentric rich guy with big ideas to tackle space.
It's not all ideas, but an ideas guy is a necessary but insufficient condition for the ultra talented "do-ers" to do their amazing things. Elon could have bought a big chunk of Google or apple if he wanted to with all his wealth and just generated nice returns, but t we probably wouldn't have boosters that return to land and can be reused if he did.
Musk essentially was the A series, which led to him becoming the chairman and majority owner of the 7 month old company, which at that point just had a handful of guys. He ended up dismissing the original founders of the company before production began on their first product.
Their impact on the Roadster is debatable. Their impact on Tesla, as a whole, is effectively zero.
You can still do that. Just "electric battery car" was not a novel idea in 2003.
Jobs was viewed as the idea guy when he went back to apple, and it wouldn't have been really different if that was his first time there instead of returning.
He has done a fantastic job at fundraising for SpaceX. Most other companies can't get past Series G as a private company. I think SpaceX is on series N, or around there. The talent pool available to SpaceX and Tesla is also very smart and motivated, and will put up with a lot of BS from the companies because they are so mission-driven.
That is his really great talent: getting smart people to put their resources behind ambitious projects. That was also Elizabeth Holmes's talent, and Adam Neumann's. So far, he has done well at pivoting that inspiring message to real results, unlike the other two.
You may very well be right! I didn't mean to come off saying you are wrong, just that Revenue isn't a proxy. IKEA on the other hand I very highly doubt has a higher market cap. Retail typically has high Revenue and low margin, like Walmart
Not even close. It might be the most valuable one that uses venture funding (which would be normal given that they might also be the most highly funded venture-backed company, I'm not sure if anyone is beating them on that), but there are a ton of huge private companies that don't use venture funding.
Now I'm curious. Do you have some examples? I know there are some huge companies that are state owned like saudi aramco, but dont know if any other privately held companies with 100+ billion valuation
Most of them are companies whose owners either want to keep them private or who are not well-served by "tradFi" as the cryptobros say. As such, they don't have valuations over $100 billion (they don't have valuations at all, usually), but they are worth over $100 billion.
Several big law firms are likely worth over $100 billion if they ever were equity financed, but use a partnership structure for legal reasons. The same for large hedge funds, which use partnerships for tax reasons.
This list has some more traditional companies that have stayed private but have high revenue:
These lists only include companies that report their revenue for one reason or another (eg to get a loan). Many profitable private companies don't - their owners like to stay private and extract cash from the business rather than having to keep the profit in the business.
State-owned companies are another group entirely, and are often worth a ton.
SpaceX is unique because there are a whole lot of people who want to work on space exploration and very few big companies that are making serious progress in the field. Many people will put up with lower pay and extreme working conditions just for the chance to be a part of something like that. I don't think we can say the same for Twitter.
> From what I can tell he’s ruining the good parts of the Twitter culture and he doesn’t have a vision.
Maybe? But I think he and others would argue that Twitter was gradually losing popularity and had no direction. So I'm not sure "slow death" is such a great culture to hold onto.
Have you considered for a second that sending people to an irradiated hell hole planet where conditions are worse than earth even with 1000 years of climate change isnt the idea it’s cracked up to be?
The notion of "progress" is just mythologizing the past and fetishizing a particular version of the future. It only serves to portray alternatives as "anti-progress"; it is a rhetorical cudgel devoid of substance. We have problems that need solving, climate change is one of them. Musk's notion of Mars as "Planet B" is an entirely unworkable idea, and dangerous in that it invites postponing action in favor of a silver bullet that will never arrive.
Things are not worth doing simply because they are risky - that's just more fetishism. They are worth doing because they solve problems. Space travel has the potential to solve certain problems, and is already solving lots of problems today. Mars colonization is not a serious proposal to any problem, because it can't be accomplished on any time horizon we're planning for. Mars colonization will likely never happen, and if it does, it is far beyond the foreseeable future (>100 years).
So; SpaceX's rockets (and satellites) could certainly be useful, and are certainly useful today, but as GP pointed out, Musk's stated purpose is nonsense.
Why derail the conversation with rudeness and condescension? Why put words in my mouth instead of engaging with what I've said? Cui bono?
At the scale of individuals I would agree people should be free to try whatever hairbrained schemes they please, at that scale who am I to say what will work out or won't or what success even means.
What concerns me is that so many people are buying into false solutions and transparent grift about real and pressing issues that impact us all collectively. Musk isn't a crackpot who should be tolerated in the interests of liberty, he's a public figure who is actively causing harm, and I believe will cause more in the future. So I'm certainly entitled to share my views on this public figure, and I'll continue to do so. I'm curious why you would respond to that so defensively.
>>I'm curious why you would respond to that so defensively.
Because
I think I shouldn't do X. == ok
I think You shouldn't do X. == no
I think you should get all the rights to not start a rocket company, car company, a tunnel boring company, solar panel company. But you demanding others not start all those companies seems to be wrong to me.
Again, I give you all the rights do sit down and do nothing.
Whatever comment it is you're responding to, it doesn't seem to be mine, since I never said any of those things.
The freedom you seem to be advocating for is freedom from other people having opinions, existing, or speaking to you. As if they only mattered when they agreed with you or were willing to help you, and they became irrelevant the moment they had a criticism. I think you should reconsider. I think life is better with vigorous debate with people you disagree with, and that the things you so badly want to "get done" will be richer and deeper if you engage with people who may not like what you're doing. Otherwise, how could there be any other outcome than finding yourself surrounded by yes men?
I think understanding the difference between a poorly considered plan and real progress is very important. Elon seems to demonstrate repeatedly (even if he has a mythos otherwise) he does not think multiple detailed steps ahead as illustrated by several failures like Boring company.
To be fair, doesn't seem like he's putting any effort into digging holes.
The strongest argument is Tesla still doesn't have self-driving cars considering he's given it tons of attention for years and missed ETAs many times, but they're clearly getting there.
That said, while I do think space travel is crazy cool, the prospects of living on Mars are quite long-term and a _lot_ of work to the point you might ask if it's really worth it worrying about it right now. How are they going to solve the atmosphere? Or even more impossible, how are they going to solve the ionizing radiation from space? I guess they could just live in closed-off domes but still...
Exactly the how and why of mars haven’t been explained at all. Because he isn’t serious. Fsd, mars, etc are all grifts to get engineers to work harder and give up more value so they think they are a part of some meaning.
Keeping factories open during the initial COVID lockdowns because of your personal belief that it's "just the flu", and thus putting the lives of your employees at risk, seems like a direct analog to peeing in bottles to me.
That's not the problem. I can't speak for the USA however this perspective is from the UK.
At the height of covid cases, hospitals were nearing their capacity, some did and had to declare major incidents rerouting patients to other nearby hospitals which were also nearing their capacity...
Even if the death toll from covid would have been ZERO for every infected person, assuming they were able to get a hospital bed, without lockdowns reducing the transmission, we would have ran out of hospital beds. Ambulances would have been sat outside the hospitals unable to unload their patient's. At this stage all elective/emergency surgery would have stopped. The 999 operators would have been swamped which wouldn't matter anyway because there is nothing they can do as all the ambulances are stuck. Imagine calling for an ambulance after a car crash, or for a family member after a household accident, not only do you not get one but the hospital wont accept a patient if you drop them off.
Elon is no doubt highly intelligent, he would have known this.. He also would have known that if he kicked up enough of a fuss, and sent his own employees in, this would have little effect on the overall hospital bed status and he could avoid fines by threatening to take his business elsewhere or just pay them and still make a profit by having the factory open.
"At the height of covid cases, hospitals were nearing their capacity"
Hospitals in the UK go near or exceed their capacity in any flu season, it happened many times before 2020 and is due primarily to badly managed nationalized health and social care where supply/demand aren't joined up. This doesn't mean anything was wrong with Elon's position.
> due primarily to badly managed nationalized health and social care.
i’m not so sure this is because of socialized medicine considering how often american hospitals run into capacity issues and the general state of wreckage that is US health care—which by the way is a significant amount the most expensive per citizen in the world.
The UK has a backlog of something like 6 million+ people waiting for operations/medical attention. Whatever issues the US has, it's not on the same scale.
Primarily due to badly managed privately held, for-profit care where supply and demand aren't joined up. (because it's a hospital and avoiding death is inelastic).
How many of those patients actually needed to be at the hospital, never mind in a bed once there? How many actually needed to be transported to hospital by ambulance?
How many were at the hospital purely out of an abundance of media-stoked and politician-stoked fear, and would have recovered just fine had they stayed home and waited it out like they would have for any other cold?
We know that there was massive overreaction and unjustifiable paranoia exhibited by many people and organizations to pretty much all aspects of this situation, and this went on for over two years in some cases.
It's not unreasonable to expect the same irrationality to have affected the medical community and the decisions they were making.
Even before mid-2020, it was clear to any rational observer that the situation was severely overblown, and there was a lot of completely nonsensical behaviour taking place for no good reason at all.
The main reason this foolishness went on for years was because of the overt censorship and demonization we saw of those who were merely taking a rational look at the situation and expressing how irrationally others were behaving.
Hospitals were not taking people in willy nilly (because they were running out of beds). I wasn't in the UK, but in my area they were telling people only to come to the hospital if they were having trouble breathing. Have you ever had a cold that made it difficult for you to breathe and put you in danger of suffocating? Is that the sort of thing you just shrug off in your mind? When I was a child I had what I would consider a severe cold every year (due to a deviated septum); I coughed out some impressive phlegm gobs, but never had any shortness of breath.
You're accusing other people of being paranoid, while wildly downplaying the severity of COVID. Every reaction must seem like a paranoid overreaction from the perspective that it's "just a cold," but the cold does not have a 1% mortality rate (as we were seeing at the time).
I remain baffled by how some people will look at someone fighting for their life on a respirator and say, "wow, what a weak, entitled person, coming to the hospital for life saving care when they could recover from sheer force of will in the privacy of their own home."
You may want to reevaluate your claims, such as the mortality rate one, now that we have more information available to us.
Let's look at the situation in the Toronto area, for example. Remember, greater Toronto is Canada's most populous region, and the seventh-most populous metropolitan area in North America.
We know that the counting of deaths was done very questionably. Toronto Public Health itself admitted that as early as June of 2020:
"Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto."
> We know that the counting of deaths was done very questionably. Toronto Public Health itself admitted that as early as June of 2020:
> "Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto."
They also advise that the actual number of deaths from covid-19 is higher than reported.
Regardless, deaths were curtailed due to the measures in place. without these measures, once hospitals reach critical capacity, deaths would sky rocket, not just from covid but all sources.
> Later on, we saw news reports like this one:
> "Patients died from neglect, not COVID-19, in Ontario LTC homes, military report finds: ‘All they needed was water and a wipe down’"
This report is about two care homes in Ontario, it is not representative of the millions who died.
> We also saw news reports like this:
> "Hamilton Health Sciences takes down field hospital that didn't see a single COVID-19 patient"
Tents setup on playgrounds were never the first line of defence, they were a contingency for other measures which worked. without the measures you're arguing against, those tents would have been very much used.
> Like I'd mentioned earlier, there was severe overreaction displayed by many people and organizations, and it resulted in irrational behaviour.
In other news like in the ones from Saxony at some point there were so many deaths that the crematoriums ran too hot as they had to burn dead people non-stop.
Article just like these were the norm for some months in 2020.
https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/politik-gesellschaft/dunkle-...
That one field hospital didn't see a single COVID-19 patient could have a lot of reasons for example, patients went to another one.
From my experience, people around me who got COVID suffered and/or died. Others had mild symptoms. You are either lucky or your were not. :(
None of this moves the needle on your assertion that COVID was "just a cold" or that it was a sort of collective psychosis. You've identified measuring errors and some badly done logistics - hazards we have when considering a large scale under any circumstances - and from there you leap shear light-years to your conclusion.
No matter how the deaths were counted in the moment, excess death counts after the fact saw an increase of 12.8% during Covid in Ontario. So, unless there was another mysterious cause of death taking out around 75,000 people a year there, the mortality rate estimates pre-vaccine were pretty spot on.
I'm not going to accept that assertion without evidence, but even if we grant it, it's not an okay thing to do to put hundreds of your employees, and their families, at risk because you have a fucking hunch. Even if Musk were a superhuman thinker with really great hunches it wouldn't be an acceptable thing to do.
I'm not really interested in the distinction of whether it was a hunch based on gut or a hunch based on a cursory inspection of the data. I'm fully willing to believe he was as glued to the data as I was during those early months of the pandemic, or more so. He's not an epidemiologist or a public health official, and even if he were those things, decisions about other people's lives shouldn't be made by a a small group of people (or one person), unaccountable to those impacted by the decision, with a massive interest in the decision.
Again, you can grant that Elon is a super genius, and it doesn't impact the moral dimension.
"decisions about other people's lives shouldn't be made by a a small group of people (or one person), unaccountable to those impacted by the decision, with a massive interest in the decision."
That's exactly the kind of people who were making the decisions all along (public health officials and laptop-class academics).
This being why I'm criticizing the actions of Tesla, illegally violating the orders of public health officials, while not being accountable to the public at large or even it's factory workers.
The point I'm making is that public health officials were making "decisions about other people's lives" despite being "a small group of people (or one person), unaccountable to those impacted by the decision, with a massive interest in the decision". Those people are not morally or intellectually superior to Musk, far from it. There was simply no moral culpability for defying public health during COVID - it was and still is a tyrannical and expertise-free group of people that should not have any power or really, exist at all.
Musk was correct that COVID was wildly overblown and similar to flu. Fauci himself said it was flu-like back in March 2020 iirc, because it was. Musk is meanwhile highly accountable; people can just not buy stuff from him. You can't get public health officials out of your life that easily.
How could you possibly know that? Sure maybe none of the people who worked at Tesla died from COVID, but what about their families? What about every single person in public they interacted with? There is no way to know how many people, if any, they spread the virus to, who then died, and whether they got the virus at work.
But we do know that states with more lockdowns had lower excess deaths. So in the aggregate we know that lockdowns saved lives.
No, hospitals are still catching up on the years of “elective” procedures they and to postpone to make room for Covid cases. (Like cancer treatment and the like..)
Erring on the side of things often changing less then we may anticipate, my guess is that Twitter becomes a sort of Tumblr for people of a certain persuasion, that being the people who like the ideas Musk is putting forward. It still exists, it puts out new features from time to time, there's a large group of people who simultaneously love and hate it and spend enormous time and energy there, but it's role as the primary town hall forum is passed on to some other community or set of communities. Maybe ones we know today, maybe ones we don't.
But my confidence that I can forecast this is low, I'm mostly taking a stab for a bit of fun and to look at this comment in a few years.
One thing I have a high degree of confidence is that Musk will declare victory in almost any outcome, and if it's really so egregious that he can't declare victory with a straight face, he'll find some way to blame everyone else in the world.
In a few years, if not sooner, Twitter will be right there with Tesla/SpaceX in terms of resume cachet. Everyone will see their culture has been transformed to one of rigor and performance. The "A" players will surface and they will do more with half the staff (or less even) than they ever did with 7500 people... and it will be noteworthy. Musk will be in the mix heavy for about 6 months. He'll make executive hires that work for him and then will wander back over to SpaceX as they get closer to Starship getting off the ground.
People will be flipping out the whole time and a few Twitter competitors will rise, which will be great. Each Twitter alike will take on its own culture and the bubbles will now be network wide, much like they are with big press outlets like Fox and NYT. But Twitter will be the big daddy that all the journalists are on and if you want to broadcast something it will be the best place.
SpaceX and Tesla have no 'resume cachet'. They are widely known in engineering circles as hiring huge numbers of entry level or just barely above entry level engineers, exploiting their interest in technology to work them like rented mules until they burn out, and then discarding them. It's not a negative having worked at one of these places necessarily but unless the next employer is looking for an engineer with soul burned out of them it's not a positive either.
I work in embedded/systems software and worked in aerospace, have been in hiring committees in the Bay Area for years. While what you say about how Tesla churns Jr. engineers, SpaceX is not much like that. Also they both carry significant 'resume cachet', and I hired both in projects ran by "ex Tesla" and also ran by "Tesla haters" and making a career in SpaceX and in Tesla do signal that you are pretty serious about your performance as an engineer.
I don't like Musk, I don't like Tesla, I don't like (most of) what SpaceX does. But as a professional I can't agree with your Reddit-AntiWork-MuskIsEvil portrayal of those companies. It's just not true.
As a hiring manager I can say that SpaceX has very little cachet, but Telsa has some. At least not in the SW space. Maybe in areas more related to their domains they have more.
Hiring manager at big company: no cachet. One of the people in a team adjacent to mine got a job offer from SpaceX and rejected over perceptions of chaotic management.
That's not what is meant. The folks working at SpaceX work hard. The question is, when they look to slow down and go to another company, does having SpaceX on resume for 2-3 years vs widget maker X make it more or less likely to be hired.
The idea that spacex engineers are lazy / don't work hard etc is fanciful thinking. SpaceX being badly managed? Maybe true. But engineers at spacex? If you look at competitors like an engineer on the SLS project (which has taken 10-20 years to get to one 20B rocket launch) - no question who you'll want to hire if you are in "new space". I think for old space companies - probably still worth hiring SLS type folks just given that they will know how to deal with the paperwork of those jobs.
I would NEVER work for Tesla or SpaceX (work life balance way off). But neither would I claim they are lazy or poor engineers.
Is this a real statement? At least in SV the last few years, ex-tesla and ex-spacex in terms of getting funding for projects was a big win. Some went to apple et al as well for pretty good money.
I know of a few folks from what I would call older line engineering (thinking boeing / SLS type places) actively looking to get onto a musk company (younger folks generally pretty eager to do work).
It's pretty visable when you see NASA administrators doing presentations and then SpaceX folks (who all seem like they are in their 20's to me). Pretty clear you are getting a lot more experience at SpaceX then in the big SLS subcontractor stack for example. I'm adjacent to this space a bit and I think most of the senior folks leaving tesla / spacex (plenty of them) have all landed pretty well despite your claims.
It's 'social' and 'media' which are completely different operating environments.
Twitter is long, long established as another company.
The 'user base' of Twitter is entirely different kind of customer.
He has no 'big government subsidies' to rely on, aka neither Tesla nor Space X would exist without major budgetary support from Big Gov.
I suggest Twitter under Elon may be more profitable. Or different in some other way as well, but I'll give it only 25% chance it becomes like you're suggesting.
The commenter you're replying to was obviously talking about direct government payment for SpaceX services and direct government rebates for Tesla (and other electric car) customers, not infrastructure investments.
People seem to think one of three things about Elon Musk:
A) Musk is a typical rich asshole who only loves money.
B) Musk is a typical power hungry asshole who loves power and money is a side effect.
C) Musk is a big nerd who thinks he can solve big problems better than other people, and power and money are side effects.
I believe he's type C (Hopeful Nerd). So for that type of person, his positive return is solving the problem. He thinks he can fix social media. He thinks social media is a big problem. He thinks humans need to fix social media or they are fucked, just like if they don't get off oil they are fucked, and just like if they can't leave Earth they are fucked. Fundamentally, he does think humans are worth saving.
I would bet that the vast majority of people that choose to work with Elon believe he is type C (Hopeful Nerd) and believe in humanity as well. That's why they put up with all of his flaws and toxicity - because they believe in the cause and know it's a broken eggs == omelet situation.
Why does he have to be one of those things? None of them are mutually exclusive. You can be a big nerd with lots of money and a narcissistic power-hungry attitude. Just because you’re obsessed with money doesn’t mean you also don’t crave power (the two routinely go hand in hand as money is a form of power).
Well it's less that HE is mutually exclusive, it's more that the polarized social media world tends to see through these extreme lenses. And probably some days he's more one than the other.
I see you only listed three options but where's the fourth: D) Musk is the saviour of humanity and everything he does is perfect and in no way, shape or form subject to criticism.
> Even if all of that is true, I'd be surprised if Musk manages to make a positive return on his investment.
+1. It's hard to see how the ROI works out here. The price was 50% overvalued if not more, and Twitter has had severe problems with monetization.
On the other hand, Musk actually uses Twitter at scale unlike the previous management of the company. That might give him more insight into the possibilities than his predecessors.
I think it's about more than money for Musk. It's about influence and nudging the world closer to how it "ought to be". This is why wealthy people buy newspapers that will never make money. It's about power and influence.
And I agree with OP - all this will be forgotten when Twitter is considered an elite place to work in a few years. Love him or hate him, but the guy attracts really talented people that want to work with really talented people.
Great point. Bezos didn't buy WaPo to make money. But I think Bezos is far less idealistic than Musk. Personally, I don't like Bezos one bit, and not just because his rockets are shaped like dildos (though that does not help).
In a way, I agree. Twitter's moving into an era where they have way fewer people but also huge pressure to release a bunch of changes on nightmarishly short schedules. I guarantee there's some senior tech lead who's just been handed a "make $8/month blue checkmarks happen, you have two weeks" assignment.
In an environment like that, "rock stars" who can knock out projects in short order are going to see their careers skyrocket. But the trick is, they're going to pull this off by taking every shortcut they can. Code reviews are out, refactoring is out, performance and scalability concerns are out, etc. They will successfully launch the thing and then flee to the next glorious launch opportunity.
This will work very, very well for a while. The thing about taking on a lot of debt is that it allows you to accomplish big things in short order. But the debt will be hidden, and over a year or two, they will start to find that suddenly getting projects done is becoming nearly impossible, even compared to the pre-Musk days. And things will slowly fall apart.
It might be that all of the technical debt they're about to take on will have been worth it. Debt's a tool, and maybe making big changes to adjust their company's heading is worth it. And maybe to Musk, it's VERY worth it, because technical debt doesn't show up on financial ledgers, and he probably wants the company to look as solvent as possible.
But I wouldn't want to be a software engineer there in a year.
This makes no sense. Tesla, SpaceX, like video game companies, are able to punch above their hiring weight because the domain is "sexy" (engineers get excited about electric cars, space exploration, and video games)
Social media just isn't these days, from an engineering perspective. The fun parts (scaling distributed infrastructure) are already old hat and it's mostly a business rules complexity problem. Most of what all these people are doing relates to complicated and boring business details. It's a corporate job. It won't pay, for engineers, in excitement, so it has to pay in money.
So I'm not sure where all these people that are so excited to work their asses off for something that will be boring for them will come from (exciting for the businesspeople, as there are very hard business problems, but not for the engineers, as there are no hard tech problems in this domain anymore).
The only option will be to do what FAANG and hedge funds have always done, and either really overpay to force top talent to care about these boring problems, or just settle for average talent with average productivity and average outcomes.
Bahaha. Rigor and performance?? Teslas kill people. SpaceX is cool, but pays fuck all because it’s cool.
I once watched the YouTube video of musk talking about battery prices and buying raw materials on the London exchange, and I thought, wow this guy is so insightful, no wonder his companies do well. It’s not till later that I found out that everything he says is someone else’s idea that he takes credit for.
> I think it'll be fine. You don't need 7000 people to run a micro blogging service. It's really that simple.
When you're generating and distributing and moderating multiple TB of tweets in real time every day to billions of people and also feeding other corporations parts of that data... maybe you do.
Twitter has around 190m daily active users. You're going to struggle to run something like that with an engineering team of 20-30 people (although WhatsApp did exactly that for many years), sure.
But I don't see why an company and an application of that size couldn't be run by a company of, say, 1500 people, instead of 7000. 250 engineering staff, 250 doing moderation/support, 800 doing sales & account management and 100 in management and 100 doing sundry tasks.
250 people moderating AND supporting 190m daily active users??
Let's do some napkin math here:
500 million tweets, let's say 10% are reported, and evenly distributed. That would make for reviewing 200,000 tweets per employee per day. That's 7 tweets that need to be moderated per second for a standard 8 hour day.
190m active users, .1% of which need support daily. On top of 7 tweets per second, that's just shy of three user support tickets per second that they need to manage as well.
And that's without weekends, holidays, sick days, etc.
EDIT: Let's go the other way with napkin math too.
Let's say each content moderator can review 6 tweets per minute.
50m tweets to be moderated at that velocity means you need around 136,000 man hours per day. For an 8 hour day, that's 17,000 employees. Too many.
So you make an ML algorithm that processes the reported tweets, but needs backup and spot checking on 10% of those. 1,700 content moderators (and a team dedicated to building/maintaining the ML report checking algorithm).
Now, about those support requests. Based on my experience from being a CSR for Amazon years ago, you'll probably want 2-3 minutes per support request, and that's if you're sending a form letter back. 1.9m requests at 20 per hour means some 95,000 man-hours per day, or 12k CSRs. Too many. Another ML algorithm (and team to maintain it) and we're down to 1,200 CSRs.
About 3 thousand employees plus their support structure, just to handle tweet reports and CSR requests.
Based on napkin math, 7,000 employees makes a lot of sense to me.
The idea that 10% of tweets are reported is a huge over estimate. I'd say at most 1% of tweets are reported, and it's probably more like 0.1%.
Twitters actual numbers (from https://transparency.twitter.com/en/reports/rules-enforcemen...) show that 11.6m reports were generated in the period July to December 2001, which is roughly 65,000 reports per day. ML could easily reduce this number further, but with 100 employees doing moderation, even without ML, that's 650 reports per day. That's getting towards doable.
Seeing how poorly ML works for moderation (Too many false positives), I don't think it belongs anywhere near it.
The problem is that you could offer a user a path to request a human review moderation action taken by ML, but bad actors that knowingly break rules will just request human review and at that point, the ML is worthless.
Exploring this further. I don't have real numbers but I suspect yours are pretty far off.
10% reported seems high, possibly by as much as an order of magnitude. The overwhelming majority of tweets are vapid and innocuous.
It seems like an ML algorithm could do better than 90%. It doesn't have to be as perfect as driving a car; if it screws up occasionally it will merely annoy users (and probably the users that are most troublesome).
If twitter becomes a more permissive environment, less censorship is necessary. Agree or disagree with it, it means less work for the censors.
Paid subscriptions give you a significant new trust metric for users.
The rest you can farm out to mechanical turk?
250 seems within the realm of possibility. People will complain about you the same way they complain about Google, but they'll keep using your product.
I pointed this out in a sibling, but 10% would also include automatically reviewed tweets for misinformation, covid, and any other language filters they have in place.
Also, having worked for a company that did ML sentiment analysis and content analysis against the twitter firehose, the accuracy of ML was closer to 65% than it was 99%. Yes, the company had a huge in-house crew dedicated to checking that 35%, and monitoring twitter manually for anything missed.
You guys have never worked at a major social media platform and it shows. It takes around that many engineering staff just to run a passable advertising platform. There are so many technical nuances that you cannot even imagine.
Maybe, maybe not. I don’t think the number of engineers needs to scale with the servers. You can scale out servers without scaling out your number of engineers. As far as moderation, Twitter is already poorly moderated and moderation can be outsourced.
The types of things that require scaling out engineers is supporting video embeds from 100s of different video hosting platforms.
I've seen this statement a lot, and I think it's missing something.
Public companies typically have growth as a goal. Twitter was not making a lot of money. Some of these people were working on building a future Twitter that would grow bigger and richer. I'm not saying they were on the path to success, just that I expect a lot of the activity there could be described that way.
Five years ago you could say of Uber 'You don't need 5000 people to run a freelance taxi app', when they had hundreds (thousands?) of people working on autonomous driving. Amazon didn't seem to need scores of backend engineers to run a web store, but now AWS is a huge business. Google employs vast numbers of people but has a relatively small number of impactful products, only some of which make money.
Again, not claiming they were doing it well, just that they were trying stuff beyond maintaining what we see.
So in this hypothetical, the people building the future of the company have achieved nothing during this time and should absolutely be removed or replaced.
i think 7000 is too high as well but don't forget, in a business, the technology part is maybe 10% of the overall effort. There's a lot that goes into running a business beyond the tech.
It adds some complexity, but consider that we know very well how to scale this type of service: E-mail + reflectors (mailing lists), and we know very well how to do parallel mass delivery for the small proportion of accounts with huge numbers of followers.
Scaling this is easily done with decomposition and sharding coupled with a suitable key->value mapping of external id to current shard. I first sharded e-mail delivery and storage for millions of users 23 years ago. It was neither hard nor novel to do then, with hardware slower than my current laptop handling hundreds of thousands of users each.
I have no idea if that is how Twitter ended up doing it. But building it that way is vastly easier to scale than trying to do some variation over joining the timelines of everyone you follow "live" on retrieval, because in models like this the volume of reads tends to massively dominate.
You also don't need to store every tweet, you need to store the id's of the tweets (a KV store of the tweet id to full tweet is also easy to shard), and since they're reasonably chronological the id's can be compressed fairly efficiently (quite a few leading digits of tweet id's are chronological).
You also have straightforward options for "hybrid" solutions, such as e.g. dealing with extreme outliers. Have someone followed by more than X% of total userbase? Cache the most recent N tweets from those accounts on that small set of timelinesyour frontends, and do joins over those few with users who follow them.
Most importantly, it's an extensively well tested pattern in a multitude of systems with follower/following graphs whenever consumers/reads dominate over a period of decades at this point, so behaviours and failure modes are well understood with straightforward, well tested solutions for most challenges you'll run into, which matters in the context of whether it'd be possible to build with a small team.
Put another way: I know from first hand experience you can scale this to millions of users per server on modern hardware, so the number of shards you'd need to be able to manage to deal with Twitter-level volume is lower than the number of servers I've had ops teams manage (you'd need more servers total, because your read load means you'd want extensive caching, as well as storage systems for e.g. images and the like - there's lots of other complexity, but scaling the core timeline functionality is not a complex problem)
I might be underestimating how hard it is to scale microblogging. I most certainly am.
But have you looked at the scale of what Telegram provides both in width and at scale?
Certainly there are celebrities with more followers on Twitter than the largest Telegram channels, but Telegram scales surprisingly far, and I haven't seen it struggle more than once or twice since the start.
They're different problems, but messaging isn't some trivial thing. And a user having a single unified public view of their tweets is pretty much O(n).
WhatsApp is not 'vastly more innovative', and they solved different kinds of problems.
Twitter is a 'universe of 100M connected people'.
WhatsApp mostly connected single entities together.
So, for example, 'real time search' and 'relevant updates'.
Imagine taking a firehose of 100M people's random thoughts, putting that into an index, making it instantly searchable. Now pull up the most relevant thoughts from those 100M to each and every other 100M user.
Now moderate all of it in really subtle ways, whereupon most of the 'negative activity' is tantamount to spam or annoying behaviour, and not anything we might normally consider 'abuse'.
That's an incredibly different challenge and that's only two small artifacts of what they are doing.
Twitter is not rocket science, but it's not trivial either.
Also consider that R&D is usually maybe on 20% of overhead - yes - it takes 'all those other jobs and expenses' to run a company.
Wasn't WhatsApp on track to be cash flow positive?
I know I at least was shouting at them to take my money: it was the perfect HN product, reasonably priced, technically superior and with no ads or tracking.
Twitter has ads serving infra, recommendation systems (timeline, notifications, events, users), user generated events, prediction systems (ads), user graphs. The complexity is from processing and persisting exabytes of data in company owned datacenters. eg. Twitter stores images, videos, user events, user data, tweets/replies. WhatsApp has little persistence outside of metadata maybe? But your messages are not stored in a FB datacenter and if they are I'd be concerned. You can read about their infra in their blog. Comparing p2p messaging versus a distributed social media site with mountains of data and years of iteration in ML systems does not make sense.
I don't disagree that 7000 people is too many for what Twitter has become but Twitter has been at the bleeding edge in terms of building web and data systems that can handle scale (while also open sourcing most of that work).
It’s a messaging service that has a broadcast feature. And for that multicast/broadcast feature you get to have a crappy peer to peer message experience, be limited to small messages, look at ads, surf through unknown algorithm manipulation of what you read, locked in a single system, and be told you might need to pay to either a) prove you’re “real” or b) not see the ads. Sign me up!!
(A blog is also a broadcast messaging service, so I think you’re both right).
Twitter had a loss but had been profitable before.
Twitter has a huge following/user-base worldwide.
The hard part of creating the brand has happened.
He just needs not to break it, trim some fat and appease advertisers. (In a possible recession, so that is the hard part of his job.)
The HARD problem Elon has is of his own creation.
He leveraged massively to bring this deal to fruition.
During a downturn.
So if let us say Tesla stock goes down considerably that might be an issue.
If Twitter does not get called for its debt, Elon is going to make lots of money when he "brings it back to the people," out of pure kindness mind you, and it goes public again or there is a secondary offering. He bought it in bad times at "low brand value."
The other value to Elon is he will increase his brand. Elon's value is in his name. Twitter can help him there, as it does daily.
Edit: P.S. Oh, a bit more related: It will get sued. In fact it already is in the process from my understanding for botching/ignoring California WARN act regarding layoffs. So... good way of spending money. And he can not demand them to waive it off with a severance letter.
"When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact." -- Warren Buffett
One thing is for sure: It will be absolute hell for those who will have to keep things running in the coming months. For better or worse Twitter infra is extremely comlex. 50% gone would be very rough even if the cuts were made thoughtfully and things were in KTLO-only mode. But that's not the case. Musk has already been pushing changes through skipping the normal process and will likely continue doing so, aggressively. Not a good combination.
It should be illegal to buy a company with money you borrow against the value of that company. When your primary financial goal is servicing debt over building long term value - the incentives become completely misaligned.
agree to an extant, but we do it all the time with mortgages, as in buy with loan against value of the asset. the only difference is that bank wouldn't give me a 2M loan against 1M house. In this case this seems like a play on credibility of Musk that banks & other investors are willing to overpay. IMO its a mistake & misaligns the incentives but lets see.
I do however feel that there should be civility in these layoffs regardless of what Musk's belief's about performance of these employees (or Musk fanboi's). There should be proper severance/healthcare and prorated vesting.
But it doesn't hurt the pubic good if my house gets repossessed. When companies are run into the ground, it results in massive layoffs and less consumer choice. Or in this case the loss of an important and unique disseminator of information.
Similar stuff is happening with most of the local papers in the country. Although in that case the whole business model is dying. But vulture capitalists are hastening the demise by squeezing every the lifeblood out of the business and destroying what's left of the public goodwill.
>But it doesn't hurt the pubic good if my house gets repossessed...
Actually it does when large number of houses get repoed. it did happen in 2008. that was because of securitization & rating mistake by banks but that speaks to my point, if the banks have a bad valuation model & give out unservicable loans then they have to eat the loss, just that everybody was doing that in 2007 because of repeal on many laws around such speculation.
this seems to be a similar thing as long as it does not happens to be systematically tilted towards overvaluation but I'd argue businesses (esp public ones) are more closely watched and market does a semi reasonable job of valuing them over time. personally there is not a whole lot of growth left in twitter (or FB) except for changing to a new business model like identity verification or eat into FB's lunch ;-). But as I said we'll see.
To me the key factor is not if Elons other companies would have succeeded without him. The key factor is that he started all other companies or joined just after the start. Twitter on the other hand has a lot of history and past leaderships.
On the other hand, I think Twitter has so much momentum, it will take a lot of time to implode if Musk makes (even a lot of) mistakes.
I'm curious about whether a paid-for social media business can survive. We so thoroughly educated everyone that social media is free, and there seems to be such resistance to the idea of paying for it, that I doubt it. But I tend to agree with ol' Musky that this has to move from the ad-supported model to improve.
I'm also curious at the rumblings from US politicians. What would happen if the USA nationalised Twitter? Given that politicians from all over the world use it too. A case for a UN intervention?
So many people I know are leaving Twitter, but the political class seems to need it, so I don't see it dying any time soon.
200 billion in value at least. Not kidding. You’re going to see a Twitter that’s has not innovated at all in 10 years start making changes at crazy speed. All social platform competitors will be attacked.
There is at least one extreme data point that says you can do an incredible amount with very few people: WhatsApp (~30 engineers @ 500M daily users)
At that point WhatsApp had first class clients for iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Nokia and Web + a server backend that scaled to 2B+ daily users.
This doesn't happen by accident. WhatsApp founders created an environment where this could happen:
- focusing on a few things (saying no a lot)
- everyone on the team is highly capable
- a work environment that allows people to focus on work (minimal meetings, good long term planning, fixing root causes vs constant firefighting...)
This isn't a too great demonstration of "you only need" because there will be a lot of brain drain issues with this company, worry and drama internally resulting in bad productivity.
Oh absolutely, but at that point you're judging more the qualities of Elon's ability to lead a company then the consequences of having too many or too few people to run a big website like Twitter.
> I feel bad for the folks losing their job because that always sucks
I'm not trying to minimize the fact that this sucks for those affected, but let's not also forget that prior to the acquisition, the employees were given multiple opportunities to unionize and/or turn Twitter into an employee-owned company. This is the direction they collectively chose to go in instead.
Were they, though? Or would Twitter have employed the standard Big Tech response, which is to immediately terminate anyone who does the barest amount of serious organizing?
This is an opportunity to go back to RSS with perhaps some extensions. Nothing would feel more satisfying than downloading your tweets to host them wherever by yourself.
>Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years?
I'll bite on this one. For reference, I personally believe Elon Musk is a degenerate blowhard who has literally zero concept of what life actually is like for billions of people on the planet, nor does he care. I believe he belongs to the class of people known as 'parasites'. Here's my take:
1 year: Initially, we'll see improvements. Dead weight is cut, along with some live branches, but we see improvements. More free and open speech, I believe he will follow through on that. Fringe groups have a louder voice and can find people to join their causes, leading to further polarization of politics across the globe, and especially in the US.
3 Years: Quality and use is declining as celebrities and politicians have begun to move away from Twitter due to constant abuse from toxic individuals, up to and including "vague" threats of violence. A minor celebrity blames Twitter for their recent issue with a fan stalking them.
5 Years: Twitter is dead. There was a political assassination that was formed, planned, and tweeted/broadcast from Twitter live. This may be a state level politician or federal, but it will be someone many people know the name of. Elon Musk blames the engineers for not properly implementing his AI software intended to prevent this sort of thing from happening.
> Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has revealed that some mornings she starts her day by reading the death threats she has received from men on Twitter.
Making a death threat, or a threat of violence, is not protected speech, it is a crime. Can you clarify why you think the new owners will look the other way at crimes being committed on their platform?
Also, if it was already happening (up to and including "minor celebrity blames Twitter for their recent issue with a fan stalking them"), is this the trajectory you see regardless of ownership? And if not how will new ownership contribute to it?
> Can you clarify why you think the new owners will look the other way at crimes being committed on their platform?
Because, put plainly: I don't think there's much reason to expect Musk to take them seriously.The previous management had only minimal capability to curb this behavior, or claimed they did, because of scale. They'd deal with cases that rose to the top, but not a lot more. Musk, on the other hand, is ideologically congruent with much of it, and there are no indications that his yelling about "free speech, especially for the right wing" comes with consequences or even minor disapproval for that speech when you use it to threaten to kill somebody.
I always wonder why the management needs to deal with this. I believe in state run services of which one is the police. If someone threats you, go to the police (and then with proper procedures the company needs to be forced to help prosecution E.g. by a judge). I do understand the police is reluctant to do something (at least here in Germany, "Die Polizei ist nicht im Internet, oh wei oh wei!"), but privaticing crime management is not the future. And I did go to the police several times because of things that happened "on the internet" and was helped.
> Musk, on the other hand, is ideologically congruent with much of it, and there are no indications that his yelling about "free speech, especially for the right wing" comes with consequences or even minor disapproval for that speech when you use it to threaten to kill somebody.
Absence of indication is not indication of absence though.
Another way to look at it that by having less strict moderation, and keeping moderation mainly focused on unprotected speech such as incitement or threats, you have more resources to go after unprotected speech.
>Can you clarify why you think the new owners will look the other way at crimes being committed on their platform?
The old owners only did what they had to when the threats floated to the surface of the lagoon. The new owner has explicitly said that free speech means free speech. I believe overt threats of violence (read: I will kill X on June 5, 2023) will be addressed, but anything that can be played off as "satire" or "joking" (Read: somebody should kill X. lol jk) will be ignored, if not promoted for the extra eyes and clicks.
>is this the trajectory you see regardless of ownership?
No. I believe with old ownership we would see what we currently have in perpetuity. There was no innovation from Twitter, but there was also no real negative change either. Status quo.
>And if not how will new ownership contribute to it?
From what I read/see, Elon Musk espouses the view that people who disagree with him are lesser than. I believe he genuinely thinks he is better than everyone else; smarter, stronger, faster, better. I believe he will see people who act and think the same way (read: toxic) on Twitter, and automatically defend them if not outright promote them. This group will include people who incite violence.
At some point I think there was a trending hashtag on Twitter #killallmen - a direct call to commit violence of the worst kind on a demographic. Did the previous ownership take it seriously? What was their response? Did they just dismiss it as a joke?
The new owners have quite loudly and explicitly promised that there will be less content moderation than their was before. And specifically less moderation of conservatives.
If Twitter, under the previous leadership was full of death threats to leftists, and the new leadership is promising less moderation actions taken against the sort of people who make those threats, it seems reasonable to assume that those threats will continue or get worse
> The new owners have quite loudly and explicitly promised that there will be less content moderation than their was before.
Less moderation to the point of not taking actions against content which is criminal, i.e. threatening violence?
> new leadership is promising less moderation actions taken against the sort of people who make those threats
I think there is some leap in logic here, which is that conservatives are more likely to be criminals, but if that holds then banning them from the platform for non criminal offences will reduce the amount of criminals on the platform, however you will also be banning people who are not criminals in the process, and this does not really seem like a terribly morally sound thing to be doing. How many steps from banning people from twitter for conservative views to reduce crime to jailing people who frequent bars because they are more likely to be criminals? If your only value is to reduce crime, then I'm not sure I see where the breaks are.
The correlation runs the other way. Mass shooters and people who carry out acts of political violence in the US are overwhelmingly driven by conspiracy "logic" that has recently been embraced by the right; Qanon, pizza parlor conspiracies, racism, etc.
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. I think you're probably off the mark, but these are very reasonable and falsifiable predictions and this is what most of this comment chain should be.
>5 Years: Twitter is dead. There was a political assassination that was formed, planned, and tweeted/broadcast from Twitter live.
The internet has existed for decades with laxer moderation and nothing like this has happened - seems like you're making some hidden assumptions about how the political climate will evolve that are pretty questionable.
>1 year: Initially, we'll see improvements. Dead weight is cut, along with some live branches, but we see improvements. More free and open speech, I believe he will follow through on that. Fringe groups have a louder voice and can find people to join their causes, leading to further polarization of politics across the globe, and especially in the US.
Twitter has no real impact on polarization on politics especially in the US.
The problems of the US are first past the post elections, the broken 19th century style primaries, people literally not having enough money to take a day off to vote and/or being too burnt out daily to give a shit about politics.
The result is the extremes get a very very loud voice since they are the only ones with nothing better to do. Twitter suddenly being more "free and open" means the extremes get an even louder voice.
Your average person making up most of the population just wants to kick back and relax from the daily grind. Not go argue on twitter.
I'm not sure why the downvotes. Your predictions don't seem any wilder than a higher post that's all sunshine and unicorns, and in 3-5 years yours can be definitively answered.
Twitter has already done essentially nothing about overt threats, much less vague ones, against anyone who wasn't a twitter-staff legible good-guy celebrity.
The toxic threats even sometimes come from twitter staff and insiders, for example when Coinbase announced their no-politics-at-work policy, Twitter's former CEO Dick Costolo tweeted in reply that that Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong would be "lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I’ll happily provide video commentary".
My guess is they will be forced to retreat from a lot of international markets as they don’t have the legal and moderation staff to keep up with regulation.
Critical is mostly subjective to whom you ask. In one way everyone is critical, in another no-one is critical (Except E.g. Ive or Jobs).
That said, I would think they are axing critical people. Then struggle and either fix it or go under. Whenever I was involved in layoffs, critical people have been laid off (from my perspective).
As a manager I was forced to lay off critical people before M&A. Because they we're critical positions I did rehire the positions after acquisition.
Twitter will integrate with blueskyweb.org and the lightning protocol which will bridge users into web5. This will create a Cambrian explosion of innovation in the consumer social space, and begin the end of web2 social platforms like Facebook and Tiktok. The twitter social graph will be used to bootstrap a true Wechat competitor that is based on open protocols and data. Either that or it goes up in flames within 6 months.
> The app is simple but doing simple things at scale is hard. I wonder if we'll see more downtime and issues now.
So, here's what I've never figured out...
Once your app is built, and you've figured out how to scale it, and everything is autoscaling nicely, and you've reached the critical mass Twitter has...why do you still need all the engineers? Why do you need to keep growing?
At some point, isn't the scaling solved? Once you have a platform that can handle 400M MAUs, what more is there to build?
Does it really take 1,000 engineers to maintain? I'd think automation could take care of most grunt work involved with maintenance.
I think the issue with these massive scale apps is that people want better and fresher features which are not always well defined and get lost in the maze of product development of a huge company. They have to make decisions, do we go with web3 stuff or do we improve current NLP system etc etc. Making decisions is much easier for a small startup than a behemoth of twitters size. And yes, it takes many people. 1000 engineers? Maybe not, bloat has set in at that point, but a few hundred for sure.
Once your app gets to that level, even keeping the lights on requires work. Third party dependencies don’t stop updates, security or otherwise. Laws and regulations change. Advertisers demand features that aren’t seen by the general public. Multiple SRE teams are needed to handle oncall rotations, outages, etc. And now that you have thousands of employees, you need to start building automated HR and IT tooling.
I'd say it's typical discourse in today's world to consider Musk either a total failure or the greatest genius ever. Everything has to be boiled down to this simple Disney-like binary.
Anyway, on this one I consider the chance of failure to be high, from a financial point of view but also because a social network is not an engineering challenge. That said, he seems to seek out such unlikely adventures.
I think Twitter will first take a massive hit before it rises to new heights, if it does.
That was not what I was trying to say. I meant that it's not JUST tech, it involves a huge amount of politics, legislation, privacy, government relations, etc.
So looking at other siblings comments in this subthread, sounds like Elon is a genius, rigor in future Twitter, high calibre talent blah blah blah.
Even if that may end up being true that suggests Twitter today is full of mediocre/subpar employees. Were Parag and other execs just rewarded for bringing Twitter to a sacrifice at the altar? Dang indeed!
If Elon "pulls it off" and shows other tech company leadership boards "you can get by with 1k employees instead of 7k" (or whatever the final number ends up being), what does that mean for the future of tech jobs?
> Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years?
what I hope is that it shrinks to about 1/20th its current size. And then many many smaller platforms spring up. I think one thing that makes social media hard to manage is the sheer scale. It's likely much easier to manage/moderate a smaller social network than a huge one. Also, it wouldn't be as dramatic to be kicked off a platform because then you'd just go somewhere else.
if not that, then i hope Musk moves it from the users being the product to the users being the customer. Charge $10 for 1,000 tweets but keep it free to read. Or maybe charge money for rate of tweets like $10 gets you 5 tweets a day. Make it cost money to engage. Twitter would probably shrink (which is good IMO) but also make more money ( which is good ) and make mobrule, massive information warfare etc cost actual money.
Having to pay to tweet would be the death of Twitter. It wouldn't just shrink, it would be thoroughly decimated. It would initiate a vicious spiral in which Twitter becomes less attractive to read because fewer people are using it to tweet, which causes fewer people to feel the need to tweet, etc. As the audience shrinks big names leave the platform (because getting attention was the name of the game for them), causing even more of the rank-and-file to leave. Advertiser revenue would plummet. Any Twitter that does possibly survive would be a zombie, so minimally profitable there'd be no conceivable way of keeping up with those interest payments.
I get the point information warfare, but you may as well just wish for Twitter and other social media platforms to outright die.
No, the bigger they are the more useful they are to advertisers. The best social network i've ever been a part of is one dedicated to a hobby i'm in with about 1k users max.
and they are successful by interoperating, until one becomes more popular than the others and turns proprietary. (I just want to get my prediction in also)
So looking at other siblings comments in this subthread, sounds like Elon is a genius, rigor in future Twitter, high calibre talent blah blah blah.
Even if that may end up being true that suggests Twitter today is full of mediocre/subpar employees. Were Parag and other execs just rewarded for bringing Twitter to a sacrifice at the altar? Dang indeed!
> Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years?
1: Profitable
2: More signal, less noise
3: Significantly less misinformation
4: (Maybe) A reliable way to get news
Personally, I'm eating popcorn on this one. I think Musk got himself in trouble for letting his big mouth yap, and he fired the execs as revenge. As a software developer who's seen good and bad organizations, I'm very curious about the layoffs.
Considering day 1 the new head of Twitter posted false information about the Pelosi attack from a site known to publish fake news, I'm going to guess this probably won't be the case.
And on day two the Biden white house was "fact checked" so brutally on a tweet that they ended up deleting it. That would never have happened under the previous regime. A republican white house - sure, but not to Biden.
Biden’s statement wasn’t wrong. The fact check just provided a statement stating that the reason social security payments were the highest they’ve ever been is because they are automatically tied to CPI.
It’s weird to editorialize fact checks. If Biden said the payments were the highest ever, but the payments were actually lower, then sure add a fact check and provide the real number.
It’s honestly an example of how much of a mess Elon is stepping in with this venture.
Bullshit. ". . . through President Biden’s leadership" is objectively false. It's through the CPI adjustment he had nothing to do with. Even if you leave that out it is intentionally misleading.
It's the sort of lie the media (rightfully) wouldn't let Trump get away with.
This is my issue too. Politicians have seemed to abandoned reality. Why not though, its what they get rewarded for.
Politician X makes a claim that would be torn to shreds in a setting where people are at least trying to be honest. Politician X then gets thousands of supporters blindly agreeing or having meta discussions about almost anything besides what matters.
Until we as a people stop rewarding this behavior, it will only continue.
Except he did get away with it. My wife works in Medicare compliance for a large insurer and under Trump, every single communication they received from Medicare about an initiative literally included the language "Through the leadership of President Trump, ..."
> Bullshit. ". . . through President Biden’s leadership" is objectively false.
Unless you want to take the position that it was "biden's leadership" that caused the high inflation, then you could say it was objectively true but uhhh... not something they should be bragging about.
If it were the Trump whitehouse though people would probably be asking if the administration broke the law by removing the tweet and thereby causing the removal of the 1A protected 'fact check'.
His "free speech" views seem likely to result in more misinformation, more noise, and especially more harassment and annoying Firstname Bunchofnumbers making people's mentions even more unusable.
I can't see a path to profitability. In particular, "cutting to profitability" never works in momentum driven tech companies. I think he's underestimated how many people love their twitter community but hate twitter as a platform steward.
I think he will try to make it more "facebook like" in terms of moderation line, which is generally considered to be too rightwing by the MSM , and they will attack him viciously, like they attack FB. He either will sell it or it will be the new Yahoo, my bet is the former.
Twitter won't die, but it won't make much of a profit either. Elon Musk will find another buyer in 2 years for $25 billion and make most of his money back while leaving the company saddled with most of the $11 billion in debt financing.
I think where elon will take twitter is a sort of idea -> project -> mass colaberation, society sized incubator, were news and policy discussions are just a byproduct. But may im just projecting. But it would make kind of sense, to have it all in one app, from pitch, to finance, to realization
Twitter is a toxic clown party lama joust. It's nothing but a means for millions of narcissistic people to decorate themselves with signifier quotes and feel-good platitudes. twitter is where progressives go to sniff each others farts... So good for Elon for charging them 8 dollars a month for their little blue checks. What an embarrassment to my generation twitter is and it makes me ashamed that people in my industry created such a heinous (platform).
Musk and friends compare Twitter to other tech companies and see that it's ratio of employees to revenue is lowest. He therefore thinks he must halve the number employees and/or increase revenue to get this ratio up.
It would be nice if revenue and employee count were completely independent. Heck, you could fire everyone except one person and have an incredibly high ratio! (Don’t fire that last person or else you’ll get a divide by zero error.)
Interestingly, he’s already tweeting out complaints about a massive drop in revenue. His theory is that this is caused not by his erratic behavior, but instead by activists who hate free speech: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588538640401018880?s=46...
Twitter could have let him out of the deal but forced it. This is all on the (now former) board of directors who probably received a nice payout for a new mansion.
This was not an option with a publicly owned company. For the board members to walk away from this offer would have breached their fiduciary duty. They certainly benefitted as did everyone else with stock.
That fee was for external factors causing the deal to fail. Musk was already committed. His attempt to walk away was construed as breach of contract, and he would be liable for much more than the fee if that had happened.
I'll ignore for the moment questions about what "activists" is supposed to mean and whether it refers to a real group capable of making unified decisions. Regardless, it's just not great for leadership to blame a revenue drop on unrelated third parties even if those third parties are working against the company and taking credit for the revenue drop. This isn't like complaining that trolls came in and review bombed your movie on IMDb. Revenue is an actual metric. If the claim is that the revenue numbers are only very briefly down because advertisers are only pulling spend in response to some temporary PR issue, then sure, make that argument.
Who is "they"? Activist is an expansive noun that covers every possible viewpoint, so this is meaningless without further qualification. Is it randos on Twitter, or someone with actual clout?
Only 3 years ago Twitter had 5000 employees. They now have 8000 in 2022. That's a massive headcount growth for a company whose stock price declined significantly since then.
There have been lots of new features like Twitter Spaces, tipping, voice tweets, Twitter Blue, Patreon-style subscriptions for content creators, controlling who can reply to your tweets, etc. However, some of the new features like fleets (temporary tweets) were deprecated.
You didn't see Twitter Spaces, Fleets, Birdwatch, Tweet Editing, and Twitter Blue? Some of those features have been successful for them, some not, but they've been releasing features.
This is an ignorant question: to what extent is it relevant that a hardware company like Apple effectively employs/contracts services of e.g. Foxconn to the tune of probably a million employees?
It feel a little bit misleading to take a look at company in isolation, as different companies have different dependencies and depths of integration.
Great point. Revenue reflects the value added of the entire supply chain, not just Apple's. EBITDA/employee instead of revenue/employee would be a more appropriate measure. GP's numbers revised:
Twitter EBITDA per employee: $211mn / 8k employees = $26k per employee
Google (Alphabet) EBITDA per employee: $93.7bn / 135k employees = $694k per employee
Apple EBITDA per employee: $130.5bn / 154k employees = $847k per employee
Twitter EBITDA per employee if 3k instead of 8k: $211mn / 3k employees = $70k per employee
Apple's a funny one when it comes to staff numbers as well - they operate over 500 stores around the world, so their employee count is somewhat "boosted" by that.
Purely looking at the math and the product portfolio, I would argue that since Twitter is such a single-product company, with a near-monopoly in this specific niche, it should have a much higher ratio.
Given these factors, I wouldn't be surprised if Mush cuts the employee base in half again.
I think the employees are pretty expensive to keep, even compared to other tech companies. Twitter now has a lot of debt to service from the acquisition and I think the employees now get cash instead of RSUs (paid based on the acquisition price) whereas employees at other tech companies have effectively seen comp decrease as the stock prices went down.
So there might be some philosophical attempt to reduce headcount. There might also be some attempt to hire more later and at a lower price (or at least one that isn’t artificially high).
This is a great point. Employees at Twitter may be vesting RSUs that need to be converted at Elon's inflated purchase price. Even laying off those people today and rehiring all of them tomorrow would save the company a boatload of money.
At previous places I’ve been at it seems like it’s easier for higher ups to just blanket fire people and then rehire the important ones once people in the know complain. Not super efficient but definitely faster and comical in a depressing way.
“Satya: Thx for the chat. Will stay in touch. And will for sure follow-up on Teams feedback!”
“jack [presumably Dorsey]: I'm off the twitter board mid May and then completely out of company. I intend to do this work and fix our mistakes. Twitter started as a protocol. It should have never been a company. That was the original sin.”
Larry [Ellison; Oracle] I agree that it has huge potential... and it would be lots of fun
Elon: Absolutely:)
[2022-04-26] Larry: Since you think I should come in for at least $2B... I'm in for $2B
The way employees were treated was beyond disgraceful. Really feel sorry for my younger self who believed that Musk truly cares about Humanity. Never ever hero worship a billionaire while thinking he will change the world. They are all ego manic pos hungry for more and more control. Small things you can do a) If you care about environment don't buy an over expensive electric car. Think about efforts to improve Public transport b) SpaceX is not about putting man on Mars. It is about elon wanting to control world's internet through Starlink. Whenever a small nation falls for the trap raise your voice.
Starlink's total bandwidth is about the same as a small regional ISP. There is no way it will ever "control the world's internet".
Starlink will serve many places where terrestrial wired or wireless access doesn't make sense, including oceans, very rural areas, uninhabited areas, airplanes, rockets, etc. It will never be able to serve 1% of a high density city. It will never control anything on the scale of the world's internet. This is an absurd conspiracy theory.
There's no source or confirmation that 1,300 units were actually down, and, if they were down - it looks like because the service wasn't being paid for?
Do you expect companies to provide services for free? The hypocrisy that Elon pointed out is that the military industrial complex is getting paid billions, but the ideological mob via captured MSM is smearing him for no longer wanting to provide free/subsidized services?
P.S. Their "withdrepw" typo in the article, doesn't bode well for overall quality.
Edit to add: Found another source confirming the units were down, oh - and look at that - it was due to non-payment. People demonizing Musk for war mongerers not paying their bills eh? Let the smear campaigns continue..
"Blackmail" is a strange word for "we decided to stop paying the monthly service fee and service ended as expected."
> Before the terminals went completely dark, Ukraine's Ministry of Defense made a request in early October to their British counterparts to pick up the $3.25 million monthly bill. The batch of terminals were also rotated out as concerns grew that service could be turned off, in order to minimize the impact, the source said.
> A British official said after discussions between the ministries "it was agreed there were higher priority military capabilities." Among many other channels of support, the UK has been flying thousands of Ukrainian troops to Britain for training before they head back to the frontlines.
It's possible for a perfectly reasonable person to justifiably strongly dislike Elon Musk, but what you're doing here is not that.
I think it's similar to small construction companies using their staff during the winter to work on the owner's new rental properties.
They can easily scale it up or down depending on how other projects/priorities are going and how many people don't have tasks to do. All of the deadlines and KPIs are internal and they don't expose themselves to lawsuits or financial penalties when they have to delay something.
In the case of spacex, it's even more beneficial because they need to launch rockets anyway for testing. Sending them to space empty is a wasted opportunity.
Starlink has massive DoD potential, like it or not. Also could be big for banking. Their client facing aspect of it will eventually just be piggybacking off of those two industries.
There are other billionaires out there doing good things, without needing to have a weekly news scandal:
Bill gates foundation has made tremendous progress with healthcare in developing countries. He’s probably made as much progress that can made in these countries as the walls he’s hitting seem to be corrupt/incompetent governments rather and money or technical.
Mark Cuban’s cost plus drugs company is making a life changing difference for Americans paying a lot per month in medicine, often saving their customers hundreds of dollars per month, and committed to expanding their selection of generic medicines.
"The way employees were treated was beyond disgraceful."
Sorry I may have missed this in the article–was it something beyond being laid off? Being laid off sucks (it's happened to me) but it's a normal part of business operations.
They are treated like disposable trash, tossed into the wind by a capricious ultra-rich jerk who bought the company on a whim. The consequences of that poorly thought out “decision” meant the purchase had to be a leveraged buyout which necessitated heavy cost cutting.
How is this not disgraceful? This not “normal business operations”, this is peoples lives being torn apart while the ultra rich play games with their livelihoods.
It goes both ways. Employees get to quit at a moments notice, leaving the company scrambling to find a replacement at potentially great costs. The internet is replete with stories of employees quitting, leaving their companies in shambles trying to figure out how to fill the void. I choose to care about my employer and my employer chooses to care about me. I could make a lot more money at a company that does not care, but I value that relationship more than money. Everyone should have the choice.
Most employees have to work in order to make an income. To assume that it's at all common for employees to just jump ship and leave a mess behind is inaccurate
> leaving the company scrambling to find a replacement at potentially great costs
And to this point, most employees are redundant. Other employees can pick up the slack. A well managed organization usually doesn't let the bus factor get too high. And if an org isn't well managed, it's not fair to blame employees for wanting to leave
> I choose to care about my employer and my employer chooses to care about me. I could make a lot more money at a company that does not care, but I value that relationship more than money. Everyone should have the choice.
I think this is closer to the mark. Employment is first a legal agreement, but also a social agreement. And this is the social agreement that Musk is destroying through his game of chicken with Twitter. He doesn't get a pass because "it goes both ways"
> And this is the social agreement that Musk is destroying through his game of chicken with Twitter. He doesn't get a pass because "it goes both ways"
It is a choice that is going to cost his company money. Talented potential employees are going to be well aware of the potential to be fired without a second thought(or severance) on the whim of Elon from now on. Twitter will have to increase compensation or settle for less talented individuals to balance that potential. That is where he does not "get a pass".
I agree of course from a human social standpoint that it would be moral and appropriate to give as much notice and severance as possible. However, there are many factors that come into play when making decisions of this nature. I do not know the full compensation package of the employees(were they already overcompensated?) or the total financial status of the company. The company could in theory be on the brink of failure. If Elon gave the fired employees a sweet parting deal and the company subsequently goes broke, leading to even more layoffs that would be terrible for the remaining employees. Furthermore, what of the employees that have to be fired or never hired in order to compensate the employees that are already leaving? I wonder how the vote would go from the employees if a company proposed the following:
"Would you rather we fire without severance pay 100 employees tomorrow or fire 150 with severance pay next month?" That's essentially the question that happens in management when a layoff is happening. Sadly many people fail to see that 50 jobs were saved in the first scenario when they read headlines about layoffs.
Either way we think, the complexities of human interactions in the markets and business is fascinating!
> "Would you rather we fire without severance pay 100 employees tomorrow or fire 150 with severance pay next month?"
that assumes management is acting in good faith towards the employees, more often than not that decision is tilted towards shareholders ie.. if they think they can cut 150 employees and make it work then it just becomes a choice between cutting 150 employees with or without severance as soon as possible. the amount of severence is essentially decided by local laws and prevailing standards but mind you the game is mostly give as little as needed.
How is it disgraceful to lay off a rich tech worker who isn't needed in the company anymore and can add more value elsewhere in the economy? This is a big part of economic prosperity that we all enjoy. Sometimes people need to get fired. It sucks, but if everyone was in a jobs protection racket, that would suck much much more.
I was one of those suckers though I kept it mostly to myself (& dont own tesla stock or a tesla). I still do feel Musk's contribution in accelerating EV adoption is invaluable and help markets get over a 'internal combustion local minima'. Also he didn't have to use his pile of money to land rockets and make space launch cheap so I give him credit for that. BUT thats where it ends for me, IMO we need a barely winning, underdog Elon much more than this flamboyant, impulsive, A*h0le billioniare.
what I worry about now is that musk fanbois are willing to bend the rules (in peacetime not covid panic or early days of EVs) for him will set a horrible pressident for workers in general.
In my view no single medium (the media is the message) has done more to weaken the quality of public discourse in the world than Twitter. But maybe Facebook proves that even if you're allowed to use prose crazies dominate so maybe the issue is deeper
I read this kind of comment all the time on HN, it’s so confusing to me. I only joined twitter 2 years ago because there are a large number of high quality tweet threads on finance, ML, NLP, breaking news etc. A lot of the time I get information earlier on twitter than I do on any other platform. If anything, for me, twitter has strengthened the quality of public discourse.
If some big event happens I can read an expert’s tweet thread on the matter 30 minutes after the event happened instead of reading an editorialized piece with a bunch of random comments. I was reading tweet threads on the recession 1 year ago with deep analysis from experts. When the FOMC meeting happens 1 hour later I get a thread on the financial implications, another on the economic implications and another on the political implications. You don’t get that quality of information at that speed on any other platform.
I strongly suspect most of these comments about the quality of twitter are actually angry that the people you follow post opinions you don’t like. I see political opinions I don’t like all the time from my finance follows, I just scroll away not sure why that is a problem?
If anything Facebook and YouTube’s algorithm were the most damaging in 2010s because they heavily promoted extremist content to random people. I don’t see that from twitter especially not at the same volume as 2010s FB and YT.
I don’t think that’s true. Twitter is/was the only remaining news medium where experts had a voice. During the pandemic doctors and infectious diseases experts were using it to call or government blow hards. Now that’s going to die as well and we may return to complete darkness.
Complete darkness? O no, not the dark ages before 2006, when we had walk uphill to school and uphill to go back home. Or I could try to more direct and say: that's utter crap.
> Twitter is/was the only remaining news medium
And twitter is an important reason that other, more reliable and informative news outlets went under.
There were still some newspapers left in 2006. By 2022 they are all basically dead.
Also standards of journalism integrity were bad then but they are abysmal now. Very few journalists actually investigate stories, most just re print press release.
That's just blatantly wrong. There is still great journalism out there and the depth and breath of quality news is now reaching farther than ever before.
But of course you are right: who could have foreseen how much bad news people want to read and how little they want to pay for quality news. Why do people watch Fox or read Murdock media rags?
I saw the opposite. "Experts" being totally wrong and fear mongering without evidence. It was rural governments that said "prove it".
Recall how various studies on covid lethality, vaccination and masks were wildly different. The Israel study is a quick one. This is exactly what happened when influenza was new in the 1920's.
Yet the "experts" made it sound like everyone is going to die if you are not wearing a mask 24/7 and isolating. This is what "do no harm" ideology becomes - causing mass harm to everyone to potentially protect a few.
I’ve been following epidemiology experts and no one implied “everyone dying”, nor recommended “24/7” mask wearing (rather cited lowered transmission rates) and yes isolation lowered transmission rates too.
The flak they had to take for inconveniencing the lifestyle of people in the interest of prioritizing health outcomes for all, is insane.
If anything, we learned that the thought of care for others at a small cost to the self is extremely triggering for many Americans and is easily politicized as a wedge issue to influence voting.
Agreed , the experts showed us that a minor lifestyle change can significantly reduce covid transmission. Instead we as a country did all the wrong things and blamed experts when government officials failed by instituting random non evidence based policies
If you believe "influenza was new in the 1920's", you have bigger things to worry about than this discussion. I suggest going to check on the paperwork for that bridge you bought.
What you’re witnessing on HN and elsewhere is politics masquerading as objective and ostensibly, a thoughtful discourse.
None of the articles on HN have much of good faith discussion. I just see it as “progressives are pissed because their platform of power is being seized”. A lot of that relied on platform censorship on places like Twitter.
Just now, the WhiteHouse account is being fact checked. That doesn’t sit well with progressives.
This isn't some conspiracy theory, we have the current Biden Administration working with Big Tech to censor speech. "Public health" is just a trope under far more insiduous political agenda for power: https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...
Isn't White House supposed to keep records? They are not supposed to delete stuff.
The white house press releases have been a total disaster. I thought we had it bad in the previous admin. Lies after lies told to American public. Much of this stuff goes unchallenged on all social media.
I see Twitter as possibly working up to the ideal of "crowd sourcing" the truth. If Musk does what he seems to be saying he will do -- and take the training wheels off the moderation, and get the government out of it -- we might be left with a system that really can sort out the truth from fiction. Or, at least, present both sides, and let people decide for themselves, without hiding one side.
The panopticon they’ve build is bigger and wider (sharing data between Insta, WhatsApp etc). I don’t know what would be the “Cambridge Analytica of Twitter” but time will tell.
Is that really Twitter's fault? Please go through this thread right here and see how many of the comments would fit in a tweet. Many of them also match (or exceed) the Twitter standard for lack of basic humanity. The appetite was there. If Twitter hadn't provided the outlet, some essentially identical alternative would have. It's quite likely that some other will do the same after Musk finishes driving Twitter into the ground.
The platform isn't the problem. The people using whatever platform they can find to spread an anti-democratic anti-intellectual anti-humanitarian message are. I'm sorry you don't want to see that.
that's literally the very mechanism that weakens public discourse because it turns discourse into a 280 word soundbite popularity contest.
Productive and democratic discourse consists of people assembling a community of their peers eye-to-eye to solve local issues, not billionaires and dictators addressing a mob like Mussolini on the Palazzo Venezia with a megaphone.
You’re missing the point of their comment. If the medium is the problematic thing being focused on in their comment then who the communicating parties are is not significant.
A lot of people reading this aren't going to understand what you mean by "checkout Postman". I'm guessing you mean "read Neil Postman's books"? If so, I agree - especially Amusing Ourselves to Death.
Why is it important to directly communicate with or even "listen to unfiltered" the world's dictators and billionaires? As for communicating directly with politicians it's very unlikely that the vast majority of them manage their own social media accounts. You probably have the same level of direct communication as you do sending their office a letter or an email.
Nonsense. This a big beef with me about Twitter. It purports to be an egalitarian platform where you can "directly communicate" with significant people, but the sheer volume and signal-to-noise ratio of popular accounts means that they will never even see your comment, let alone reply, except in extraordinarily rare examples.
I checked out Twitter again after a few months absence. There is good content, for sure, but by crikey, most of what passes for political discourse amounts to a stream of non sequiturs and ipse dixit (assertion without proof).
> Reddit. Reddit is by far the worst and has the most impact.
I think this may be viewing things through a bubble - my baby boomer parents don't know what reddit is, neither do any of their friends, but you better believe they and all their Facebook friends are all aware of all the latest crazy conspiracy theories. I think Reddit, while popular for certain demographics, is far less wide spread than some of the other social media.
I'll go out on a limb and say it's not entirely the specific medium's fault. It's the people.
It did not used to be this bad with the exception of 4chan (of course), and the state of discourse in life has degraded so far, we even see it at the highest levels of government. Every year that goes by I fear we're losing more and more of our common decency and appreciation for our shared humanity. I have seen families torn apart because of this.
I've started going out of my way to meet my neighbors and smile at strangers.
I deleted that because it colored what I said enough for you to miss my message. I have no agenda, but I think your comment proves my point that there's something off about how we're communicating right now.
Fair but I didn't miss what you wrote, you choose to explicitly choose an example that would get eyes rolling. Which, if I read your comment correctly, you accept the responsibility with "there's something off about how we're communicating right now".
Inflammatory language get's more reaction - well documented and your probably aware of that.
During the initial COVID outbreak, it was one of the only decent information sources I could find.
Twitter's nice because it gives you fast and easily available tools to curate your own feed. I could quickly follow a variety of professionals across different disciplines and regions to parse together some useful info.
You have to work at it, but anyone who assumes quality information will passively flow to you is mistaken and being misinformed in some way.
Sorry to say this but comments on this thread are very disappointing and show a basic lack of empathy in HN crowd. I am obviously generalizing and I know most of you are not heartless souls.
FFS people, a huge number of people have lost their livelihoods, sense of belonging and might fall into financial hardships in current market conditions. Whatever you think of Elon or Twitter employees, its good to be grounded in suffering of fellow techies.
> Sorry to say this but comments on this thread are very disappointing and show a basic lack of empathy in HN crowd.
The vast majority of comments near the top don't seem to be of this type, so not sure what you're referring to.
I have a lot of sympathy for Twitter employees who just had to deal with the total shitshow of the past ~10 months, with the media spotlight on them.
But that said, the thing I fundamentally disagree with (and I'm speaking from experience) is that getting laid off if this colossal, tragic thing that many HNers seem to think it is:
1. There will definitely be ups and downs, but getting laid off in a growing industry is very different from getting laid off in a shrinking industry. Many companies are tightening their belts but there are still tons of companies hiring right now, and it's not like most tech workers have the concerns of, say, medical transcriptionists, where the vast majority of those jobs just won't exist in 10-20 years.
2. Tech pays well, and the likelihood of huge layoffs at Twitter have been known for months. While I can empathize with people who were laid off, it's difficult to have sympathy if folks haven't prepared, i.e. saving up a cushion and starting their job search early. It is rare to get this much foresight into a layoff.
3. Tech also tends to give much better severance packages than in many other industries. To be clear, lots of other industries give 2 weeks max, if anything at all.
Again, I have tons of sympathy along the lines of the "man, that really f'in sucks that you had to deal with that" level. I disagree with some of the melodrama I'm seeing that this is something like the worst thing that can happen to someone - one of the linked tweets in the article had a Hunger Games screenshot.
This is a discussion board. Therefore, commenting at all requires something to discuss, and there is nothing really to discuss specifically around the topic of empathy towards the laid off employees.
It sucks, we all know it sucks, and it shouldn't be minimized but there's no "other side" to that viewpoint, so what is there to talk about? People aren't "heartless" because they choose to talk about the bigger picture rather than wallowing in sympathy.
And just like that we found a counterpoint to "Empathy is obvious, nothing to discuss there"; I assume the explicit point here is "Management aren't people and shouldn't be treated as such"? :)
Those techies had years in which to organize their workplace under US labor law to forestall exactly this kind of outcome. For the past 20 years, there was no group of employees on earth with more latent power than US tech workers, but this very fact blinded them to the possibility that they might ever lose this power. What feeble efforts there were at collective action were organized around divisive "social justice" topics rather than securing a permanent voice for labor in tech company governance and decision making.
Twitter workers are highly intelligent and the current pity party for them is unseemly. Everyone in the industry saw a day coming when the music would stop, whether because of economic changes or automation, but no one chose to act.
So its our fault for not making a union? Also nothing to do with 40 year decline in consumer rights & stagnated wages & heavy influence of money in politics. Also, to quote Stephen Colbert, its the ribcage's fault that victim got knifed.
Surely a union would help avoid this exactly kind of things, I can assure you. Once I kept my job thanks to a union when there were mass layoffs at a company I worked for. Also, a union would probably have negotiated something better than an "at will" contract, which I assume Twitter employees are bound to.
Any time a whiff of union talk for tech workers comes up, the industry recoils in abject horror driven by many years of anti-union propaganda ("unions = evil" or "how DARE you well paid, lazy programmers ask for even more"). Especially here in HN given its hyper-capitalist slant. I think it's a bit disingenuous to put all of the blame on tech workers
No, the argument is that we are on a forum run by and for venture capital, so criticizing labor for not being activist enough is out of step with where we are.
> Any time a whiff of union talk for tech workers comes up, the industry recoils in abject horror driven by many years of anti-union propaganda ("unions = evil" or "how DARE you well paid, lazy programmers ask for even more").
I mean, we definitely could. They'd be seriously fucked if we did. It's a wonder it hasn't happened yet
I get it. I'm almost 40 and have been working at tech startups since I was in my 20s. I've been through what they're going through.
The difference is that people are being laid off, terminated, or otherwise losing their jobs every day. It's not a new or interesting phenomenon. What's interesting are the conditions that led to it happening to these people, both inside and outside Twitter. It's novel and may have broad impacts well outside the ~3.5k people who are now looking for work.
Inside Twitter, I don't have enough context to say much in detail. I will say that 7.5k employees seems very high given their product offerings, and that the existence of things like an "ML Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability Team" at least lend credence to the idea that many of those people weren't contributing directly to the company's revenue.
Outside of Twitter: the purchase was high profile and novel, made by a popular figure whose star seems to still be on the rise. There was drama around it for months, and we still don't really know if Musk really meant to buy it. Musk's personality alone is interesting. Then there are the responses of people approximately split down party lines in the US, the various communities that use Twitter heavily today, advertisers, and high-profile people who have run afoul of Twitter in the past.
Finally - and perhaps most impactful of all, though it's not been extensively discussed here - there is the possible impact this will have on US politics. Exactly how much of Trump's popularity ~2015-2020 was due to his tweets? Will his account be reinstated? If so, will he use it? Will he resume using it the way he did before, or will he feel less encumbered by Twitter's policies and be even more bombastic/inflammatory? How will that impact the 2024 presidential election?
From where I sit, I have no idea where things will end up. Any outcome from "Musk loses tens of billions of dollars as Twitter ceases operation" to "Elon Musk sends his congratulations to President Trump from his home at the SpaceX lunar outpost after his election to a second term".
If you don't find such a range of possibilities interesting, I don't know what to tell you :)
I don't really relate or sympathize with the Silicon Valley types, no. I don't do the yoga and $8 latte-shakes and the Kegerators and Ping-Ping tables; I come into an office I rent myself in a flyover state, do a full day of work, and then go home, usually after sundown, seven days a week, and I make a lot less than those kids in California do. So it doesn't really burn me up to see the less productive ones trimmed off.
I read elsewhere that they all get 60 days of salary as severance, so I'm not interested in hearing sob stories about being fired right before the holidays either.
If you got laid off in these cuts, you'll do fine. Just find another SV company that's hiring, go in there with "Twitter" prominently on the CV and play up a sob story about how that mean ol' racist fascist homophobe fired you because you wouldn't give him a Roman salute or whatever, and you'll be back to working in an office with bean-bag chairs and free vegan flatbread brunches in a jiffy.
No it’s crazier than that they get paid for the next 90 days but are not allowed to work at Twitter. They’re in a paid but ‘non-working’ status. In addition they will be offered severance. This board is hilarious in thinking that the package musk is offering is in any way ‘cruel’.
> This board is hilarious in thinking that the package musk is offering is in any way ‘cruel’.
So much agree. The attitudes here are just laughable. The drama, entitlement, the faux "empathy", violins, crocodile cry me a river tears.
The factory worker or janitor working hard doing honest work and struggling to put food on their table get my sympathy, not these tech workers with cushy jobs in the top percentile of wages.
I'm one of these btw and am very thankful and I don't feel I'm entitled to it. I've been laid off. And you know what I did? I got another tech job. Barring special circumstances, it is that simple.
Yea i also dont understand the faux outrage. I mean the guy bought it and now he has to make back his investment and if he thinks its gonna happen by kicking out half of the people out then so be it.
Apparently Twitter was too bloated, with some staff not working a lot or doing useless stuff.
In CA this is fully allowed and legal so yea tough luck, but im pretty sure these poor Twitter #OneTeam souls will be gladly picked up other tech companies, they dont have to worry.
> A huge number of people have lost their livelihoods, sense of belonging and might fall into financial hardships in current market conditions
At the end of the day, CA is an at-will employment state. Anyone can get fired anytime, and it is up to everyone to be prepared for that. Any person working in any company X can meet the same fate - it's like being prepared for an earthquake, which can happen anytime. I'm not condoning what's happening at Twitter, but the idea that those employees had no way to be prepared for this is false. Though I agree with you that we should show empathy to those affected.
Being prepared for getting fired (in the sense of having a financial cushion) is one thing.
What I’m seeing here, however is a discrepancy between saying that working hard and burning brightly for your employer is meaningful and fulfilling and something to strive towards (as seen in the threads around expectations at Twitter of working 12h days and meeting tight deadlines) and on the other hand the expectation to dispassionately deal with being fired.
That just doesn’t go together. It‘s just a weird perspective. Those views don’t seem to be consistent with each other.
If your work is meaningful to you then psychologically being fired can have a devastating impact. You can’t be at the same time emotionally invested in your workplace and also not affected by being fired.
I know that HN is not one person, but that’s the perspective I’m perceiving.
> working hard and burning brightly for your employer is meaningful and fulfilling and something to strive towards (as seen in the threads around expectations at Twitter of working 12h days and meeting tight deadlines)
but how many people actually do this? Even then, if someone does it and learns from it then they've set themselves up to make even more down the road
That seems to me to assume the people are robots. Or Vulcans, or whatever.
It just seems weird to me. And again: you are taking the financial perspective about making money. That‘s just plain weird to me.
I’m talking about psychological impacts, not money. Having empathy for the psychological impact of the situation these employees find themselves in. Presumably if you are willing to work long hours as an employee you identify heavily with your work, probably also your colleagues, you value what you are doing. To suddenly have that taken away is certainly not easy. I mean, if you liked your colleagues that‘s people you were around a lot and suddenly won’t be …
And in that context Musk unemphatically arriving with a fucking sink as a joke, overall handling the layoffs extremely badly and without a shred of empathy anywhere to be seen is fucking awful. And I’m just weirded out that that‘s not the tone seen here.
There have been a lot of layoffs during the last few weeks and months and while, yes, HN commenters typically did recognize the economic circumstances that led to that they also had a lot of empathy for those who were laid off and were able to differentiate and recognize if employers were treating those laid off well (severance payment – and this is not strictly about financial safety but about respecting employees – and communicating with empathy) or not so well.
Why is that impossible with Twitter? And I think hardly anyone would give Twitter and Musk good marks here.
> Presumably if you are willing to work long hours as an employee you identify heavily with your work, probably also your colleagues, you value what you are doing.
You're assuming here that people work long hours because they identify with their employer. If a programmer works long hours, is it because they love their employer or because they love programming in general? I'd say the latter, it sounds to me like you're saying the former
As far as the colleagues part goes, if someone is truly close to their colleagues, they keep in touch even after leaving the job. If working at X employer is required to keep in touch with those colleagues, the relationship isn't that strong to begin with
> (severance payment – and this is not strictly about financial safety but about respecting employees – and communicating with empathy)
I mean, if you're laying someone off, how it's communicated is of secondary importance. There's a way of doing it professionally and giving them proper severance, doing the right thing, et cetera. But what exactly do you have in mind here, with "laying someone off with empathy"? Are you talking about Musk being a dickhead? Personally that's less insulting than seeing a CEO fake crying about laying people off on LinkedIn
> And in that context Musk unemphatically arriving with a fucking sink as a joke, overall handling the layoffs extremely badly and without a shred of empathy anywhere to be seen is fucking awful. And I’m just weirded out that that‘s not the tone seen here.
You might be generalizing a bit (with respect to attitudes seen here). Musk is an unprofessional asshole. Would you prefer he pretend not to be one and lay people off with "heartfelt conversations" instead? Personally I find the former less sickening than the latter, but ideally he would've just done a normal layoff sin theatrics and moved on
As for the employees, I'm sure it's awful and they're scrambling rn to find new employment. Luckily for them they have Twitter on their resume. I do however worry about the people on H1b finding new employment in this economic climate
In four years Musk will be bored to death with Twitter and will sell it to private equity and the Saudis for $5 billion. At that point it will be mostly a platform for porn creators and crypto pumping, the only two verticals where Twitter seems to be actually growing lately.
Meh, Morgan Stanley has had bigger losses. How much of it is actually their money anyway? My guess is the losses will be passed down to the individuals who gave MS the $$$. Morgan probably bundled it all up, made a nice fee, and passed it on to Musk.
> Morgan probably bundled it all up, made a nice fee, and passed it on to Musk.
It has not. The debt was conditional on the acquisition of Twitter by Musk, so Morgan Stanley could not sell it before the acquisition was completed. But the debt was necessary for the acquisition, so the acquisition could not be completed without the debt money. Therefore, they had to happen at the same time, with M&S fronting the money.
Of course the terms of the debt, and the price of the acquisition, had to be both defined for everything to move forward, so they were finalized months ago.
When Musk signed a contract with Morgan Stanley, money was cheap, so the debt has very low interest. When the debt has actually been issued, a few days ago, money had become more expensive; Morgan Stanley won't find anyone to buy it as-is. To sell it they will have to discount it quite deeply, losing a bunch of money; otherwise they'll be stuck with it.
The crown prince already owned a large stake of twitter, and decided to maintain ownership stake after the buyout. They are still a shareholder, like before, not a loan holder.
No it doesn't, that table (from [0]) lists equity investors, not lenders.
> Each Equity Investor listed in the following table has committed to contribute to Parent, at or immediately prior to the closing of the Merger and subject to the conditions set forth in the Co-Investor Equity Commitment Letters, cash in the amount set forth opposite such Equity Investor’s name in the following table in order to fund a portion of the Merger Consideration contemplated by the Merger Agreement. Certain Equity Investors have retained an option to satisfy such Equity Investor’s equity commitment with shares of Common Stock held by such Equity Investor (valued at $54.20 per share).
If you click the link to the actual SEC filing, it says otherwise. Alwaleed put stock, not cash towards the purchase and will "retain an equity investment in Twitter following completion of the Merger"
> At that point it will be mostly a platform for porn creators and crypto pumping, the only two verticals where Twitter seems to be actually growing lately.
Like justin.tv/twitch, they might do well to identify the pivot.
temperamentally he is mercurial and polarizing which is the opposite of what Twitter needs.
maybe he can turn Twitter into a super-app on the console of every Tesla. a plan is not in evidence other than throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. 'move fast and break things' might really unlock opportunities, or destroy trust.
Zuck was unusually good at fake apologies while continuing to data-rape and strip-mine users, but trust is a problem for Facebook and will be exponentially worse for Musk.
it could indeed turn into MuskChan. if he is really going to turn a blue check into something anyone can buy without providing ID it's just a matter of time before impersonation scams multiply.
it will be an incredible distraction from challenges at his other ventures. Saudis and pedophiles are going to use it to abduct people. what is he going to do when people/nations go nuts about something on Twitter and take it out on Tesla?
I'm also skeptical of the weird turnabout between 'get me out of this deal at any cost' and rushing to pay up in full. either a side deal with e.g. Saudis or there was something existential about to come out in discovery.
Do you really think it will be four years? Considering his attention span, and the rapidity with which Twitter is already deteriorating, I suspect it will be much less than that.
Yeah he’s only seen like a handful of new space rocket designs through from conception to profitability, and he only created one major car company before moving onto other things. He can never stick to anything.
I agree that "short attention span" doesn't seem like it belongs on Musk's very long list of negative qualities, but a reminder: he was not an initial founder of Tesla, he bought in a year later and claimed to be a founder until he was sued and reached an agreement[0].
That is a fair point. I just am not sure his recent behaviour actually suggests he’s got a short attention span. I suspect he’s wanted to take over Twitter for a long time and is now rushing to carry out changes that he’s long planned. He might be acting too excitedly, he might screw it up by going too fast and rough with the changes, but I don’t see that as indicating a short attention span. Maybe impatience.
I know this is cliche to say... but I have been reading this comment for the past 10 years. Maybe one year it will be true but it has a terrible track record.
I was assured Tesla would be "dead" by 2018 and in the 2000s you would get comments about how re-usable rockets were just impossible.
For the record, I think twitter is a different beast but at the end of the day, I think life will go on.
There's an asymmetry here where Twitter and other companies get blamed for layoffs, but didn't get praised for providing highly paid jobs that put their employees in the top 1%.
Even Stripe just had layoffs and they are a much more productive, tighter run ship.
Twitter cutting deeper than Stripe shouldn't be surprising. It's not a secret that they were overstaffed and are known for rest & vest.
This goes way back. In 2014 there was a show called Silicon Valley that had an entire character and subplots based on this phenomenon in tech companies. Big Head hanging out on the roof resonated for a reason. Compassion is warranted regardless and productive employees got caught in this too, but that doesn't mean we have to engage in selective amnesia and kneejerk outrage.
Well, it's mostly not Twitter betting blamed for layoffs, it's Musk. Twitter provided those jobs, not Musk. Musk is doing the layoffs, not Twitter. So someone not responsible in the least for the creation of those jobs is ending them.
That is not to say the layoffs were not needed or justified (I don't know) but the asymmetry exists because it's an asymmetric situation.
Layoffs that improve economic productivity should be celebrated. The executives who do them should be congratulated. They are creating economic surplus by freeing up labor to add value elsewhere in the economy where it's needed more. So few people understand how much human prosperity would be stunted if people weren't allowed to be terminated when they were no longer productively adding value in a position.
it's important to distinguish short-run productivity and long-term sustainability. systems need slack. if you take away all the shoulders on all the highways you will get improvements in throughput and cost per trip. and any breakdown will be much worse because responders can't get through to clear it.
layoffs shouldn't be celebrated because they cause pain and they mean someone screwed up.
time will tell whether Musk is putting the business on a sustainable footing or killing a golden goose.
I'm assuming here that the layoffs are overall net good for the company. If the layoffs jeopardize long-term sustainability too much, then that assumption is violated.
> In 2014 there was a show called Silicon Valley ...
Yeah, we've heard of it.
> resonated for a reason
Mike Judge has a gift for exaggeration and humor. I'd be surprised if even one out of 100 so called 'slacker' rest and vest employees even resembled 1/10 of big head's cluelessness and "beach / roof" lifestyle.
Agh, I WISH tech companies provided jobs that put employees in the top 1%. The truth is that in an era of gigantic wealth inequality, being in the top 1% of income doesn't mean shit. I may make good money, but when I can't even afford the shittiest studio apartment in town and I have no choice but to be a renter bitch, it doesn't make me feel rich at all.
I looked it up and the top 1% of income is $823,000 a year. So I take back what I said, as it's clear that even the gleaming tech companies are NOT in fact handing out 1% salaries like candy.
Looking at how Musk handles business and public comms makes me loose more and more respect for this guy with every passing second. It's all fun and games when you have a few hundred mills in the bank. Hopefully the people that left were prepared. Given his public behavior it was kind of expected. I'm not sure if people that stayed are now worse or better off.
We're not talking about life, we're talking about their job.
The answer is yes: Jobs generally boil down to exchanging labor for cash. When people are willing to do a job without pay, we call it "volunteering" instead.
When you take a job at a consistently unprofitable company, you kinda have to accept that's what you signed up for. Every job at Twitter is a speculative bet that might or might not pan out. I'm not saying they're not allowed to feel bad or complain about it, but a sale followed by rapid staff cuts is what always happens to startups who don't do well enough on their own.
No, they also got the opportunity to build a system to make people miserable at scale. And, it's important to remember that, their life isn't over. They're not being marched into the ocean this afternoon, they just need to get a new job in the area, which is unlikely to be too hard.
When there were layoffs at Etsy back in 2017, one of the unintended consequences were that a lot more people quit voluntarily afterwards. Attrition was a lot higher than expected. I have to believe that the people who remain are not all going to want to stay at the company that Twitter is becoming, whether it be for lack of institutional knowledge, peer support, or just because they liked their coworkers and are sad to see them go. This is a sample size of one, of course, but the layoffs at Etsy were a whole lot smaller than these ones were rumored to be.
Unintended? My company did two rounds of layoffs already and this was a thing that was known from day 1. Literally the day after the the first rounds one of the questions in the town hall was about "how do we plan to retain the people who are left now that they're getting spammed by linkedin recruiters".
I think these days this is a known and intentional effect from upper management and they absolutely are accounting for another 5-10% of voluntary leavers post layoffs. Its free money from their POV, no severance.
To clarify a bit here, "unintended" meaning the amount of people, not that people left at all. They had to start incentivizing people to stay, they talked about attrition frequently, etc.
I kind of figured this was part of the goal at Twitter. 75% of staff was the number that was originally floated, so maybe the thinking here is that after a brutal layoff round, another quarter will say “fuck it” and leave.
Not at places I've worked. The first to get laid off are low-performers that everyone knows is a low performer and no one likes. The unproductive lifers usually have built a system or two, and they're just coasting on that while doing as little as possible.
Regarding your point number 2, I've been having this debate over on Twitter (ha) about how much those who remain are saddled with extra work. I've been through a few layoffs in my career, though none as large as this one, and what usually happened was those of us who remained ended up with less work. That is because the ones who were let go were almost always low performers whose work usually needed a lot of review and redesign by the more competent ones, which was more work than just doing the whole thing over from the beginning. In some cases when it did cause a large burden to the remaining employees the project left behind by the laid off ones was left to die. And that often was the right answer since the low performers had so often been shuttled to projects that weren't very valuable to begin with. With no visibility into the Twitter case I don't know if there is much of the same effect that I experienced, although I am reading a lot of opinions on HN and elsewhere that some of the groups that have been decimated should have been killed off long ago.
The rule of thumb is ~1/3 of the layoff size will be incremental attrition over the next 6-12 months. If they hired a firm that knows what it's doing, they build it into the model.
That happens at every company. I've been working in the tech industry for 25 years at 8 different companies. You lay off people and then the best engineers start looking for a new job and leaving 2-3 months afterward.
It's easy to quit a job when we are in a bull market. The last few years have seen massive turnover, for example.
But we aren't in that scenario any longer. People who remain will find it much more difficult to find a good job somewhere else as more and more companies are freezing hiring. This could go on for awhile.
I'm not a huge Musk fan, mostly because of his political ramblings and especially revolving around Ukraine; but I find the sudden hatred of him pretty odd. Mass layoffs happen all the time, Square just announced a 14% cut yesterday. In terms of Twitter's current moderation nothing has really changed on the platform, I'm an avid user and have seen no difference.
It's not really just Musk, it feels like there is a turn on any social media platform that doesn't do wide arrays of censorship that lean whatever way you're inclined to agree with (this includes conservatives hating TikTok.) Musk has said he wants a free-speech platform but has never claimed it would have no moderation. There was a piece somewhere about a rise in the use of the N word, but there was no follow up showing if those accounts were banned. Seems like an important part of the story.
Honestly some of this feels like a hit job. I've not found anyone that can point to something inherently wrong with the new vision of Twitter that isn't based in some crazy hyperbole not in tune with reality. Twitter has been horribly run for ages, someone trying to revive it isn't bad.
When I use a platform, unless the person is a literal Nazi or Communist, I don't care what their political beliefs are. I care about the product. I think that is being lost on people where now everything revolves around politics. It's kind of sad, especially when we all basically agree on 90% of things and policy.
We used to complain about data silos and filter bubbles...and now people just leave platforms because leadership may not share their political views? How is that good? I think the media itself has fed into this because they have always hated social media (for better or worse) for making them no longer the first source of news when print was already dying.
Time and time again, Musk has shown that he does not understand the nuances of free speech and moderation, and has presented nothing to indicate that he has any new solutions to the problems he is claiming to want to solve.
You're applying good faith reasoning to someone with a proven track record of acting in bad faith. That's noble of you, but you shouldn't be surprised if others don't follow suit.
What is the new vision for twitter? Musk has ridiculed his customers, acted unpredictably, and fired people unceremoniously while joking about on Twitter.
To me, all of the reaction seems to be completely appropriate given his actions. This is why actions matter! This is why CEO’s get communications training, because in the absence of reading his mind, the world has to react to his behavior. Being a leader of a 45 billion dollar corporation is hard, this is why most CEO’s that do it don’t have two other part time jobs. Maybe it will turn out ok, but I don’t see how you can not see that his behavior warrants scrutiny and pause, and seemingly attribute it all to vague notions of political beliefs.
Do you honestly think your first sentence has anything to do with public/media reaction? I mean honestly? Because the same reaction happened in April when none of this had occurred. There had been a turn against Musk before the Twitter acquisition was even a thought. I just find it interesting.
I honestly do. He's done a really bad job of consistently explaining why he would be a good person to entrust twitter too. He can be great in certain interviews. I think here he does a pretty good job of staying professional and building his case:
But in April he was like chief internet meme operator manipulating dogecoin markets and building a case for free speech absolutism. So yeah, I 100% honestly believe that the public and media's reaction is mostly rational.
It's a dick move and demonstrates someone who doesn't understand how to build worker loyalty. Forcing people to tap dance 80+ hours a week or be fired (without mega compensation) doesn't earn you loyalty. Yeah, he claims he works 120 hour weeks, but he also reaps nearly all of the compensation.
But I think the benefit of all this is having someone trying to break the laws. He's pentesting federal & state worker protections. That's a good thing in the long term, not so much in the short term.
I'm well aware of the law, it has been posted everywhere. However, the article questions itself, because it doesn't say how many have actually been laid off, when that date is effective or if they will just get their pay for 60 days; so he might not even be in violation. I don't think Elon is just doing this all solo, he probably has a legal department and also has advice from one of his co-investors which is still Jack Dorsey.
All of which kind of supports my point of the media doing a bit of a hitjob. They did the same during the Cambridge Analytica scandal and a huge portion of the reporting came out to later be mostly not true. The irony is that the media may be doing exactly what they want Twitter to crack down on.
Yes, "they" as in the media at large. I don't know what you're trying to get at with your quotation marks. Most media are corporate owned and by only a few companies. With journalists sharing talking points and share stories (remember JournaList, that was buried quick.) Now they do Slack channels, etc. You can even slowly see a talking point emerge where several large journalist accounts use the same verbiage and phrases, it's kind of interesting to watch.
It has been reported on here on HN multiple times on how a large part of the CA scandal was not actually as big as the media portrayed. The media loves to make a bigger scandal out of something then slowly backtrack it over time. It happens a lot. Scandals get clicks and eyeballs.
I'm pretty curious about how and where Twitter employees were distributed. For a company ostensibly worth $44 billion, having 7,500 staff feels pretty damn lean. It feels like Musk isn't just purging people, he's purging the Twitter culture...
For comparison, SpaceX runs an entire private space program on ~12,000 employees. Near-weekly launches. Rocket development+production. Building+deploying Starlink.
(Although that's just a number from a quick googling. Maybe they outsource a lot of manufacturing etc?)
That comparison is however completely irrelevant to Twitter.
It may seem to ignorant people that a space program is more advanced than "just a website" but actually running these kind of websites is extremely complex. Especially when you're needing to compete with Facebook and Google at serving ads in a relevant and effective way.
It is really interesting reading through their infrastructure challenges alone:
It's crazy the number of people on HN somehow claiming that Twitter is this well run and well functioning tech company now that bad rocket man took the reigns and decided to lay off everyone... Isn't it a consensus among tech people that Twitter is the absolute worst tech company?
Twitter was a bit shit. But its up and running more or less in real time for millions of users. Thats pretty impressive. Its business is shit, yes.
Musk looks like hes done the classic: "the office is clean why do I need cleaners" dance. I am surprised he can fire that many people that quickly and still expect momentum.
It doesn't help that he appears to be shitting out product ideas that he's just "dreamt" up. Rather than talking to people to see why twitter didn't do it in the first place. He clearly has a low opinion of the entire company.
I think a lot of people viewed Twitter as poorly-monetized and -managed as product and business, but generally competitive as a technical organization.
Over the years in various hiring threads it's been common to describe Twitter as the giant tech comapny you go to when you can't get hired anywhere else. Twitter has definitely had a reputation for a long time for being bloated and filled with less-than-competent employees. It's only earlier this year that I've seen the discussion shift towards this idea of Twitter being a competent group.
Whew - even with your empty caveat against saying what I’m about to say:
Designing reusable rockets and launching hundreds of them into space for profit, is more complicated and requires a different caliber of frankly higher IQ worker, than building and maintaining the existing Twitter.
Not that there aren’t some smart web people, obviously.
I’m writing from a faang office with a few decades of experience. I know some people in aerospace. They’re on average smarter than 4/5ths of my colleagues (who are also clever).
I’m much more junior, but to exchange anecdotes, I think it’s difficult to accurately say that people in FAANG are less, equal, or more intelligent than people in aerospace. To define intelligent, I will use the everyday definition that mixes speed of learning with the ability to solve hard problems (acknowledging that the academic definition of intelligence is different).
For one, I anecdotally know people in FAANG who were smart by effectively “studying for the test” by focusing more on leetcode than projects/intellectual exploration. In contrast, the people I know who went into aerospace tended to have a genuine interest in physics (and some with more interest in philosophy), and had more experience with projects (e.g. worked on an aerospace team in university), with many of them having little-to-know experience with software development.
Interestingly, the aerospace people I know anecdotally happened to be better at soft skills/networking for getting into companies, whereas the FAANG people focused on leetcode for admissions. After getting into a company, also from my anecdotal experience, more FAANG people focused on metrics/compensation, whereas more aerospace people tended to focus more on the mastery of the craft. I acknowledge that my anecdotes shouldn’t be generalized, but it aligns with the motivations of many people looking to get into each company (it seems more people go into FAANG for compensation/prestige, whereas more people go into aerospace for the passion).
So, I would say that people from both categories tended to be very smart at learning quickly and solving hard problems, though anecdotally, the aerospace people seemed to be generally more intellectually curious. Then again, perhaps the aerospace people were better at soft skills/presenting themselves so they appeared smarter, whereas the FAANG people didn’t focus on presenting themselves as intelligently. For limitations, note that the people I’m thinking of are at the junior level.
In any case, I don’t think one can conclusively say that people in FAANG have more/less/the same intelligence as people in aerospace companies, though maybe one can tentatively say that people who go into aerospace tend to be more curious and interested in mastery of one’s profession (versus material compensation).
I've worked on a large scale website everyone knows. There are lots of interesting problems, and lots of super clever people who solve them in clever ways, but it's not literal rocket science.
How many employees would it take to just maintain the status quo? Code freeze, no more features and bug fixes. Just keep the lights on and keep selling ads.
Government typically has a whole ton of contractors, sometimes twice the number of FTEs, but a cursory Google indicates NASA has only about 1000 contractors. Interesting, but the contract money probably goes to acquisition and commercial partnerships (https://www.osbp.nasa.gov/docs/top20_2020_contractors-TAGGED...).
That said, their FY22 budget is “only” $30B, which is less than Elon just paid for all of Twitter. This number usually surprises people but a lot of other space-related work is within the USAF and NRO budgets.
About a decade ago I was working on websites for NASA and just the contractor I worked for had over a thousand contractors. They were far from the largest, too.
I was curious about the numbers that other tech companies may employ as a comparison... from some cursory googling:
* Meta: 71,970 [2021]
* Apple: 164,000 [2022]
* Amazon: 1,298,000 [2020]
* Netflix: 11,300 [2021]
* Alphabet: 156,500 [2021]
* Microsoft: 221,000 [2021]
* The New York Times: 5000 [2021]
* Fox Corporation: 9000 [2020]
* Reddit: 700 [2021]
(Anyone else I should add?)
I can't really find any trends. I think Reddit is an outlier, and my impression is having only 3750 employees would probably put Twitter on the smaller end of the scale too.
We'd need to also see the money (income/revenue/profit) of these companies, and then see the ratio of employees to money. Musk saw that list and noticed that Twitter had the lowest ratio.
To get the ratio metric up, they have to increase income or reduce employees.
This rationale, given by Musk (and I imagine VC friends) is all outlined in the discovery documents of the twitter vs musk legal case.
I've been using Reddit daily for a couple of years and have never seen downtime or any weird bugs. I use the mobile app, not sure if that's what you were referring to.
I wonder does this number include moderators or are they contractors who are not included in the headcount. I could see half that number being made of moderators if so.
Depends on how you value the company. Twitter is very overvalued if you look at accounting & finances more than influence and popularity and hype.
Consider revenue and income (losses) and Twitter doesn't look good at all, they look horrible. They don't have that many employees, but they must be very very highly compensated and concentrated in very high cost areas. Otherwise the company is wasting serious money somewhere else, because to lose money on $5B/yr revenue with 7500 employees year after year in a business that's as high margin as pure software is incredibly terrible performance.
> I imagine the buyout netted most employees with stock hundreds of thousands of dollars.
One of the theories knocking around last week was that these layoffs are just before a stock vesting was to happen, presumably in an attempt to avoid paying them.
> I find it very odd that people keep mentioning it despite it not panning out, and not sure what to make of it.
Has anyone confirmed that the stock vests actually happened? Or did they get postponed whilst the layoffs where being organised? Haven't seen anything either way.
And I don't think it's that odd to consider that a man well known for flaunting the law would flaunt the law on this as well.
I haven't seen any screenshots of pay stubs to verify it. Given that it was a conspiracy theory to begin with and there is no confirmation to follow up, my assumption is that no, it did not happen.
Elsewhere it has been announced that laid off employees are getting quite generous Severance packages, so this would be out of line with that.
And the class action for WARN Act violations has already been filed. Sounds like the Chief Twit didn't give 60 days warning OR severance, as required by law.
Sadly, as best I can tell, there are no real fines for WARN violations - at worst, Musk as to pay 60 days income and benefits, as he should have done in the first place. There might be a $500/day penalty as well (not sure if that's per person or total - either way, chump change to most employers that are subject to the WARN act).
The point of the law is to provide worker stability. 60 days payed severance does that just as well if not better than 60 days notice and no severance.
Well people don't seem to get it, so I guess you're right.
As others have pointed out, Elon has already been involved with WARN lawsuits from former Tesla employees. He surely understands that the law exists, and what Twitter's obligations are under it. So what else could result in this apparent indifference, which so many other people see, and care about so deeply? Ergo, he must not care about the legal implications of how he is going about these layoffs. Hence, he must be ready to just pay the fines.
But, sure, expecting people to connect those dots must be more appropriate for other social media platforms.
And not just Musk. Big companies regularly put themselves in a position to be fined by regulators. Either their lawyers are stupid (they probably aren't) or it's just a cost of doing business (it probably is).
If you actually read the lawsuit - it was filed preemptively to ensure that Twitter give 60-days severance/notice period.
There is no evidence listed in the suit that says these employees were not given such notice.
Further, it specifically states that employees assumed that they were laid of without severance because they were locked out of their accounts and hadn't been yet presented a severance package.
I am not an expert on these things, but I believe this notice is required. I am surprised there is not an easier way to receive this information, this is certainly something I would want an alert set up on.
You are assuming both: that there was in fact 60 days notice (how!?) and that there is in fact a severance package. Yet, why would you not be openly communicative of this if you intend to give it?
So how is it legal nonsense if the lawsuit has good faith reasons to believe that neither of your assumptions hold?
Everywhere I worked access to systems was revoked before people received their termination communication from HR. This is standard practice in industry to prevent last minute IP theft, or destructive revenge actions at an emotional time.
I think it means that they feel that they can do it safely without it. It also saves them from having journalists taking photos.
Your security team and HR team must be really good lay-off some many people without causing violence, law suits, data leaks.
I can easily imagine that if 50% of people present in a office were laid off some would start a protest within the office which could degrade into some violence, damages and law suits. Also, having the HR systems automation must be really on par to revoke access correctly to so many people.
I don't care a lot about Twitter itself, and I'm willing to entertain the notion that it could function equally "well" with a much smaller fraction of the workforce...
But this is something that should be implemented gradually. Here is someone who just stepped into the company, and he's laying off people en masse. Even if you concede that Musk is some sort of genius (which I don't, but that's besides the point), that doesn't mean that you can just walk into a company and tell from day 1 who is productive and who isn't. And even if you could, making redundancies obsolete isn't something you can just do in one go, even if certain people and processes are inefficient there would probably be a need for a transition period where the institutional knowledge can be transferred.
Given everything else I know about Musk and this deal, this looks to me like a knee-jerk action, not a careful business decision.
It's almost like blaming the new president for having to raise taxes after the last president spent too much $$ and raised the deficit during the good times.
When Twitter massively expanded their headcount over the last 3 years their stock price was nearly 30%+ higher than it was before the stock market tanked.
People here aren't paying the bills or looking at the financial sheets. We're taking a human look at it (which is good) but there's more to this stuff.
The C-suite was probably waiting for Musk to take over to make any hard choices that were coming anyway.
All of what you said does not absolve the fact that Musk is acting whimsically and clearly showing errors of judgement in his words an actions since taking ownership.
Memes aside (I kinda LOL at his sink joke), he is breaking laws and terminating entire departments without any handover or planning.
The entire verified fiasco is a good indicator - the new process won't actually require verification of identity - is essentially a shakedown of existing verified users.
source for breaking laws? I've only seen speculation over the past few weeks that he's not paying severance, however in actuality we now see he's paying them until beginning of Feb to not work.
Amidst all this doom and gloom and supposedly inevitable failure of Musks' Twitter, I find it interesting to reason about that being a reality. What would replace it?
Nothing. As much as I dislike Twitter overall, it's not replaceable. The main characters driving it (journalists, politicians, the like) have no other central gathering place where they would have the cultural influence that they have now. Their status is exclusively bound to Twitter and cannot be reliably replicated elsewhere.
Have a look at the typical big accounts, with hundreds of thousands of followers and a decade-long history of a few dozen tweets per day. These are the 1-10% Twitter users generating 90% of activity on the network.
Where would they move to? Reddit? Discord? Mastodon? Facebook? I don't think so, that would be a worse experience but more importantly, the audience won't follow.
Twitter power users see themselves as creators, but they are not in the ordinary sense. A photographer or videographer produces tangible content that can stand on its own. As such, they can move it across networks.
The same thing is not true for a tweet. Sure enough you can move a tiny piece of text to another social network, but it makes no sense there. It doesn't have the cultural relevance or unique twitter mechanics of amplification. When your creation is snippets of texts that generate outrage, you're in Twitter prison.
Bottom line, I believe the above is what would keep Twitter alive even if temporarily takes some hits.
Lots of gross comments here today, and I don't have the time to go check every last username but I only hope it's not long-timers here who are being so snarky and callous at people losing their jobs.
And if it is, y'all should remember that the best developers have long memories. Would be wise to have a little empathy and delight a little less in the turning of the business cycle, even you think it benefits your interests.
A grim day. As a tech worker, my solidarity is entirely with the employees of Twitter.
The irony is that Twitter, more than any other social platform, helped create the aura around Elon, Tesla in particular. In some sense, Twitter was quintessential to what Elon is today.
For him to now
- make a bid for twitter
- back out of it in futile
- acquire it, lay off execs
- lay off half the force
Is surreal. If this had been anyone apart from Elon, they would have been ostracized.
I am saddened, but also a bit terrified since I see strong parallels between Elon, and... Other such figures. But Elon now owns a social media platform that "informs" upwards of a 500million users a month.
It's really an ironic saga that's unfolded between Musk and Twitter. I've said many times that I think Twitter facilitates a Jekyll-to-Hyde-like transformation in people that are predisposed to it. I think the fantastically rich are disproportionately represented in that group. If you're surrounded by yes men (and that includes Twitter followers), you're going to turn into an awful person. So Musk has come back to ruin the very thing that created him. This story is not new to humanity. The golem has returned to destroy its creator.
> Musk’s team has already tried to evaluate the productivity of Twitter employees by asking engineers to print out the code that they have written in the last 30 to 60 days. Musk also brought in Tesla engineers to look over Twitter code.
At one company I worked we had a bug in the software for the device we were manufacturing. There were millions of units at peoples' homes and the bug caused couple hundred of these units to loose the content of their flash, every day. This in turn a huge ongoing loss both financial and reputational for the company.
Because of the nature of the bug, we spent something like 3 months trying to find it. We even built a special lab with dozens of units hooked to specially designed rig to have a chance to observe one unit in the process of getting wiped.
Finally, one guy with an oscilloscope cracked it. It was electromagnetic interference between two different circuits within device causing the flash to receive a command telling it to wipe itself clean.
The fix was one line, two characters really.
I am sure Tesla engineers will do a good job evaluating worth of each one of those lines people printed out.
If I had planned and written those two characters, I would have appended a comment like yours and any sensible engineer would have praised the solution.
It’s fairly obvious their metric isn’t «number of lines of code».
My point is, looking at the code you are unlikely to be able to judge the value of it.
Code is not valuable in itself. Code is liability because it costs a lot now and will have to be maintained in the future.
Frequently, best solutions and decisions are the ones that result in avoiding to write any code.
As to code, I put a lot of effort into solving complex problems with simple code. Anybody can write complex code. It takes experience and effort to make stuff look simple.
I think their point is in the era of OKRs, they are more interesting in knowing if you have been coding up the next billion dollar app, or working on maintenance stuff to keep lights on. While the latter is equally important, its the former that brings in the next billions in profit.
When you'd bring that tiny print of code and give your explanation, do you honestly believe a Tesla engineer is not equipped to understand the value of those few lines?
What a contrast in leadership when you compare the way Twitter is doing this (rumor is right before bonus/stock vesting and cold impersonal email) and how Stripe is conducting their layoffs (empathy, 14 weeks severance, bonus payouts, etc.)
Which company is going to have an easier time hiring after the dust settles and they have a growth stage again?
> Which company is going to have an easier time hiring after the dust settles and they have a growth stage again?
The one with the better offer, taking a possible layoff payout into account. The comp ranges can be so drastically different between companies that a possibly generous layoff (that is no means guaranteed if Stripe has to do this when circumstances are more dire) is negligible financially.
Without questioning you specifically, I doubt any substantial number of others would feel the same. Few would pass up a even a 20% pay bump for the same role, so forget about it if it’s a 200% bump.
It genuinely depends on the person. In some places, WFH policy difference can alone amount to 10K difference not spent on childcare or traveling. You might be right on average, but I would assume most people do basic internal calculus of whether the move is worth it.
For me, knowing Musk's reputation for demanding workaholic mentality.. %20 might not be enough and that is before WFH issues.
>> Twitter would have to pay me something like 3 times more than Stripe for me to consider it, if I were back in the market and had those two.
Twitter was a public company with quarterly vests where you could get liquidity on your compensation (and from what i understand you were cashed out at buyout.) Stripe remains private and much of your money remains locked. Not sure if they issue RSUs, options, or what, but quite possibly you lose a lot or your historical compensation 3mo later. They were two different beasts. (Of course, now both are private, so going forward they might be similar.)
Are we deluding ourselves here? Why do you think hundreds of thousands of extremely bright people work for horrific/products companies like Facebook, Palantir etc? Money. Money talks and talks very loudly.
Most people have a price at which they will sell out. Those who don’t, are too few to make any significant difference
Because despite you thinking they are horrific companies many other people don't.
Billions of people love and use Meta products every day and their tech stack is one of the world's best with technical challenges almost no other company faces.
Palantir also has many parts of their business that benefit society e.g. combating human trafficking etc.
Also neither of those companies are necessarily known as terrible places to work. I know people who'd be miserable in most 9-5 jobs who are happy in Meta.
Working at Twitter now means a daily grind means being subject to the whims of an increasingly petulant emperor who does not respect anyone's expertise. What good does it for your career if he's just going to drop the ball at a moment's notice anyway?
If that were actually true, why do so many people love working at Tesla/SpaceX? Clearly they don't have the same view of Elon's management style as you do.
The reality is that Twitter as a business (and, imho, as a product) was sorely in need of a course correction. Layoffs, if they need to be done, should be done crisply and thoroughly so that remaining employees don't feel like the other shoe is about to drop.
You rip off the bandaid, it sucks, then you refocus on the work ahead.
I don't know why people work for Tesla/SpaceX. I can take a guess though - there are only a handful of companies that work in space related field and only a few companies that make electric cars. So it is somewhat understandable, if one really wants to work at these places.
Twitter is different - there are other big companies that provide as much tech challenges or more (whether they are better/worse than Twitter is another question). Twitter employees have many more options (relatively speaking) than SpaceX employees
Working at Tesla/SpaceX puts you at the cutting edge of your field. It's probably worth a few trade-offs - and I'm sure it pays a hell of a lot more.
Working at Meta/Google doesn't necessarily do that. I'm almost certain most of these companies' moonshot divisions are not as well-run as many startups, nor are these companies assured success in these areas.
Their main products are already at a "don't fix it if it ain't broke" stage, even though many will claim these are broken. I doubt it's exciting work.
Working at Tesla or SpaceX will be like working on a moonshot that's actually taking off. I'm sure it's a thrill. But increasingly, I don't think Musk is level-headed enough to be trusted with such things.
It takes time to reject nitwitted leaders, so we can't expect employees to abandon ship overnight just to prove my point.
> Because despite you thinking they are horrific companies many other people don't.
Thats exactly how a lot of people will view Twitter. You might think its horrible and they are terrible for laying of people, but plenty of good engineers ready to fill those roles for the money without the need of having free snacks, free coffee, rest booths, ping pong area, LED illuminated reading rooms, etc etc etc. Twitter will be fine.
lol. Suppose their salaries reduced to half of what they are making today, how many of them do you still think will continue to work at these places, for the technical challenges and whatever else they have told themselves is the real reason for them to work there in the first place?
I don't doubt the technical excellence of these companies. They are technically very capable because of the talent they hire, and they are able to hire top talent because of the high salaries they pay, not because of some altruistic or egoistic reasons
I agree that "good company" and "bad company" are a reflection of personal preferences, but the fact that FAANG comp is much higher than elsewhere tells us that the companies strongly suspect that a lower salary will not be enough to attract such a strong talent pool.
No. The companies feel they can afford to pay top drawer wages so they do so in order to hire what they hope is among the top talent, subject to among other things the randomness of their hiring processes.
A workplace can actively kill humans and still treat its employees very good.
You are mixing very different factors together here.
Prestige, to name another example, is very important to a lot of people. Having "worked at FAANG" on your resume opens many opportunities afterwards that don't have anything to do with money.
> extremely bright people work for horrific/products companies like Facebook, Palantir etc
For what it's worth those companies have not brought any real innovation in the last 10 years, give or take, because if they had they would have been on top of the world (quite literally). Which makes me hopeful that some of the real geniuses out there (today's von Neummanns and the like) might still avoid those companies out of principle.
I certainly have a price at which I will sell out, but if they aren't offering "retire decade(s) earlier than normal", it's unlikely to make a long term difference to me compared to the alternatives. Yes, a 20% bump for a few years would be nice, but paying half of my paycheck in therapy bills for a decade cancels that out and then some.
Basically, if they aren't offering "f** you money", pay has a diminishing effect on my employment choices. And if they are offering that kind of money, I'm assuming that'll come with even more consequences. My resume is alright, but it's not enough for an offer of way more money without strings attached.
I can't speak for everybody of course, but I think not heeding the above leads to burnout.
Pornhub, Exxon, Smith and Wesson, all the big tobacco companies, the guys that manufacture fentanyl, infowars, they all have IT staffs. Some have extremely sophisticated IT staffs. Money talks, but there other factors. when you’re working on migrating from .net to cloud native at Exxon and you’re building some kind of new container registry or something you probably don’t spend your days pondering climate change; you get paid every two weeks, you are learning some cool stuff and you’re building some cool stuff. Most people need jobs too.
A pay check and some sort of plausible rationalization is all that is needed. “Twitter is free speech” sounds pretty strong. “Twitter connected Ukrainians during that invasion” sounds strong.
> Which company is going to have an easier time hiring
The one that people want to work for and don't have to "sell out" to do it.
> Most people have a price at which they will sell out.
Sure. Agreed. But now you've tripled your OpEx vs your competitors. And the people that sold out aren't in any way loyal, so will bounce. But if they aren't offering substantially more, the money doesn't matter. It's all basically the same anyways.
And then you have to consider financials and leadership. Twitter financials got substantially worse (20x) from my understanding after Musk took over because of the debt he now has.
And as far as leadership goes: he was forced to buy it. That really doesn't look good.
> The one that people want to work for and don't have to "sell out" to do it.
Nope, this is wrong if the company can afford to pay more. Just look at companies like Jane Street, HRT, etc. The high comp they are willing to pay makes them harder to get into than Twitter, Meta, etc by a long shot. They have a far easier time hiring.
Does the pay by itself mitigates some of the following shitty behavior:
- Timing bathroom breaks
- Requiring lengthy security check prior to entering work location
- Micromanaging and invasive monitoring
Just small things that would drive some people livid regardless of pay. Scratch that, at the higher end of the spectrum it could easily drive them away.
Timesheets, Security and Command and Control management has been a constant at every job I have worked. I have never heard of some one working on a job where these three things where not an issue.
The only time those things haven't been an issue is when I do charity work which isn't really work as I don't get paid for it, which I think is the only reason the charities take what they get and are happy with it as they have no other choice.
I was lucky enough to work in both types of places. Ones where the manager was hovering over me and literally micromanaging my every interaction. It was beyond maddening. But I also worked in places like now, where my output matters, but I have a lot of autonomy on how I get there.
Oddly, my most recent volunteer gig was very.. structured. It may not help that it is sponsored by corporate so maybe they started demanding a lot of data.
> Is the only thing that determines whether you take a job the salary ?
If that ain't a major reason why people relocate from all over the world to SV, then I am missing something. Of course the salary is one of the major factors.
The day to day work life is probably the same level of huge contrast as these layoffs. I think that matters more to people than a few thousand dollars difference in pay, when that pay is likely to be in top 2-3% of all US jobs (over 200k).
Are there no laws about minimum notice or severance pay?
I’m glad Australia has decent laws to protect workers. It’ll be interesting to see if Australian Twitter staff who are locked out of their accounts have been laid off and what happens next.
In cases like this typically they'd just fire you and pay the salary through the minimum notice period without requiring nor allowing you to show up. I see no reason to think that's not the case here.
Yeah there are laws : https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/termination/plantclosings. Probably state laws as well. These require notice of severance or post payment and protect against discrimination. Twitter can try to claim that they’re all being fired for cause, but that’ll just end up paying a whole lot of lawyers.
I don't see more empathy from Stripe. And since no one has come out of the process of mass layoffs yet, we don't know if Twitter isn't going to provide severance and bonus payouts and etc.
On the other hand, Stripe was much more productive and is workforce wasn't so inflated.
I was thinking it over, and one way Stripe nailed Twitter is communication. Stripe’s severance was clearly communicated up front. Twitter’s leadership is like the proverbial headless chicken.
It’s quite the contrast. I think there’s a lesson here. A well-drafted email could’ve saved twitter a lot of heartache.
Then again, maybe the email drafter got laid off too.
Hell I don't like what Elon does most of the times but you have to admit he did built successful companies from ground up in fields no one was even looking into.
Twitter might succeed or it might fail but Twitter in its current form both as a company and social media paltform was bad.
You have to admit that he invested in some companies in fields that no-one was looking into. He's made a few big bets that have paid off extremely well. That's not nothing, and is impressive but it's not building a company. By all accounts he's a bit of a micro-manager, but I suspect there's only so much he could micro-manage or actually contribute directly in ventures like SpaceX or Tesla (he did make a door-handle patent tho).
Twitter on the other hand is another matter - no huge technical barriers stopping him from getting his hands dirty, no lives are at stake or regulatory bodies that are going to tell him "no that is dangerous" - so we're finally seeing what Elon unleashed looks like. So far it can probably be described as "chaotic" at best, it remains to be seen whether this chaos will disperse and Twitter will emerge leaner and better.
My belief is that he doesn't understand Twitter and its users quite as well as he thinks, and that Twitter will slowly get a bit more annoying and less profitable until he loses interest or gets distracted by something else. We will see, I use Twitter a lot so I hope that I'm wrong.
Musk took over Tesla by firing the founder CEO, and took another 4 years to ship a car to production. The car had already been built when Musk took over. He only needed to build a production pipeline.
It’s almost like both companies need metric tons of money to do anything remarkable - isn’t that the point of YCombinator as well? That’s just venture capitalism.
He just has the ego of a manchild and bought the title of “founder” as wellz
Are you saying musk’s role in SpaceX and Tesla is as an investor? That seems so disingenuous that it’s impossible not to conclude this post is purely emotional.
If you hate Musk, fine, but please just stick to the facts and articulate why you hate him.
I don’t understand why there is so much emotion around Musk. He has done good things and bad things. He has done incredible, near possible things. He works ridiculously hard. He’s rich. He has said and posted things he shouldn’t. I don’t feel that I am in a position to say he is a terrible person. I don’t even know the guy. I wouldn’t want to live in a world without SpaceX and Tesla. I am genuinely fascinated by this hatred.
I’ve tried to compile a list of why people might hate him:
- posted a conspiracy theory on Twitter (which he did then delete)
- childishly insulted a diver
- is a shameless self promoter
- fires staff brutally
- makes huge and sometimes
unreasonable demands on his workforce
- disagreed with covid policy, partly on the argument that the fatality rate is low and there’s not much you can really do about it
Ok, these are bad. But he’s hated as if he is the new Hitler. I don’t get it. I’d really appreciate it if someone could rationally explain why Elon is deserving of such great hatred.
IMO - my theory is that 5 years ago Musk was successful enough that regular people in the tech industry admired him, but not so successful that most people who admired him realised he was substantially more successful than they were ever going to be.
These days though, it’s quite clear to the 250k a year tech-guy that, even though they’re making bank, they’re never going to be “Elon rich”, and so the jealousy disguised as virtue has come out in full swing.
Is he perfect? Of course he fucking isn’t… we work in tech, we all work with atleast one “brilliant ass-hole”… they’re the ones that make our days a little bit more painful but also write the fucking insane code that makes most of our workplaces profitable.
> they’re the ones that make our days a little bit more painful but also write the fucking insane code that makes most of our workplaces profitable.
People like to think that but in my experience there are far more brilliant nice people than brilliant assholes. This is the mythos antisocial engineers tell themselves to justify their poor social skills.
And it takes some emotional evolution to realize that. I too once upon a time was the former, until I realized that such a person is the most annoying and unremarkable personality ever. I wouldn’t hang out with me 8 years ago, was kind of a grade A douche, and my code wasn’t great. But I made money, so I always thought the ends justified the means.
Alternatively, 5 years ago the reaction was "oh, the tesla/spacex guy? those are cool companies, guess he must be pretty cool", but since then he's made himself more of a celebrity which comes with much more visibility on those actions. As a result people are now judging based on actions they've heard about rather than the top line of a bio summary
There are a lot of people here very clearly articulating the issues they have with Musk - usually related to some bad tweets, but also more serious things like the sexual harassment - so there's no need to speculate that it's in any way related to his political leaning. Besides, it was only recently that he declared himself to be a supporter of the GOP, long after the tide of public opinion started to turn on him (and even perhaps because of it)
Doesn’t negate, but it is such a huge boost that it is basically playing the tutorial vs on hard mode.
And regardless of wealth, Elon’s only actual contribution was paypal, which is.. well, paypal (I quite literally left some money in that because it was so scammy I couldn’t even rescue it by donation..), and funding tesla (not inventing anything!). The latter is pretty much impossible without some form of privilege.
Whose father _claims_ to own an emerald mine, for which there is no actual proof. Not to mention that it is well established that Musk does not have a good relationship with this father, so whatever wealth Musk Sr. may or may not have, doesn't help Elon. So what's your point other than trying to spread misinformation?
Yep, sure. We all know how humble Elon is and is absolutely not the type of person who would sell this “self-made men” image of himself to the public to look better? “He came to the US with a few hundreds dollars and everything is his accomplishment”…
Even if family wealth only helped him through insanely good relations to other people in the top 1%, it is still all that much more than you will likely ever achieve/get. And I frankly don’t buy this “daddy doesn’t love me” BS.
This is preposterous, a tech worker is never going to be as wealthy as Elon in 2010, unless they starter thinking of themselves as a founder instead of a worker.
I will admit to having a few feelings of jealousy of the founders I know who have done far far better than o have on the game of building big companies, but that is also mixed with happiness for them.
With Musk, it's different. It's sadness and disappointment, to see someone throw away so much goodwill and be such a horrible person. Some of this is the media becoming adversarial with tech, while at the same time profiting off the hype bubble that the media itself created for Musk. But I view him as a lost man that needs a better support network and a slightly better filter so that he stops looking so foolish all the time.
So the 250k tech guy thought he could level up to the 20B elon musk, but once musk crossed over the 200B mark they got jealous?
Personally, I thought he was a cool guy building a revolutionary car.
But once I saw his hour long talk on how he was going to build a Mars colony, the fact that he was actually a Tesla investor - not a founder(the super fast LI ion lotus had already been demonstrated to him when he invested) and his absurd claims about AGI - I realized he was completely out of his mind. I have been skeptical of his personality since 2014, even as I held TSLA shares.
Yes he is able to manage and productionize probably the best car on the road right now and maximize Tesla shareholder value, but he is a shell of a person beyond that.
I don't like Musk, but he's done more for Ukraine than you can dream of. But he also sent a few stupid tweets that he took back, so that's a good enough excuse for virtue signalers to feel superior.
> SpaceX has said it pays for about 70 percent of the services used by Ukraine, offering all the terminals in that country the best possible option, valued at USD 4,500 per month even though most have contracts signed only for the USD 500-per-month service option.
According to Musk, Starlink has spent $80-120 million to subsidize Ukraine. He could be making this up, but this is supported by a letter SpaceX sent to the Pentagon even before Musk's infamous Ukraine tweets.
I don’t think his proposal was pro-Russia as much as it was anti-more-dead-people.
There’s no way Russia loses this war if it doesn’t escalate beyond local conflict. The objective now is (or should be) minimizing casualties and human suffering, not lines on maps from 2015.
Stopping recurring monthly donations of something very expensive is also not “blackmail”.
> I don’t think his proposal was pro-Russia as much as it was anti-more-dead-people.
I believe this topic has been discussed more than enough since February, by people with way more expertise than Musk. Ukraine has made it very clear that they do not intent to let their country be oppressed by the foreign aggressor. It is their decision to make.
Asking Ukraine to bow to Russia now that they are successful in their defense is a pro Russia stance. Claiming otherwise is just dishonest.
Especially since he was attempting to imply that anything close to a proper voting process would even be possible in that region now.
His statement means he is either incredibly stupid, or malicious. Both possibilities are dangerous. And Musk fans will vehemently disagree with the former.
If you're a spectacularly famous, influential and anti-more-dead-people the message you should be blasting out to your hundred-million followers is: Russia out. That's it.
> I don’t think his proposal was pro-Russia as much as it was anti-more-dead-people.
It was anti Ukrainian lives on occupied territories and pro Russian soldiers lives. It was also pro next invasion once Russia recovers at which point Russia will argue that Ukraine is failed stated due to having destroyed infrastructure.
>The objective now is (or should be) minimizing casualties and human suffering,
The causalities are not minimized by rewarding Russia for invasion and letting it continue with genocide.
> not lines on maps from 2015
The issue is not so much lines on the map as actual consequences of those maps. The torture, genocide, suppression of Ukrainian identity and so on. And obviously favorable position for next invasion again and again, until whole of Ukraine is taken.
I hate almost everything Musk does, but I am aligned on his Russia plan. Biden must negotiate with Putin to end the war. Europe is buying more than enough oil from Russia to sustain the war for a decade.
At a meta level, I consider Musk and Trump both to have the same approach to media: say whatever you want to create publicity. Words mean nothing, in the sense that there are no repercussions large enough to outweigh the created buzz/fame. Outrage works extremely well to that end (look at this thread.)
Because he says things helping both extreme sides (lovers and haters,) all they have to do is latch on to whatever fuels their fire, and ignore the other words. And it is well-know that confirmation bias is a thing among humans. This causes polarization that fuels the debates, creating a spiral of even more debates, buzz and fame. Even sparks meta-debates.
Edit: Another side of this is that it seems that everything must be classified as good or bad. Both on HN and elsewhere, commentors go to extraordinary lengths to argue why something has one abstract label or the opposite. Does everything have to have emotions assigned to it? Does everything have to be categorized in the very coarse good and bad buckets? It would be nice to read comments where the author tries to explain both sides, instead of just arguing for one.
I don't think I made any statement here about whether he is good or bad. I've said that I find his public persona to be annoying, justified why I think that, and have said he's probably not as responsible for everything he's credited for than many of his supporters believe. I think that's a really reasonable comment to make - there are people frothing mad about him and there are people who are rabid supporters of him. But I haven't seen either in this thread.
Edit: ok I just saw someone call him “Elongated Muskrat” so now there is someone who is mad at him in the thread :-)
Yepp, it wasn't a reflection on your comment. I just think the good/bad dichotomy ties in to my argument about polarization. It doesn't happen with every comment, but when it does, it adds fuel to the fire.
Sorry if that wasn't clear.
... I wonder if polarization can be seen as a market spread, and that more polarization causes higher volatility, which leads to more "trading" to close the spread. I.e. discussions follow some version of the efficient market hypothesis? Need to do a PhD on this. :)
> , I consider Musk and Trump both to have the same approach to media:
I think you've hit on more here. I think Musk has become associated with Trump. I think that might be because Trump is the champion of the losers of globalisation, and Musk is also a hero to those people because (a) he has created a lot of manufacturing jobs and (b) is creating a sense of patriotic pride in some of his achievements... just see SpaceX staff chanting "USA USA". I'm not criticising anyone, just drawing a connection.
So I think after reading these posts and talking to others, that Musk is hated because he is part of the war between left and right. To praise Musk is to praise Trumpism, and to hate Musk is to show you are against Trump.
Major world powers invaded Germany, tore the country in two, and Hitler killed himself. Musk is a complete dick in public and people are right to criticize him, but you are being plainly ridiculous when you say "he’s hated as if he is the new Hitler."
That's a fair criticism of me using a lazy shorthand, but it really is quite difficult to capture the level of vitriol against Musk. It's at a level I've never seen against anyone in my lifetime. People certain express strong hatred towards him than, say, Putin or Xi.
Obviously in reality Musk has done nothing to be compared to Hitler, however as far as how much hate he gets in 2022, I would say he easily surpasses Hitler by at least a factor of a thousand. Very few people even talk about Hitler anymore, so it doesn't really capture the sense of hate either.
I think a good comparison in the US would be Trump and I think more people hate Trump than Musk.
Eh, guess I just don't know enough about SpaceX then. If you read my comment and interpreted it as "hatred" then that is odd. I don't think it's possible to hate someone you don't know. I mean, every time he has popped up in the last 5 years or so he's been saying or doing something dumb or annoying so quite a lot of people have gradually gotten tired of that. But it’s not hatred at all.
He's not treated like the next Hitler by any stretch of the imagination. He's more like a village drunk who just keeps showing up doing stupid things like peeing on your doorstep or passing out in your garden. You don't hate that person, you're just like "[sigh] ok I guess we have to deal with him again..."
He’s also built rockets that land themselves, scaled electric car manufacturing, launched a world-wide low-latency satellite internet service, and made more progress on self-driving vehicles than literally any other company in that same time.
If your town drunk is doing that much good for the world, I think you’d forgive them for pissing on your doorstep once or twice a year.
Well this is the other side of the public opinion on Elon Musk. His companies have done a bunch of things, ranging from impressive to bad. As outsiders all we know is that his involvement with, say, a rocket that can land itself is somewhere between "Elon single-handedly designed, constructed and assembled every part of it" and "Elon told someone the rockets re-usable". There's no way to know, but you and a legion of people seem to be portraying his involvement as closer to the former (literally "He’s also built rockets that land themselves..." - come on)
Honestly this discourse has played out a thousand times over. Some people love him, attribute all his companies' wins to him and memory-hole any of the fuck-ups or gaffes. Some people acknowledge his business acumen, don't quite believe the hype on the company-level achievements that get attributed to him personally and find his personality as portrayed on traditional and social media to be grating.
I'm clearly in the latter group and I think that's a pretty uncontroversial position to take.
Edit: would the drive-by downvoters care to explain?
He does seem to be a lot more hands-on with the technical stuff than most C level execs, and for SpaceX there are reports that he is actually doing the work that comes with his role as Chief Engineer:
>"Elon single-handedly designed, constructed and assembled every part of it" and "Elon told someone the rockets re-usable". There's no way to know, but you and a legion of people
I think that's missing the point, which is the question of whether these innovations (the re usable rockets, scaling e cars) would have happened without his involvement. If the answer is no, then the question of whether 'someone else did it and he took credit' seems irrelevant. That's what leadership is, driving results, not pulling up your sleeves and doing it yourself.
If someone says those words - that he helmed a company and pushed them to deliver re-usable rockets then ok. Saying he built that is an absurd fantasy.
At Tesla, Elon is a manager like any other CEO. At Space X, he clearly is not and Gwynne Shotwell with decades of experience in Aerospace engineering runs the show.
As much as people would like to believe that Elon musk, a materials science graduate with his only career experience being online payments with PayPal, is actually responsible for the core founding engineering of SpaceX and Tesla is crazy.
Musk made bank with PayPal and has been an investor in many companies including failures like Neuralink, boring company etc. He has both invested and managed Tesla.
Thanks for posting links, that's the kind of answer I'm interested in.
(Thanks also to whoever un-downed me, as it is from genuinely wanting to understand).
The last link is paywalled, but I doubt that is really his motive. It sounds silly. There was plenty of outspoken criticism against that highspeed rail link without a Musk conspiracy theory. He gave an interview on the BBC where he was similarly bemused by how poor our high speed efforts were, and his criticism was fair.
I'm not sure we can see incidents in very large organisations as indicative of the character of the CEO. For sure he is ultimately to answer for them, and has a responsibility to sort them out, but Tesla employees about 100 000 people and in any sample of people that large you'll have some horrible ones.
Someone else told me about the harassment suit today, now that is directly attributable to Musk and awful. Are there other such incidents?
Still, doesn't seem to explain the sheer hatred for the man. I do have a different theory about that having spoken to others, which I'll post elsewhere...
The hyperloop article is sourced directly from his own statements in text messages turned over during discovery.
I'm always amazed at the double standard where musk is solely responsible for the success of multiple companies, but any fault is attributable to someone else. He claims to have slept in the factory! He's this hands on car-building ubermensch. How can he be completely oblivious to safety and discrimination issues?
According to whom? His internet comments are sci-fi libertarian mainstream with a dash of NWO.
His business accomplishments are impressive, but he's rather boring, no pun intended.
I think the only argument against Musk's success is that he enjoyed unfair regulatory advantages.
PayPal's KYC was non-existent for years, you could send money with little more than an email. Amazon had similar miraculous regulatory exceptions. No State sales tax until it had a near-monopoly network effect.
I found that time he called a diver who was trying to save those kids a pedophile to be pretty revealing. Also, calling himself "Lorde Edge" was pretty awful. I suppose if you're asking "who has the right to tell him not to say that?" the answer is "no one", but I find it hard to respect the guy when he acts so childishly.
Don’t forget his initial support for Ukraine and then his attempted about face with star link terminals. I’m very curious why all of that intrigue seems to have dried up. How did Musk know the Crimean peninsula was dry and needed water guarantees from Ukraine? It’s weird and i believe the critics, he actually talked to Putin and felt like a big man so he started shilling for russian “peace”.
I thought he was just a lucky cult like futurist before but now I think of him as what he truly is - a billionaire narcissist that craves adulation from the mob.
>You have to admit that he invested in some companies
Yeah sure, he just invested in Paypal, then invested in Tesla, then invested in SpaceX.
I'm not even sure if I'm answering real people or bots anymore, everyone sounds the same now: "Elon good, because environment and space and he made reusable rockets and tesla cars are so good etc.", (Elon starts saying wrongtalk about the media and other sensitive subjects), "Elon bad, because he called some diver years ago a pedophile, and he just invested in tesla and spacex no biggie easy for anyone".
But hey who cares right? I've been getting insulted by everyone here for saying Youtube censors videos and google censors results etc. yet just a couple days ago some leaked documents showed the DHS with the help of tech giants are planning to push the censorship even harder.
Flagged this. There is a reasonable discussion to be had here, and it was being had. But you're calling me a bot, you're misrepresenting what I've said and launching into an unrelated rant about censorship.
Twitter was a mixed bag, but it was genuinely useful for news, niche interests, and helping under served issues and communities get more prominence. It's where the kind of open source intelligence that helped to expose Russia trying to cover up its role in the MH17 shoot down emerged, coalesced, and achieved prominence, as one example.
I worry much of that will be lost without having a natural new home with the same reach and impact.
Musk might be good at building and running engineering companies, but Twitter is not that. The social aspect is far more important than the underlying technology, and Musk and his advisors are terrible at that. I don't see any way out of this that leaves Twitter better.
> Musk might be good at building and running engineering companies, but Twitter is not that. The social aspect is far more important than the underlying technology, and Musk and his advisors are terrible at that.
I was talking about private space company. I mean who thinks like I'm going to start a private space company that will launch freaking rockets in space. I don't think any private company did that before SpaceX
Like United Launch Alliance, Rocket Lab, Northrop Grumman, Virgin Orbit, etc?
Also, SpaceX would not exist were it not for a US government decision to fund and develop private spaceflight launch capabilities for NASA and the US Air Force. In fact the idea was given to Musk by Mike Griffin who at the time headed up In-Q-Tel, the CIA's investment arm and could also source the right technical experts to form the core engineering group. Shortly after he became NASA's administrator and gave SpaceX a huge development and launch contract before it had flown anything.
The idea that SpaceX emerged from nothing and bootstrapped its way to success has always been false. That doesn't mean they don't deserve praise for doing a ton of things right and having an impressively bold engineering strategy, of course.
Well, lets skip the fact he didn't build those companies. Both companies rely heavily on government subsidies. He's in part 3 of his dependence on big government, demanding they start subsidizing Starlink
Remove those subsidies tomorrow and the companies fold, all of them
Can Elon figure out a way to get the government to subsidize Twitter? Maybe, but it's going to be harder
Don't tell Elon then, because he definitely paid a growth multiple for Twitter. If Twitter never grows beyond its current size then his investment is a giant failure no matter how much he manages to cut costs.
We don't know details yet, so it's hard to contrast anything. The pre stock vesting rumor was before 11/1. That date has passed.
It's also interesting that nearly every tech person I read thought Twitter was over-staffed prior to Musk taking over. Now he's doing something about it, and people are pearl clutching.
Twitter's loss in 2020 was over $1,100,000,000. In the last 10 years, twitter has lost almost $4,000,000,000, posting profits in only two years (2018,2019).
Twitters losses in 2021 were over 221MM, and 250MM to 700MM between 2013 and 2017.
So the myth that Twitter was a healthy company is only promulgated by agenda driven opinions, not factual ones.
And this year (and all years here on out), Elon Musk in his brilliance added $1,300,000,000 to that loss, because he took on a $13,000,000,000 loan to buyout the company.
That's all I'm saying. The $1.3 billion/year in interest payments alone is a magnitude more loss than Twitter ever had before.
Isn’t the difference that Slack is profitable while Twitter is not?
I worked for a couple startups and the severance package for companies losing money was pretty bad. The package for profitable was ok. And the package for insolvent was “your last paycheck was your last.”
Add to this, rumor has it Elon fired the 3 executives (CEO, CFO, chief legal counsel) with cause to try and avoid paying out the golden parachutes (eg the CEO would otherwise get $40-60m+). I guarantee that'll end in a lawsuit and probably a settlement for less. But I expect that to impact executive hiring.
As for hiring peons, it's hard to say. A bigger factor (IMHO) is Elon himself. Fans will probably go there. Those who don't like him probably won't. I expect that to have a far bigger impact than firing a bunch of employees right before bonus time several years earlier.
My read of the situation is that Elon never really wanted to buy Twitter. I mean he did try and get out of it but the Twitter board crafted a good contract and I believe Elon realized he was going to get dumpstered by the Delaware Chancery Court.
So what does he do now?? The private equity playbook is my guess. He'll massively cut costs, repackage it somehow, claim victory (for "free speech" or whatever) and then sell off a minority stake or even the whole thing. He may even try and do the tech thing where he sells most of the equity but retains all the voting power.
In such an environment, short term hiring probably isn't on the cards.
Here is one possible outcome: Elon splits up Twitter into two parts:
1. An infrastructure element that creates an open API/protocol for sharing/pushing messages, contacts and media between content/social media platforms. The basic idea is to have a generic interface similar to email.
2. A content company that provides aggregation, search, moderation (possibly based on user preference) and possibly editorial features, as well as a front-end for users. Basically what gmail is to email.
As soon as Republicans gain control of congress (and possibly the presidency), he starts lobbying to make it mandatory for all social media platforms to allow their users to connect through the API/protocol under (1) with a generalized account, similar (or identical, at least in form) to email addresses.
This would kill the monopolies of Facebook, Insta, Tik-Tok, etc, by allowing a user to use only one of them to connect with user on all of them, similar to how they can use an email client of choice.
Twitter could then charge some small fee for communicating over this protocol, or could simply sell the protocol company to the government, who could make the protocol publicly owned, like email/smtp.
Would this make him a huge profit? Not likely. At best he would get his investment back, perhaps. But it could help break down some echo chambers and counteract some of the crazy polarization that's currently going on in the US.
And if I'm reading Musk correctly, profit is no longer his primary motivation, if it ever was. Rather, it seems that he has some Messiah complex where he wants to be seen as the guy that saves the world.
Whether you see that as a sign of genuine altruism, a severe case of Narcissism or just a sign that he's really an insecure nerd that seeks social validation, is up to you.
First, I don't see this kind of split ever working. How do you monetize it? Email is federated and has huge problems because of it. Moving a centralized service to federated would be a massive destruction of value. Let's not forget Elon is on the hook for $44 billion so I expect him to protect his investment first and foremost. Why do you think one of his first actions was to apease advertisers?
In politics corporate interests transcend politics and cross party lines. There is no shot any Congress would destroy the value of all these American companies that way.
> But it could help break down some echo chambers ...
Nobody wants this. The idea that any of this is about free speech is a complete myth. The idea that an "echo chamber" is even a thing is problematic. People are going to engage in content they like and not engage with content they don't like. It affects what websites you go to, what TV you watch, what channels you subscribe to and so on.
The post on HN yesterday from the ex-CEO of Reddit was great in this regard. He put forth a cogent argument that none of this is about content. It's simply a user behaviour problem.
So when Kanye goes on Twitter and launches into an anti-semitic screed he gets banned. Not because of the content per se but because he's annoying and he's making the experiene worse for everyone else. Whenever conservatives (in particular) talk about "free speech", they really mean "hate speech" and wanting to avoid getting silenced even when everyone else just wants them to stop being anti-semitic, homophobic, transphobic, racist or whatever.
> First, I don't see this kind of split ever working. How do you monetize it? Moving a centralized service to federated would be a massive destruction of value.
Maybe Elon can afford to take a loss to achieve this?
Or maybe the platforms ARE able to find ways to split add revenue (and other revenues) in ways that don't really destroy value.
> In politics corporate interests transcend politics and cross party lines.
How much financial support is Meta and Tik-Tok giving to Republicans? In fact, I think it's primarily Meta that has a lot to lose from this, out of the American companies. Alphabet/Youtube may actually benefit, as they are specialists when it comes to video, and if Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram are forced to permit sharing of Youtube videos through their platforms, they may gain traffic at the cost of native video alternatives.
> Nobody wants this.
Well I do, for one.
> The idea that any of this is about free speech is a complete myth.
I'm pretty sure quite a few people care about free speech, and even more are worried about American polarization. Even many non-Americans, like me.
> The idea that an "echo chamber" is even a thing is problematic.
That's an interesting point of view. You're not only saying that they don't exist, but actually that the mere IDEA is problematic? Isn't 4chan an echo chamber?
> People are going to engage in content they like and not engage with content they don't like.
I agree. People should be able to filter content they find problematic, just like we do with email spam or how we can restrict porn in browsers, etc.
> So when Kanye goes on Twitter and launches into an anti-semitic screed he gets banned.
I watched Kanye's appearance on Lex Fridman's podcast/youtube a few days back, and it was mostly sad, tbh. Lex, being Jewish himself, pushed back pretty hard when Kanye started his Anti Semitism. But Kanye WAS allowed to speak, and neither Spotify or YouTube have take it down.
> It's simply a user behaviour problem.
On Twitter, maybe that's what it looks like. But if you sit through the podcast, maybe your conclusion is that this is more of a symptom that Kanye is going through a very rough time than some intent to be evil. Obviously he DOES have racist thoughts when it comes to Jews (or, depending on your definition of Racist, they would be if Blacks had as much power as Jews, or if he were white).
But then again, the basic conspiratorial pattern he's using doesn't seem very different from how BLM talks about "white" people. One could argue that white people have some obligation to avoid Anti Semitism due to the Holocaust. But the left seems to be quite accepting with Anti Semitism that comes from Palestinians, since they're "punching up". Aren't African Americans also "punching up" in this case?
Anyway, Kanye is a lot more than his prejudice against Jews. It IS interesting to hear his story and point of view, even if it did make me quite sad.
So, in conclusion. Let's say social media gets a protocol similar to smtp, they would be able to add optional moderation/spam filters against content like this. But I think users should be able to check their "junk folder" and whitelist content they don't think should be block listed, as long as the content is not illegal.
I've seen no evidence Elon is willing to burn Twitter to the ground to make a political point. to the contrary, he tried to back out the deal he hastily entered into and only went through with it when it became clear he was going to get railed by the Delaware Chancery Court.
Even if he is, it's a massive risk. Another platform that he doesn't own could simply rise and take its place.
> How much financial support is Meta and Tik-Tok giving to Republicans?
The Trump administration tried to block Tiktok (briefly). Many officials and politicans call it a national security risk, most recently the FCC chair just this week. While there are noises made about a break up of Meta, I suspect it's going nowhere.
> You're not only saying that they don't exist, but actually that the mere IDEA is problematic?
I'm saying anywhere people can in any way filter their experience, what they see will differ from the unfiltered view. Even if they see the same things, they will engage with things they like. Basically, this is inevitable. The problematic part is this only tends to get lablled an "echo chamber" when people filter in such a way that the criticizer doesn't like.
> But Kanye WAS allowed to speak, and neither Spotify or YouTube have take it down.
In case you didn't see it, I encourage you to read this HN submission from yesterday [1]. I'll also bring up the Paradox of Tolerance [2]. Free speech absolutism is the extreme view where anything can be posted. Not even 4chan has this. So when I say "nobody wants this", I mean everyone agrees there are and should be limits on speech so it's just a question of what those limits should be.
Any site that has attempted unmoderated free speech descends into a cesspit of Nazis and racists where everyone else leaves. Moreso, advertisers (who still pay for the platform) don't want to be associated with it so they leave too.
As you mentioned, Kanye still got an incredible amount of exposure for his views between various podcasts and the right-wing media (eg Tucker CArlson, Ben Shapiro) so it's not like he's been silenced. There's just one thing out of many he couldn't do because Twitter didn't want to be associated with it.
> But then again, the basic conspiratorial pattern he's using doesn't seem very different from how BLM talks about "white" people.
Free speech is fundamentally a political issue, otherwise I'd try not to get into this topic. I understand your confusion, which I certainly believe to be in good faith. I'll scratch the surface of this as neutrally and briefly as I can.
"Whiteness" and "blackness" as concepts are not equivalent. "Blackness" is an invented concept for various people who were robbed of their heritage, culture and language through chattel slavery. It's why we say "African-American" for black people but "Italian-American" or "Polish-American" or whatever for white people.
"Whiteness" as a concept is defined by two properties: 1) The proximity to power and 2) Not being black. It is a concept rooted in white supremacy. Who counts as "white" also changes. Ben Franklin, for example, didn't count Germans as "white". Now we count Italians as "white". That wasn't alwyas the case.
You are correct in that part of this is "punching up" vs "punching down" but you should also know that this idea of equivalent concepts is used by white supremacists. "White power" was a reaction to "black power" as an emancipating force in the 1960s. "White Lives Matter" (and even "All Lives Matter") are the same response to "Black Lives Matter" (BLM). They're also insidious because they imply that BLM means white lives don't matter. It's more accurate to say "Black Lives Matter Too" even though no one was suggesting white lives don't matter.
Kanye is actually pushing white supremacist views. You don't have to be white to be a white supremacist.
> But the left seems to be quite accepting with Anti Semitism that comes from Palestinians
Anti-semitism (hatred of Jewish people) isn't the same as anti-Zionism (opposition to the policies of the state of Israel). People try and conflate the two to deflect any criticism of Israeli actions. There are very valid criticisms to be made of Israel's treatment of Palestinians (eg [3]). The ADL is extremely active in American politics and spends a lot of money in races to defeat candidates critical of Israel.
> I've seen no evidence Elon is willing to burn Twitter to the ground to make a political point. to the contrary
Not burn to the ground, simply build something with a lower monetary value today, if he thinks it can lower tribalism. Consider something like linux. It's precicely the fact that it's not monetised that ensures the near monopoly in the server OS space.
> Any site that has attempted unmoderated free speech descends into a cesspit of Nazis and racists where everyone else leaves.
My take is that anything that is within the law should be allowed to be posted, but extremist propaganda (especialy when fueled by hate), whether it's from the left or right, should be supressed hard unless the reader explicitly disables such suppression.
Btw, one sign that someone is close to one of the extremes is that the person stops recognizing that there IS indeed dangerous extremism on both sides.
> "Blackness" is an invented concept for various people who were robbed of their heritage, culture and language through chattel slavery.
I'm not American. I live in a place with a different history and context. Generally, though, it seems that most "normal" people seem to assign identity to themselves and other based on how they appear, and that this happens at an early age.
Precisely how this forms categories tends to vary with time and space, like for almost all other categories. Even basic things as the number of the colors in the rainbow varies between cultures. For instance, in Islam, the rainbow only has four colors. The truth is that colors form a one-dimensional spectrum, while ethnicity forms a multi-dimensional spectrum.
> "Whiteness" as a concept is defined by two properties: 1) The proximity to power and 2) Not being black.
For me, this is not a useful way. When I meet people from around the world, I associate them by origin to some extent, but at a much granular level, even within countries. Hamburg is different from Munich, Manchester different from Brighton, Chongqing is different from Shangahai, And Dehli is different from Bengaluru. Africa is similar. Egypt has a distinct identity, especially in the big cities up north. Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya each have theirs. Together these countries have a lot in common, and also a lot in common with Southern Europe. Nigeria or Mozambique are both quite different from North Africa, but also very different from each other, and so on.
When you meet people from most of these places, they will have a word to label "people of European descent". For instance, in Thailand, the term is "Farrang". When these people speak English, they may use terms such as White, Black or Asian, but in their minds (as in mine) they will keep the same meanings as they assign at home.
Someone of the Chinese elite in Singapore definitely don't think of themselves as "White", nor are they "Black". If their status is high enough, they may not even allow their daughters to marry someone of European descent.
> You are correct in that part of this is "punching up" vs "punching down" but you should also know that this idea of equivalent concepts is used by white supremacists.
It absolutely is. This way of thinking is precisely what leads to much of the most extreme racial hatred. Hitler saw the Jews as oppressors. The Hutus saw the Tutsies as oppressors, just to name a couple.
You mention the Paradox of Tolerance. I definitely do not think we should tolerate racial/ethnic hatred, whether it comes from someone with ancestors from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India or China. "Punching up" should not be a valid excuse. The only way we can coexist in a multi ethnic and multi cultural society is by demanding tolerance of everyone, and be intolerant of those who do not.
I believe that we actually do not have a choice about this, if the culture we live in is to survive. If we tolerate racial prejudice, I belive there will eventually be some kind of physical conflict likely to end up with a really bad outcome, either genocide or ethnic cleansing/balkanization.
In fact, I think it may be impossible to sustain a multi ethnic/multi cultural society forever. A culture of tolerance may keep tribal conflicts at bay, but unless we can merge into One People (through cross-marriage), there will be a day in the future where some even or charismatic person will cause a massive conflict.
> Kanye is actually pushing white supremacist views.
I recommend seeing the podcast with Lex. Kanye seems quite confused, but if anything, it seems he identifies with the "gang" (his term), and that he simply has come into conflicts with some number of people that happen to be Jewish. He does NOT seem like a puppet of Maga republicans as far as I can tell. He simply seems to think there is a conflict between people like him (basically "gang members" in the music industry) and "Jews".
> Anti-semitism (hatred of Jewish people) isn't the same as anti-Zionism
Obviously not, but I didn't mean only anti-Zionism. Not all arabs, especially in and around Palestine are making that distinction. In fact, the books "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" and "Mein Kampf" are both popular books in Palestine and to some extent other Arab countries. The hatred does NOT seem to be limited to Israel and Zionists.
In Northern Europe, using the word "Jew" in as a derogatory term was strictly taboo 30 years ago. Now, however, after considerable immigration form Arab countries and Pakistan, the term has come back. Mostly in immigrant communities, but it is also starting to come back in working class locals that go to the same schools as the muslim immigrants. You do NOT want to walk around dressed like a orthodox Jew in the rougher neighborhoods of Northern Europe.
Frankly I am pretty sure there is a long list of talented execs who don't care how Parag was fired and would love to work for Musk.
He's too successful now with too many fans for this to have an impact. People know he demands a lot and can do crazy things. That's just part of the package.
If I remember correctly, the rumor about layoffs ahead of vesting said he was going to do it before Nov 1st. That part at least, seems to have just been a rumor.
Take this: You take over a company that was full of bad behaving managers and employees. The previous CEO supported this situation. The new CEO who bought the company need to quickly turn the ship around. Severance, bonus payouts? Yes, if the staff you take over was really good and they deserve it. Is it the same case with Twitter? Can we compare Stripe and Twitter on this level?
From a neutral point of view, if the behavior of current employees is the result of the management grooming them to behave like this, is the resulting behavior is employees' fault?
I don't know internals of Twitter. I'm just asking a theoretical question.
> Which company is going to have an easier time hiring after the dust settles and they have a growth stage again?
Not all companies die after massive layoffs. Sometimes all you need is to contract before building a better place again. Whoever is hired next by Twitter is going to be coming for the future potential, not for what happened during the layoffs.
Nah, people do remember what companies do and many avoid shitty companies. I work in HR, and on macro scale this is clearly visible. Some of our clients have a hard time filling roles despite paying competitively or even generously. Sure, for some people thats not an issue, but it is a thing, and it gets more visible with engineering roles, for some reason.
Google does not have reputation for particularly toxic workplace. They are not super clean of course as you mentioned, but their reputation is not bad at all. And while Apple has worst reputation then google, it is still fairly good one.
Take for instance booking.com. They unceremoniously dumped lots of their employees at the beginning of the pandemic despite being flush with cash. Then they tried hiring people back. Guess what, lots of people didnt want to even hear how much they are offering. There are other such companies.
But yes, there are people who would not, for instance, work for AWS due to their, shall we say, internal culture.
Sure, my point was that "past behavior" barely matters. Compensation, social status and work expectation is what makes people go for or avoid companies. If Google didn't pay as much, fewer people would bother jumping through hoops. If Apple had an oil-industry level social status, Californians would think twice about working there (or they'd get a cover job to use when talking to neighbors and friends).
How they fire people means very little, because very few people in tech think of themselves as the ones being fired in the near future (most likely also why few people in tech are into unions, they don't feel as replaceable as factory workers).
But that is the thing, I dont think you are right. You picked up companies with good reputation as examples ... they pay well and have good reputation, of course people want to work there.
There are companies with actually bad reputation and they either have problem to find staff or have to pay a lot more while still having issues.
They literally formed an illegal conspiracy to harm their employees by suppressing salaries -- this type of thing apparently simply doesn't matter much if they keep offering some of the highest salaries in the industry. And neither will this behavior at Twitter, I believe.
> They literally formed an illegal conspiracy to harm their employees by suppressing salaries
Yes and that is bad. And still, if you work inside one of those companies, the environment does not have reputation of being toxic. It just dont, in case of google the reputation is that they treat you well most of the time, but it is slower speed then, say facebook. And facebook does not have toxic reputation either.
Their reputation is not bad, actually. People who work there criticize some, but also are generally content and happy. Because, even with that agreement, neither company is overly toxic.
I have seen multiple people making decision of "this place pays more, but the environment looks toxic" or "this place pays more, but the business seems borderline unethical" and taking lower offer. I think that is why famous toxic places had to have very high salaries - cause the people were not interested otherwise.
People will do this in a good job market. In a bad one, even crappy employers will have their fill of willing employees. Too many in her have never experienced a bad market
I dont think it would make you sharp. It would train you for ugly politics, back stabbing and general chaos. But it would not train you for good performance. You can actually hide incompetence very well in chaotic companies if you can talk well and take others credit. And competence without political clout gets punished (because it is easy).
Being sharp as in the positive performance terms requires sharp leadership and decision making. It means leadership that actually knows what is going on and that requires trust. That is not the same as rage layoff after you impulse bought company you dont want while trolling on social medias.
For me, if I were at beginning of my career I would have definitely joined Twitter. Because I have to work harder, compete harder, learn faster just to save my job. I think that sort of culture would make you sharp than others in your field very early in your career.
Then when you go and work at company like stripe, its easy.
And good luck to Twitter if they are looking to implement a Hunger Games style culture. However this type of attitude to work is extremely immature, counter-productive and proven to be harmful to both individuals and the company.
People are most productive over the long term when they feel encouraged, supported, self-motivated etc.
Positive emotions not negative ones like fear, coercion, hostility etc.
SpaceX and Tesla would have crashed and burned had it not been for government, of all levels, subsidizing them. Something that, now that he has benefited from it, Musk is against others having.
and the established automakers with billion dollar war chests didn't have access to the same subsidies if they had innovated and made electric cars that didn't suck? The established military industrial complex companies like Boeing and Lockheed that have failed in their space endeavors aren't subsidized?
Elon shows all the signs of thinking he can do absolutely no wrong because his fan base keeps telling him so.
Nothing about this acquisition as been impressive or promising. I see no sign of that changing. A mass disrespectful layoff like this is going to backfire, hugely.
While I do rather think that tesla and spacex has an unhealthy work cultural based on the limited things I read about it, these two ideas are just ridiculously dump to the point where a 3 years old wouldn’t have come up with “cars in a tunnel”.. they are ridiculous.
I would go to work for Twitter, if only to work for Elon. It would be better than any comparable education. Maybe I last a month, maybe I last my career, but I will probably learn a lot.
You want to learn from an egoistic manchild who managed to make a terrible deal and forced himself to actually go through with it to buy a company that has yet to turn a profit, and I’m almost sure it will never, because he is the owner?
> Because I have to work harder, compete harder, learn faster just to save my job. I think that sort of culture would make you sharp than others in your field very early in your career.
That's a great way to get a bunch of cowboys in their 20s who think they are hot shit after five years in the industry while kicking out the people with deep experience because they actually like spending time with their families. Now you've got hyper-trendy software design everywhere with nothing supporting it.
I think there are some very rational reasons for hating or at least strongly disapproving of the new owner.
For example, if the new owner of the company I worked for demanded on a Saturday that a new feature needs to be ready for testing by Monday, I'd be pretty upset.
Or, if I was on a team working on the problem of trust and ethics, and the new owner personally and un-ironically posted a completely false and inflammatory "news article" about a current event, and then several days later laid off my entire team, I wouldn't consider it irrational to be quite upset.
Since apparently nobody else in the thread has any empathy for those who've lost their jobs, future access to healthcare (in the US and less civilized countries), and financial security, I guess I'll be the first: I feel bad for people who are laid off by the machinations of billionaires. I wish we lived in a society where it wasn't optimal to act like raving lunatics will tear down every bit of security you have at a moments notice.
For those who are cheering this on - good thing its not you getting mauled by tigers in the gladiator pit, huh?
It's okay to feel bad for people who lose their jobs. But business cycles are important for a healthy economy. Unsustainable ventures need to die or be pruned at some point if you want to generate lasting prosperity. Whether this specific instance actually serves to create a more productive and more dynamic company remains to be seen, and it sucks for the people affected, but if they're skilled and useful – as every person should always strive to be – they'll be fine.
"if they're skilled and useful – as every person should always strive to be"
Side note, but the fact that people will "be fine" based on their level of economic usefulness - and, indirectly, linking their value as a human to their ability to be productive - is what keeps me up at night thinking about what happens when automation outclasses all of us
> I go to sleep wishing for the day when I can automate everything away.
I've been sitting here trying to suss out why something about saying this outside the context of a job interview feels so cringe to me. Best I can figure is that it's two things. 1.) Having that thought as a central part of your inner life implies that you have a very limited social life. 2.) The lack of worry about your own well being - "we'll have UBI or a dystopian hellscape, oh well" - feels almost ... subish in a sadomasochistic sort of way. Like you're bottoming for the economy (not that there's an issue with bottoming, lol).
If you owned your own business it wouldn't strike me this way, but if you're just a programmer at a company you don't actually get to work less by automating things, you just get to work on different stuff. But if you automated everything you'd just be tossed aside and reap no benefits. Wishing that on yourself is just.... so strangely pathetic. I know you didn't mean to sound pathetic. You probably consider it cool or heroic (in a nerdy sense) to talk about how much you want to automate everything.
Sorry to derail like this. I'm just fascinated by my revulsion and trying to untangle it.
I don’t literally think of this every night. I was exaggerating and should have been more clear about this statement not being literal.
I’ve never actually ended my day wishing for automating everything. But it is an ideal that I would like.
I wouldn’t be tossed aside from automating my own business as I own it and no one could toss me aside. There’s not a requirement that I have an employer.
So I don’t think automating all my work away means I won’t have a purpose any longer. I think it will lead to more interesting and meaningful work.
I could be wrong but I’ve automated hundreds, maybe thousands of processes over the years for various companies and it’s always led to me working on more interesting stuff.
I don’t think it’s cool or heroic, whatever that means, just part of fun problems that I get to solve.
My lack of worry is based on not having any control over the situation so instead focusing on other things. It’s just a reductive analysis that lets me think I don’t have to worry about it.
In the extremely small chance that it is possible to automate everything so that there’s no more work, I don’t have control over it. In hellscape mode, that sucks and is not fun. In UBI mode that’s great. Either way, it’s not affecting my decisions today. I certainly don’t wish for the negative outcome or relish it’s potential.
I think your revulsion may be due to misunderstanding some of my motivations.
It's not the next few years, but half-century out that I'm worried about. I'll personally be retired by that point, sure, but that doesn't stop me from being deeply worried by society at large. Even good programmers are going to have a hard time finding jobs.
You're also missing that programming isn't the only sector that's going to be upended by automation. Basically every job market is going to be affected by the end of the century.
>If we reach some zen state where truly all has been automated then we’ll have UBI (or some dystopian hellscape)
In the States at least, the resistance to any form of socialism is so strong that I have no faith UBI has a snowball's chance in hell.
>there’s tons of one person businesses you can run if you automate workflows.
and when literally everyone can do it, competition will be brutal. When the stakes are "make it or end up homeless", and everyone is desperately trying to run their own business because corporations don't need to hire anymore, we're in deep trouble
We have about a century of empirical data that says that automation does not cause widespread unemployment. Automating horses took away all the horse-care jobs and business, but they found other things to do. Computers automated computers (armies of mostly women who chugged out calculations), and they all found new jobs. Nobody has a secretary any more. All those people responsible for inter-departmental mail are gone, because nobody sends memos any more. Nobody has live-in servants any more, partly thanks to washing machines, dishwashers, and microwaves.
Actually, in some sense, more people have servants, just that they are part-time: cleaning services, people who keep track of your schedule (executive assistants, but for normal people, can't remember the word).
When Microsoft Word automated away secretaries, it also raised the level of quality to be what was formerly available only at professional printers, so people spend the same amount of time, but now the expectation of quality of output is higher.
There can't really be widespread unemployment due to automation, because then labor costs would decrease and handmade goods would become more affordable, so people would start doing that.
Actually studies are that people who specialized in Eg. Looming fabrics never found equivalent jobs. They literally lost their livelihoods and never regained that quality of life. I would be supremely worried if a permanent underclass of people whose specialties are automated away and there are no equivalent quality jobs for them.
Good point, but as a counterbalancing force, those people still benefit from the economy-wide productivity increase in the long run. An entry-level unskilled worker has a much higher standard of living today than a skilled tradesman of the 19th century.
When it comes to approaching the asymptote of the singularity (or just general exponential increase in tech advancements across the board, if you don't buy the general singularity theory), the societal impact of the car replacing horses means little to me in terms of predicting the future.
UBI is orthogonal to socialism. It could exist under socialism, but you could also just take the existing state of the USA, widely considered capitalist, and modify it by setting the Social Security benefits age to 0. I've actually seen socialists against the UBI often enough; it implies the existence of money and markets
We’re the richest country in the world and yet that lasting prosperity only seems to exist for a few. Maybe we’re going about this wrong. Maybe being heartless and coldly efficient doesn’t create lasting prosperity.
Many of them have been paid a high enough multiple of the median household income in the state (which is less than 80k) for long enough - they’ll be fine.
But in here, the company has deep debt only because of overpriced leveraged buyout. And the layoff have popcorn qualities because they are rage driven. The debt twitter had originally was much smaller. The scale of layoff that had to happen would be much smaller. It is also fair to guess they would be deal with more tact and more fairness then done now (no I dont believe Musk team is able to actually tell bad and good performers apart).
Twitter has some profits last year first time. I am not saying it was perfect company. But the deep deep financial trouble it is in now is because of leveraged buyout motivated by politics (stick it to ennemies) and ego.
Why not? Twitter hired a TON in the last 3 years and their income didn’t keep up. That’s business that could need correction. That’s part of the cycle.
As a european though, it is absolutely crazy to see you can do this on a day by day basis.
Here you would have at least 1 month, more likely 3 month, prior notice to just being kicked out and having your accounts closed. You would also have to state a business reason for people who are employed as fixed staff.
This gives people time to react to these kinds of things.
Edit: Sorry, this refers to a comment further below:
Also, comparing this to the pandemic is kinda crazy, isn't it?
It's one thing to have a global scale event effecting the lives of billions and another of just buying a company for way tooo much because you wanted to make a dumb joke about smoking weed.
America truely is a heartless, dystopian society...
I'm surprised by these "generous" packages. Where I work in Europe, they must give me 3 months notice, my full salary is paid for 6 months, after which it's 75% up to 2 years, and if I still don't find anything new by then I get 50% indefinitely.
I've worked in both the US and various EU countries, while the higher salary is certainly enticing, it's also a trap; When shit hits the fan, you better have been saving. In Europe, the money I make is money I get to really use, because the rest is taken care of for me.
Those benefits are ludicrous. How can any small company or startup survive if they have to contend with those kinds of requirements? If I were a business owner wherever you are I'd restrict my hiring as much as possible and try to find ways to not hire anyone, probably by contracting work out to other businesses or offshore completely.
It's a good question. Here, if you have a permanent contract, the employer is required to pay into various government insurances, and this is mandatory for all employers. The salaries here are lower because of this, but it's deceiving because the insurances are based on your salary. Your employer also pays anywhere between 2-10% on top of your monthly salary into a pension fund on top of your state pension. So in short, if you make 100k EUR, after taxes that's actually your money. So in my case, after I've made my monthly mortgage payment, set some aside for groceries and some subscriptions, the money I have left can be spent on whatever I want without worry, I practically don't need to save unless I choose to.
You're right in that employers restrict hiring as much as possible, what tends to happen here is you get a 1 year contract with the option to be taken on permanently, and these contracts don't have all of the insurances. Taking a permanent contract here is seen as a serious commitment to the company, so most people who just want more money in their bank account at the end of the month choose not to take permanent contracts and take the risk themselves.
If I saved for these things myself in the US, I would've been netting less than I do here in Europe, despite my US salary being 100k higher. A lot of people live way beyond their means with all these things considered.
The value of benefits packages in the US is often around 40% of the salary. For example, health insurance, social security, 401k matching contributions, stock options, etc.
I recognize those numbers and suspect he's talking about the Netherlands. If so, he/she is being incredibly inaccurate in describing benefits.
If you're on a permanent contract, there's a minimum legal notice that depends on years served and your age. So it's not "6 months", it's a variable amount of months. It may be as little as 0.5-2 months if you've worked there for < 5 years. If you're not on a permanent contract, the notice is: BYE.
As for "75% for 2 years", that's not the employer paying you, it's the state. Unemployment benefits. Where both "75%" and "2 years" are lacking some crucial details. It's max 75% of a fixed cap. So if you're a high earner, you might only get 25-50% of your previous salary. Further, you'll be intensely pressurized to find that new job, where you need to supply weekly evidence of job interviews. You can't just take a holiday for 2 years. By the way, you paid for the above yourself, directly from your payslip.
As for "50% indefinitely", this is state wellfare. Which is absolute hell. You don't easily qualify for it and you're even more pressurized to find a job, any job. You'll be closely monitored and you can't own anything of any worth. So if you were a highroller owning assets before, get ready to be stripped naked. Next, you'll have the social stigma of being a leech. Have this on your resume, and its goodbye career.
I'm honestly pissed about the inaccuracy of the poster.
I tried starting a manufacturing site in Switzerland. We wanted to get the Swiss Made badge (70% parts sourced in Switzerland and all major assembly steps done by Swiss employees). An hourly employee had basic rate of CHF 45 an hour and they had to be paid some ridiculous benefits totaling up to like CHF 120 an hour. Apart from the cost, the biggest issue is that you can’t fire them essentially if you hire them on “permanent basis”. It’s impossible to do anything there for a scrappy small business.
Modern Switzerland is much of a socialist state. It’s lost all the things that made it a great place for business. Zurich is still a small tech hub for startups but mostly services and finance. Labor is usually hired in US or elsewhere.
About the only place in EU that's pro-small business is Italy. It still has some 50% of the GDP from companies less than 50 employees.
Pretty much what I expected. Also, I'm surprised that the Swiss Franc is worth exactly the same as the US Dollar. Is it pegged to it? 45USD per hour for an hourly manufacturing job is shocking as well, that's about $90k per year. I'm sure it makes it a nice place to live but God help them if they ever need to get something done in a hurry. I imagine they have to tightly control immigration as well.
Those benefits are not paid by the company, but by the state. That's one of the reasons why cash-in-hand salaries are lower in most "socialist" European countries: the State takes a big fat cut out of it (47% in France), so it can pay for these benefits.
Taxes in the USA are often just as high (remember to add in state and local taxes for an apples to apples comparison with European countries). And for that you get no "socialism" -- no healthcare until you're old, for example.
Income taxes (Federal + CA) seem to be roughly in the same ballpark as France based on [0]. A French income tax simulator is available at [1]. This is the "simplified" version. What matters is box 1AJ for salaried income.
For 100000 USD it's actually a bit higher than for 100000 EUR.
However, as another commenter said, income tax is not the full story - far from it. There are other taxes that you have to pay. Also, while social security comes out of your paycheck, it's considered taxable income in France for the purposes of the income tax. Also, social security is usually insufficient, so you usually have to pay for a separate insurance. Which, you guessed it, isn't deductible from taxes.
As far as a company's concerned, if the employee costs 100 EUR "fully loaded", they only get around 55-60 EUR in hand. Also, when comparing with the US, don't forget that VAT is at 20-25% depending on the country. And, at least in France, VAT is levied on some taxes (yup), like for example electricity and gas.
People forget to count the corporate taxes on the employers in Europe (to support the welfare state) which lowers the salaries of workers making the calculation look like taxes are similar.
> When shit hits the fan, you better have been saving. In Europe, the money I make is money I get to really use, because the rest is taken care of for me.
I wonder where this happy country is. In Germany it is already a common knowledge that relying on state for your retirement is a sure recipe for poverty in the old age.
> In Germany it is already a common knowledge that relying on state for your retirement is a sure recipe for poverty in the old age.
Is it? I'm living in Germany since so many years and nobody told me this. They send me estimates about the money I'd be getting when retiring regularly, and while it'd mean downsizing, I'd not be poor with the amounts named.
Assuming you are somewhere in IT and earn above the average, you will be okay-ish.
People with lower incomes will benefit less.
But if you look at that receipt and consider inflation, the extreme rise in rent in Germany, etc and all of that over maybe 20-30 years from you ending your career. It becomes less.
There are adjustments for inflation, but still.
These high pension values are also quite sure to be unsustainable for the government, as the workforce shrinks quite dramatically and people still get older.
Generally, people are advised to put some money for retirement on the side, if they can.
If you are in a position to put some money aside probably try to do some research.
"Geldanlage für Faule" by Sina Groß is a very down to earth starting place.
It is guaraneed to be less value in 20-30 years, because Germany's pensions are transferred directly from the pension fee deducted from salary of employees. And since in 20-30 years you will have a totally diffeerent ratio of number of employees vs. pensioners, the cake will be smaller and will have to be distributed to more people. No matter how inflation or anything works out in future, pensioners will then have less than pensioners now, who more or less live in paradise.
It's wise to be prepared for this scenario for the reasons you mention, but in 20-30 years a lot can obviously change; either a change to the way the pensions are funded (this already started happening to a small extent) or a sudden influx of qualified (!) migrants.
I wouldn't bet on any of it happening, but predicting the future is always hard.
Great reply! To be honest, It's easy to forget about the inflation. Well, worst case, one could make more kids and invent their own "take care of your parents" ponzi-scheme, hehe.
Seriously though, in Germany, you always get this sense that everybody seems to know what they are doing until ??it hits the fan and you realize all that time nobody had cared about what's coming.
Not in my country (in Europe). You get unemployment benefits for up to 2+ years that is a percentage of your salary up to a certain level, depending on your job history in the last 2-3 years. The maximum you can get is around $40k USD, which can be difficult because you probably have a mortgage and other expenses that were calibrated to a much higher salary.
You are also required to actively apply for jobs, and you may be required to take a job application course. I think you can even be assigned to a job interview if you delay. It is not intended as a "free" paid vacation. I think that even in some cases you are theoretically required to take any job anywhere in the country even if you have to move, but I haven't heard of anyone who had to do that. I assume they look at your social situation (family etc.)
Every 2 weeks you need to send in a form where you state that you have been actively looking for work and your financial situation is unchanged. If you forget to check some boxes, you lose all your money for the 2 weeks. Vacation is also regulated and you need to inform your local government and in some cases you will not receive money for the period. You are assumed to spend a full working week applying for jobs.
After 2 years you are placed into a different type of program where you don't get a fixed amount, but you get money according to what the local government decides you need. That means you would need to sell your big house and move to a cheaper appartement if you want to get any support. If you had any savings, you would probably have to spend them before getting any assistance.
Yes, but you don't tend to get fired on permanent contracts to begin with and it's much more enticing to find something new especially considering work-life balance is very very good, I work maybe 24 hours at most with my company explicitly putting your personal life before work because a healthy employee is a healthy employer. You also still pay taxes over the 50% income you're receiving and taxes are high, so it pushes you to find something new -eventually-.
That's certainly not true in all European countries. In Switzerland, for example, you get 70% (80 for very low salaries) of your old salary for 1.5 years (2 years if you're over 50). After that, if you still don't have a job, you're on your own (if you're broke, you can apply for social welfare).
"Europe" isn't a unified system. Those benefits definitely don't exist in the UK, and I'd still consider our labour laws to be well-balanced and reasonably fair to both employees and employers.
In what universe would that be "properly taxed"? You're saying I can work for 1 year in a $200K/year job and then draw $100k x 30 years = $3,000,000 of value from that one year of work? And it would be fair and just to tax "wealthy people" on my behalf for that?
I still feel like I must be misinterpreting something here, because I can't imagine even the leftiest of leftists thinking this sounds fair. That's basically just UBI except the rate is set for each individual based on whatever the high-water mark of their lifetime earnings were at any point?
So in exchange for software engineering salaries that are 8-10 thousand american dollars lower per month at least. you get a fraction of a much lower salary in unemployment benefits?
Lmao, americans shocked when they realized that proper social welfare is a thing always baffles me.
To reply to you genuine question :
1. Yes it is a thing.
2. Everybody is paying for it through taxes.
> As a european though, it is absolutely crazy to see you can do this on a day by day basis. Here you would have at least 1 month, more likely 3 month, prior notice to just being kicked out and having your accounts closed.
That's not true, there are minimum periods for which you must continue to pay the employee after notice their contract will be terminated, but I'd be surprised to learn of any country where it's illegal to prevent the employee having access to the building, confidential documents, etc.
>be surprised to learn of any country where it's illegal to prevent the employee having access to the building, confidential documents, etc.
And I'd surprised if there were many countries where you couldn't prevent an employee who had been notified they were being let go from having access to systems, documents, etc.
No I agree, that's exactly what I mean. You might still have to pay them, but if you don't want them to actually 'do work' for you that's fine. (It's your prerogative to have ever let them access any of that stuff to begin with, could've changed at any point during employment even if they still had a job.)
That's only for very senior management positions and highly paid specialists, I've never seen gardening leave for even middle management, much less an engineer.
Every coin has 2 sides - yes we have this additional security (which I love, just like everybody else), but we pay for it. Much lower salaries, companies not so agile, so they are hardly world leaders. You simply can't get compensation like those folks had/have in Europe, not as perm employee on 100%, more like 25-50% of it.
Its actually great, skilled people can choose their priorities and how they want to setup their lives and career (stupid immigration policies and bad stuff coming out of it notwithstanding).
I prefer something in between - ie Switzerland. Salaries higher, taxation lower, some middle ground on social security - ie easy to fire people, usual 3 months notice by law, but social system will give you 70% of your salary (up to an OK limit) for first year, you just need to keep doing the job hunt. It means you are not shit-scared if you take a mortgage for example, you don't need to have such a massive reserve like in US. And of course top of the world healthcare that cost very little (sickness, accidents are 0 if you work/retired) and cca free top notch education including best universities.
Europe has plenty of world leaders and very large cooperations.
Just a few examples: Automotive manufacturers, Siemens, ASML, Several arms manufacturer, Airbus just to name a few.
In addition, at least where I am, there are a million small companies (a few hundred employees) who deliver to customers around the world and, I assume, at market prices.
It's a balance and probably one of the reasons we lost out on the digital race so far.
> you don't need to have such a massive reserve like in US
If it makes you feel better people in the US don’t have massive reserves either. They just gamble and hit up credit if things hit the fan, even at FAANG salaries.
Notice period is different from redundancy. Redundancy can mean you leave the day you’re made redundant. But they must give 30 days notice that redundancies are going to occur.
In australia you cannot hire for a redundant role for I believe 9 months? If you do you must rehire the people made redundant or face big fines.
> you would have at least 1 month, more likely 3 month, prior notice to just being kicked out
At this point we have no idea what kind of severance package Twitter will be offering. I think it's likely that what you're saying is pretty much what they're going to wind up with - that is, Twitter will push them out the door, but with a check equivalent to something like 60 days of pay plus like continuation of benefits. Of course, I don't know this for sure, but neither do you, so there's no point in condemning or praising them yet.
Many Americans think Europe is heartless because youth unemployment is allowed to get so high because businesses are paralyzed to protect those that have work and thus can never reorganize.
Knee-capping the dynamism of youth is a current consensus of the European system.
What's a $250k payroll worth if that's also what you have to pay for the average hospital visit? I'd stick to my €100k and not have my life ruined just because I broke my leg or my kid is born with a heart disease.
I work as an engineer in America and yea.. that’s totally not how the math works. Healthcare expenses are largely covered along with the much higher pay and lower taxes. I think my out of pocket cost last year was negative after hsa contributions from the company.
If you're productive and then get sick and get fired for being sick, by the time you die of lack of access to healthcare you had become poor. So you see, nothing bad happens to the good useful people!
You have cobra coverage until you go get another job, which is something you absolutely have to do regardless. If you have an hsa, you’ll still have a bunch of money in there, too.
At the end of the day, the revealed preference is that many EU+CA developers move to the US for the salary, and extremely few US developers move to the EU. Draw your own conclusions.
Just ran some arbitrary numbers. Someone earning $190k in mid Ohio would have take home of around $140k, between state/federal. That's before any other retirement savings or anything else. A 'fantastic' insurance plan from blue cross anthem will be around $2400/month for a family of 3. With a 'modest' deductible of $4k. $2400*12=I around $29k. This person is having to spend ~ 21% of 'take home' just on medical insurance. Not any medical expense, just insurance.
Assuming working independently, some of that is deductible, and one might argue how much left over is "a lot" or not. There's still food, shelter, utilities, transportation, education, etc. they need to account for, as well as saving for the future.
Actually, looking at it, if the person is 'independent', they'd pay another ~$10k or so on FICA, or have some LLC structure set up. Or they might be lucky enough to have an employer who pays for some/most of this 'fantastic' insurance... until they don't.
Perhaps in terms of raw dollars, there's some advantage, but there's a pervasive threat of "what if" scenarios that is hard to shake for a lot of folks.
But if you are earning that you are likely working for a large corporation where your actual out of pocket expenses are much closer to something like $1000/month for that family (varies by situation). Far better scenario then a much lower European salary (probably closer to $80,000) with higher taxes and the same (at best) quality care.
If you are working independently yea it may be more expensive, but (unfortunately) so few people work independently so it’s an edge case not really that valuable here. Though worth noting providing a way to untie healthcare from employers and still make it affordable so that you can more easily start a company is a good idea.
It’s really difficult to do good analysis here. If you were in Ohio making $190,000 your family is automatically in the top 10% or so. If you worked remote you could buy a house outside of a major city for your salary equivalent, or in a city like Columbus for 2x your salary with some fantastic public schools.
Also a nitpick while I think you get much more efficient and cheaper healthcare with the government running it, at the end of the day it’s never free so you have to actually compare taxes to premiums to get a fair assessment of cost.
This 1000 times. I don't think we'll see a meaningful change in my lifetime, but it's an existential burden that we, collectively, have had for generations. So much so, really, that hundreds of millions of people seemingly can not envision meaningful change.
The constant "just get a great job with great benefits!" refrain irks me to no end, and demonstrates a privilege that people often deny exists. Even if/when I can get that "great job with great benefits", I still only have it at the pleasure of the employer. I grow old? You're gone. Employer makes bad decisions? They "take responsibility" by letting me go.
The notion of having access to health care, regardless of my employment status, should be such a basic thing to grasp. If I'm unemployed for a year or so (illness, family issues, whatever), having to upend specific doctors/medicines/hospitals/treatments because "insurance change" is life altering for many. Seen it myself in dozens of personal connections over the years. Want to change jobs? Whether abusive working conditions or just need to be with family? "Can't do it... I need my health care... the only doctors that take my health care are in this area...". Or... "I won't have health insurance for 6 months if I take that new job".
There's 1000 different examples I could find why "employer/insurance" connection is bad, and very few I can think of that are good for all parties, yet, we continue in this mess.
> but (unfortunately) so few people work independently so it’s an edge case not really that valuable here.
I know a growing number of folks doing this, and many more who would love to, but ... "health insurance" keeps them tied to "employers".
Great post and I do apologize if I came off as 'not caring' about people working independently it's just if we do broad characterizations we have to compare broadly and so few work independently.
Maybe an idea there to start an independent business owners healthcare association or something that redistributes profits via lower premiums or something? How the hell do you start something like that?
FWIW, there are orgs that do that, but they almost always end up being somewhat regional, and... it ends up being a lot of work. FreelancersUnion, in New York, I believe did/does something like that. Some chambers of commerce and similar groups do too, but... it doesn't really end up changing much of the price at all, especially since ACA. (oh, misread, I initially read that as simply just offering a buyers group to get 'group' rates).
You've generally always been able to buy health insurance independently. I started... 14(?) years ago. The ACA, well-intentioned, was hobbled from day one, and my $220/month high deductible plan has morphed in to a $1300/month plan which is still high deductible ($14k/year), has fewer options, and ... well... some pregnancy services will be covered (cis male here). You want a 'low' deductible? You're looking at probably $2k or more for 2 adults. And yes, I know health insurance has an age component - I'm years older than I was then too. $3k/year in exchange for taking on some risk (higher deductible) makes some sense. But base price of $15k/year in health insurance, plus another $14k/year in deductibles means this is essentially catastrophic only, but not really priced as such).
It's all region-based, and even where I'm at, I get measurably fewer options because I live 2 miles over a county line, and 'no one' insures out here. It got worse for several years - I know in NC, there are ~100 counties, and I believe there were more than 30 at one point who had only one insurer even selling health insurance in those counties.
Also.. FWIW, I didn't take it as you didn't care, but yes, freelance workers are generally overlooked, even as the ranks grow. They just tend to be growing on the lower-end of the spectrum - rideshare drivers, door dash delivery, etc. Much easier to just ignore growing segments of society while we pride ourselves on our ability to "get a better job with great benefits!". I'm not in a position of having to choose food over medication, but having to decide between medication or surgery today over funding retirement savings? I've been there, as have some friends of mine. Yes, it comes across as a bit privileged, but privileges are all relative.
If you think this is good oh boy do I have news for you. You don't need to "afford" fantastic insurance, healthcare is essential and needs to be free for everyone, which it is here. I have complete freedom of choice across 27 countries, no strings attached, completely free of cost. So do people poorer than me.
Better how?
It is probably better if you do not intend to have children or ever need medical care.
People saying that taxes in the US are much lower than Europe, as a person who lived in London, San Francisco and NYC I’d like to disagree.
The tax rate for my income bracket in the UK is 45%, and while federal income tax is 39.6% I still have to pay state and city taxes on top of that which works out to be about the same.
However I get free medical care in the UK, affordable college tuition (10x less than the US at least), maternity leave, great public transit, I could go on. What does the same amount of taxes paid get me in the US? I’m not complaining about having to pay taxes, but sure would be nice to get something back that isn’t military.
> The tax rate for my income bracket in the UK is 45%, and while federal income tax is 39.6% I still have to pay state and city taxes on top of that which works out to be about the same.
This statement is meaningless without specifying the brackets or providing an effective tax rate for a certain amount of income.
How would a reader know that? And how can that be true when the brackets are so different? UK does not even look like it has single vs married distinctions, not to mention the myriad deductions in the US, and the drastically different taxes in various locales (I pay $30k+ less per year by living on the other side of a state/city border).
The 45% UK income tax rate is for 150k GBP, which is $167k. The top bracket for US federal income tax starts at $578k/$693k at a 37% tax rate.
It does not seem to pencil out to being remotely close, and that is ignoring UK National insurance and pension tax rates, but I am not sure how UK pension works to equivocate to US FICA taxes.
I was providing my personal anecdotal experience of having the basically the same net income in 3 places.
37% federal tax also does not account for 6.8% state tax and the 3.8% NYC tax which I know does not apply to all of the US, but then we get into the territory where we have to address that I will probably not have same income in bumblefuck alabama anyway.
People here are talking like the difference between US taxes and EU taxes is 20% or more, when in reality it’s maybe 5%
The difference in tax burden is give here: https://data.oecd.org/tax/tax-revenue.htm . It varies quite a bit by country, but the contrast with France/Nordics is particularly large
I’m not sure how income tax % to GDP is relevant here, but perhaps I am looking at a wrong thing, it’s quite painful on mobile
UPD: looked at the tax wedge, the US vs UK looks pretty similar to me- which supports my point.
Germany looks a lot higher, but they have 100% free tuition and I am not familiar with the rest of the benefits germans get.
A single digit % of total income may not be a big deal in European salary terms, but when you make US salaries it's significant. That's your first mistake.
Also, lol at UK public transit. Horrifically expensive - probably more than a single digit % of total income if you actually have to commute anywhere on a regular basis.
Life insurance is available- as is emergency healthcare riders.
Americans won’t admit it publicly but a big part of living in America is knowing what parts of America you shouldn’t go. And if you do have to go to or through those areas, you start to understand why so many people drive urban assault vehicles.
I'm sincerely sorry for your loss, but moving the goalpost doesn't help the discussion. Again, nothing to take away from how dreadful what you lived through is.
That's exactly my point. The discussion started to derail into "Who has more money?" like that's the ultimate metric. This just makes me sad but is pretty representative for the stereotypical US mindset. My point is there is a lot more to life than money.
This is just ignorant. Nobody with a $250k salary at a tech company in the US is paying any meaningful amount to health care. It is covered by insurance that their work provides.
I often describe the US as the richest (and most well armed) underdeveloped country.
It's unfair, as all short takes are, and it saddens me to see my friends who live there, who are at no fault for the mess they are in, suffer. I fear the coming mid-terms will only make things worse.
Extra-urban (outside of the big cities) Texas feels increasingly feudal every time I visit; maybe it’s because I’ve spent an increasing amount of my life in comparatively egalitarian Germany so it’s easier to see than when I was embedded in it.
Developers are already very well off no matter what country they live in, and I'd wager that "normal" people in the US are not far wealthier than people in Nordic countries for instance.
Yeah, but SF is swamped with homeless ppl. Yay for all those devs earning a lot while living in dystopia.
If I can earn less but be confident that I won't go broke because of an unfortunate events. And that the system is humane, and tries to find a balance between capitalism and humanism, I'll take that any day.
Have you been to SF? I spent a bunch of time there for five years between 2013 and 2018 and the homeless problem got worse every time I visited. It's really bad, and I live in a place that has lots of homeless people.
I think people from actual third world countries would love to be in the US where the government gives you stimulus cheques, instead of back home.
Trust me, the unemployed life in third world countries, and even in second world countries, is far more brutal than the unemployed life in the US, especially for unemployed big-tech workers who can find a new job anytime.
> unemployed life in third world countries, and even in second world countries, is far more brutal than the unemployed life in the US
maybe so, but we should look at the trend not just one sample group at one point in time... for a long time it can be argued that the u.s is riding along as fast as it can to catch up to "the 3rd world" in that regard....
The US safety net, in terms of spending, is as expansive or more expansive than the rest of the world. For example, the U.S. spends $748 billion on Medicaid, health care for the poor, which is matched by state governments. Obamacare subsidies are another $160 billion a year. The fact is the terrible U.S. government administration of these programs and the regulatory capture of the health care system by doctors, pharma, and hospitals are the core issues, but liberals whistle past these real issues and wonder why we don't have European comforts and outcomes per dollar.
I don't think that was the point that they are trying to make.
A lot of people hold the belief Healthcare in the US is bad because it callously refuses to spend money on people. This is not the case.
When you remember that those funds were largely deducted from someone's paycheck, it has a real impact on those workers and it's important not to dismiss all the hard work that did go into supplying those funds.
That's not to say that there are major structural issues with how Healthcare is regulated in the US, primarily related to how those funds are spent
I don’t know how “spending more money for less benefits” is better than “callously refusing to spend any money”? If your country has good intentions or bad it makes very little difference when u’re dying from treatable cancer because u can’t afford the care. Or when u have to go back to work immediately after giving birth.
Honestly, my mother lives in Russia, which is by no means an example of a country with a good social net, she was mortified when I told her about US labor laws. It’s true u net more cash in the US, but u also have only urself to rely on if anything bad happens, and people are really bad at financial planning for any and all unfortunate circumstances
There are significant differences when it comes to expectations on a fix. If the problem is just refusal to spend, the policy problem is easily improved with easy to write legislation: 'medicare will now cover everyone over 55'. The US healthcare system is far more difficult to improve than that, as just asking the government to cover more bills at the prices companies and the public pay would be hard to sustain. Changes to make costs more in line with European countries would have extreme opposition from some people: Every dollar of waste is someone else's income, and in general those are also American voters. This doesn't make American healthcare any better, but it means that it takes extreme efforts to make it better, even a little bit. So it's at least not a matter of malice.
As for labor laws, the US does far better than it seems. Easy to fire also means easy to hire too, as the risk taken by the employer is also far lower. And the stronger the protections, the higher the slack, showing in unemployment. Very few European countries have the unemployment rates of the US, and the ones that do get there via a lot of temporary work, which has about as many protections as US work. And even with those protections, you still see Spain and Greece at well over 10% unemployment, while the US is under 4.
I think there are some "simple" fixes that would go a long way to improving the healthcare system.
The easiest is basing Medicare spending on patient benefit in terms off quality adjusted life years.
I think it is a common misunderstanding that European countries maintain lower costs via price caps. In actuality, most don't limit the sale price, but control how much they are willing to pay for a drug, device, or procedure. This means that a product has to be substantially better to command a substantially higher price. More treatment with slightly worse products means much more benefit overall. Similarly, it puts some downward pressure on the price of new products because they have to compete with cheaper but less effective ones.
Using spain and greece for comparison sure seems like cherrypicking your data.
Also it has been proven many times by many people that if US were to transition to single payer insurance system, it would actually decrease the spending. No one claims it is easy, but there is absolutely no reason for the US insurance system to exist under single payer, that would be just setting piles of cash on fire.
I would quibble with the word proven here. There are compelling arguments with good data. single-payer could be better or worse depending on actual implementation and coverage.
It's also worth noting that many countries with single pair still have a supplemental insurance market for premium coverage not included.
>I don’t know how “spending more money for less benefits” is better than “callously refusing to spend any money”?
I don't know if it is better, but it is certainly a different problem, which matters if anyone is interested in understanding or fixing it.
I think it is important to understand the problem specifically there are a lot of patients dying of treatable cancer who would benefit from a health care system that functions better.
Sure it is necessary to understand the problem to fix it, I am not denying that. Sure, “refusing to pay” vs “paying a lot and accomplishing fuck all” are different problems.
But the context of this discussion is “can US healthcare system be objectively called third-world-like” which it can. Whether it is bad because of X or Y reasons is not relevant and comments like the one I responded to, come off as trying to diminish how dire the situation really is.
An interesting rebuttal to the usual complaints about the US healthcare system (no idea how factual it actually is, but it passes my basic sniff tests, but it is a subject I am unfamiliar with):
> but liberals whistle past these real issues and wonder why we don't have European comforts and outcomes per dollar.
The US should grow up and stop it with these bicameral partisan pissing matches.
Both the US centre right and alt-right parties are equally responsible for putting US citizens taxes directly in the grubby hands of middlemen who fail to deliver outcomes.
The biggest problem with us Healthcare spending is how the money is allocated and spent. A lunch pin in the high cost is that the government has no concern for the cost to benefit of treatments and largely props up the price of the market. This is a bipartisan problem. If the government set reimbursement for treatments based on patient benefit, it would go a long way to reducing the cost in the US.
Even worse than that, immigration status. Getting laid off when on H1B, especially when other companies are freezing hiring and we are getting close to the holidays when everything takes longer is terrifying. You are on a clock for being simply kicked out of the country.
Some shitty body shops are going to have a field day with this. Some random regional nontech companies who staff their IT departments as cheaply as they can are going to randomly accidentally end up with some MUCH better talent than they deserve for what they pay because of this.
Of course it was known. The system itself is shitty to immigrants. But "well you signed up, deal with it" is an empathy-free way of responding to this sort of situation. An Indian or Chinese citizen can come to the US for undergrad, get a PhD in CS at a top US university, be unable to get o1 for a variety of reasons, end up with h1b, and be on a decades-long waiting list for a green card. This person can get married and raise a family while still waiting for that green card.
Being weeks away from deportation is unimaginably terrifying.
This happened to me (and is in part why I'm a tad salty in the comments), I was a H1B and in the process of adjustment of status. While your green card application is pending, you're legally in a grey area if your H1B expires. I had to leave for family circumstances but advanced parole took months to process, I figured it would be okay since it was a serious emergency. Upon returning I was told I couldn't re-enter the US because even though my stay in the US was completely legal, I had technically overstayed the terms of my H1B. The USCIS policy and CBP policy differs around this. There's a specific USCIS policy memo that mentions this actually. So I'm now banned, no leniency, no understanding for the situation.
Advance parole is the permission to leave and re-enter the US while your green card application is pending. USCIS is pretty backlogged right now, so getting anything approved, including advance parole, can take longer, which leads to bad experiences like this one.
Lying about job requirements to import lower paid hostages has been an issue on here for years. I have empathy for the individual but they are also hurting me by doing what they are doing even if it is rational for them.
Software jobs create software jobs. I find it very hard to believe that the US bringing in a lot of people from around the world to work in software has actually hurt you. A major reason why tech compensation is so huge in the US is because it is a tech center, and a large part of that is because we draw people from the entire world.
I mean, some people are coming at this from some kind of altruistic angle, but let's be pragmatic: immigration is the American superpower and the key to expanding the dominance of American companies decades into the future.
Yep even if you take a maximally cynical view and think of policies exclusively from the perspective of rival nation states, I have no idea how you'd conclude that pulling very large numbers of smart people from China to the US is bad for America's hegemonic influence in world politics.
> This person can get married and raise a family while still waiting for that green card.
That's your mistake right here - making long term plans while being on temporary visa. Just assume that you're here for a few years to make money, and then need to go back to your home country. That's the idea behind H-1B visas anyway.
The green card wait for chinese and indian citizens is decades long. This is "don't make any long term plans until you are 50" kind of advice.
The idea behind h1b is to bring people to this country to work in useful and productive ways. Telling people to get the fuck out after a few years of work (even if they've spent 8-10 years in school here prior to that) is heartless and definitely not good for the country.
> The idea behind h1b is to bring people to this country to work in useful and productive ways.
Specifically, in a temporary way. H1B is not an immigration visa, it's a temporary working visa, for which duel-intent is acknowledged (it's legal for an H1B holder to intend to get and apply for a green card.) But at the end of the day, an H1B visa is still a temporary work visa, not an immigration visa.
I'm not saying I like it. If it were up to me all the temporary work visas would be done away with and replaced with a system of permanent visas. But it is what it is.
That's hiding behind technicalities. A person on H1B needs to leave the country within 30 days after being laid off. What life plans can one make around that? Even a simple housing lease is minimum 12 months in most parts of the country.
It leads to immigration in the sense that an H1-B terminates in a green card or the worker loses it after 6 years. Compared to a Chinese Z work visa, which you can just renew indefinitely and has no path to a permanent residency, an H1-B is a completely different beast.
OK, why don't you volunteer then to give up the basic human tendency to fall in love, and give it up indefinitely for many years at a time? It's not temporary if it can last for a decade, is it? Just live a pathetic little life in a box, collecting money for the day, many years away, when you can finally let yourself be a human again?
Tell me, which decade of your life would you be OK with throwing away this way? Your 20s? Your 30s? Get back to me on that.
By the same logic college students should never date, as they may move somewhere far off after graduating.
Sadly, while there is surgery that takes away your ability to procreate, there is as yet no surgery that will supress your ability to fall in love or to live a normal life.
So even if an immigrant comes here with the same stupid mindset you are displaying, and tries hard to never fall in love, it may happen anyway.
I don't know if I've read a more unempathetic statement on HN. Perhaps you are a happy lifelong bachelor, and can't relate to any other point of view. That is the only case that would make me understand where you're coming from, for if you have ever actually experienced love, you would understand the hypocrisy of your view.
Well, it's not like decades-long delay for green card processing is something that surprises you - it is known long before you set foot in the US. Why would you plan your life around the assumption that somehow the issue won't apply to you? Also, H-1B visas are relatively short term (6 years tops) so that's the time to figure out your green card chances and life plans. Finally, it's not like love somehow totally strips you of the ability to think rationally. If it is, it's not love, it's obsession.
this is unimaginably callous, do you not see the worker attached to the visa is a human being. they cant even have the most basics of human need by the virtue of being on a visa? you guys basically want immigrants to be slaves & guess what that works for your employers but not you the populus. your anger & callousness towards immigrants is misdirected.
btw No H1B is just 6years, thats just paperwork, all employers know this & workers know this & us gov knows it too because you commonly file for a GC near the end of that term & use it to further your stay. the problem parent post is facing is that us immigration rules are unclear and adhoc in many cases & folks in the pipeline end up suffering for it mostly.
> they cant even have the most basics of human need by the virtue of being on a visa?
Well, if you ignore reality of your situation because you are high on love hormones that's on you.
BTW. I'm not even from US, I live in central Europe, I spent a year in the US for one of the projects I worked on, didn't last, so I came back. You might say that I also fell victim to "unclear and ad hoc immigration rules", except they aren't ad hoc or unclear at all: if your intention is to immigrate to the US then H-1B (temporary worker visa) is not even the right visa type for you, you should apply for EB-3 instead, from the very beginning. So, to sum it up, original poster is trying to game the system, and bitching about the fact that the system is hard to game.
EDIT: Another problem with China and India is that combined they have population 10x that of the US. That's why US puts limits on number of immigrants from there (via wait times), otherwise the US population can easily double or triple in the next decade, leading to a lot of problems.
> Well, if you ignore reality of your situation because you are high on love hormones that's on you.
you mean getting married & starting a family? Even bloody monks who take chastity wows are not immune from carnal desires but you want some poor immigrant to be better than a monk because you waived a legal doc? btw thats works out great for illegal immigration in US.
> if your intention is to immigrate to the US then H-1B (temporary worker visa) is not even the right visa type for you, you should apply for EB-3 instead
Yet most GCs happen either H1B or asylum path. its because its designed that way. BTW I have been through the process so keep this BS to yourself, H1B is dual intent. And OP was not trying to game the system the system is poorly setup, surely your solution to a jobloss could not be just up & leave. especially when the rules are not clear (hence the needed to be clarified).
>..China and India is that combined they have population 10x that of the US..
nope, India's population is 4x of US. and agree there are per company h1b quotas BUT if US wants to limit the number of immigrants then they should stop issuing APs after H1Bs 6 year and force workers to go back. thats totally fine, but what US does is worse because they are stuck in a limbo state (I personally know many such people) waiting for GC to become current at some arbitrary date. And while this happens they have little leverage over company so they get treated like shit with subpar pay. So USCIS should either come up with a better plan to resolve the backlog or invalidate APs. they wont do that because employers dont want that.
Oh and BTW if they dont let workers become permanent residents then they should return all the SS & medicare taxes they took from paycheck as that is just plain theft.
The US diversity lottery sets a constant cap per country. The same number of Iclandic citizens as Chinese citizens can get it. The cap is absolutely not being set because the US is worried about its population doubling.
I agree with the above assessment that your posts are simply heartless.
> That's your mistake right here - making long term plans while being on temporary visa. Just assume that you're here for a few years to make money, and then need to go back to your home country. That's the idea behind H-1B visas anyway.
Just to be clear, since H-1B (or visas with similar restrictions) are the only path to permanent residency for people of many countries, this attitude is tantamount to "we don't want any immigrants from ______, period".
In civilized countries, you don’t loose your healthcare when your loose your job.
It’s tie to your human status, not to a contract
with a random corporation.
Also, civilized societies have come up a long time ago with appropriate social nets that mitigate the hurdle of unemployment.
I'm with on on everything but the food! I can get like 10 different kinds of apples at my grocery store, a dry aged ribeye, and there is an entire row dedicated to different types of sparkling water. If i want fresh noodles for fish soup I can go 10 minutes down the road to the Asian grocery and get Bok Choy, fishballs, and udon noodles. The only thing not near me is a reliable source of rainbow colored bagels that my daughter loves.
I guess then based on your narrow minded moral stance of what "civilized" means, Switzerland would be uncivilized. So would be Taiwan, Japan and Korea.
Your definition of "civilized" just means a socialist state.
There is no security. You never know when things will go wrong. When pandemic happened software companies like Twitter were untouched but millions of workers felt its impact shaking them to the core and hence preparing them for better choices next time. The employees that are laid off I wish them best of luck but they should have been prepared for a day like this. They were earning good. It's things like this which transforms people. Maybe someone out of these employees will start next billion dollar company, who knows?
I feel like Musk is making a spectacle of Twitter layoffs as a way to curry favor with those who very vocally disliked Twitter’s moderation policies, most of whom were just social media clout chaser types. Makers getting sacrificed to please the attention-seeking “professionals”
One of the richest people in the world overpays capital holders and slashes labor by 50% in order to own "the world's town square". Remarkable demonstration of labor weakness.
Many will be fine, there also may be many who will not. Not everyone makes that much at twitter, not everyone is in a role that is competitive right now. The ones who make the least are the ones who will suffer the most. Stop being callous.
That’s not the point. Dignity and respect. Going in a different direction? Fine. Make cuts. But, no one deserves to be treated as disposable playthings. Zero communication and unreasonable demands create anxiety. Contrast this to stripe. I fail to see how one’s income determines the respect they should receive.
As I saw pointed out elsewhere, with a headcount of only engineers and these alleged 10 managers per engineers, this would leave twitter with like 630 engineers and 6300 managers which is a clearly a drastic underestimation of the number of engineers and that's before you count roles like sales, support, etc.
Sure, but that team may have N engineers and those VPs may have N teams, so that doesn't seem so ludicrous for a 7000 person company. Or even 3500 person company by EOD. Certainly in my company there's about a 200:1 engineer:VP engineering ratio, so pointing out every engineer reports to a VP is kind of a meaningless statement
And there are also finance people, HR people, sales, etc. people. The company is far from entirely engineers, their managers, and the managers of their managers.
Yeah right. Because smart people can always control the circumstances of their life like an illness, elder care, affordable housing, change in market conditions, etc.
I try to live by that principle but it's really difficult to actually do it, mostly because of costs related to real estate/housing, and seeing how housing is a big share of almost anyone's salaries (either through mortgages or rents) in the end it gets out of your control.
What I'm saying is that is difficult to live "bellow my means" when it comes to, well, living, which means having a roof on top of my head. I don't want anything fancy, just a safe enough area, decent amount of space and decent amount of transportation options. I'm of course willing to pay for all that, the problem is that there are people who are willing to pay even more, which leaves me with two options: either compete against those other people, which, like I said, makes the "live bellow my means" moot, or, the second option, to compromise on my housing/living arrangements (choosing to live in a less safe area, giving up on access to public transportation, choosing a studio apartment instead of a one-bedroom thing), which is less than ideal (because housing is a basic thing in one's life).
Even leaving aside that a lot of these people are not engineers but customer support, finance, sales, etc. even developer hires in the current market are very measured and selective at most companies. First of all, probably nothing will move forward until after the holidays. It's not unreasonably pessimistic to think that it may take 6 months or more for someone to get a new position even as a developer.
False dichotomy. It's possible to feel empathy for someone who takes a bitter pill, but if the pill makes them and society better, I'm not going to be shamed by you for saying it's a good thing.
I've been laid off in downturns a couple times before, so it has been me in that pit.
But you can't have the boom without the bust, and shrinking bloated companies is a thing that has to happen one way or the other.
Also, the Twitter layoff in particular has had about as much advance notice as anything I've seen. It's been clear for months and months it was going to happen. Plenty of time to get yourself in order or get out first.
The personal financial security shouldn't be provided by corporations, is your problem, so you should be the one who solve it, if you want financial security just make sure you are highly employable at any point.
Most people fired from Twitter will find a new job without problem and if they can't, is their problem, not mine.
This is a very very naive take from someone who has no empathy and no understanding of macroeconomics.
In a down economy, human resources and artificially underutilized and many competent workers with solid financial discipline will still find themselves in financial trouble.
Sounds like what you’re really saying is “from each according to their ability; to each according to their need…”
Also I’m sure you didn’t have this intention, but your comment made me think about East Germany. When the wall came down, there were all these state owned companies that had to be sold, something had to be done with them. They could not produce enough income to maintain the workforce that they had. This really upset a lot of people and they lost their jobs. It was not their fault, it was the fault of the state and the structure of the company.
Twitter apparently is quite bloated, and for the company to survive and succeed it needs to cut costs, or go out of business.
Germany could’ve easily just closed all of those companies in the east and laid everyone off, but they did their best to sell them so that people could still be employed.
don't forget immigration security - if you're on an employer-tied visa then you must find a job extremely quickly or leave the US and start the process over.
Well people can be hard to replace thanks to skills and training they received on the workplace... which they can quit on a short notice if they are offered better pay elsewhere, causing enormous problems for business owners. So it kinda checks out.
Obligations shouldn't be one way, they should be mutual. If you want an ironclad employment security, etc, etc, you should also accept to be bound to your workplace until the business hires somebody else to do your work who is as qualified to do your work as you are. And if you think that your obligation is only to work well until you decide to quit at the moment of your choosing... then you should also accept that this moment might be chosen by your employer.
It's that whole thing of reacting with great sadness to hearing of one person's death and being numb to hearing of a plane crash (I'm mangling the saying). If we stopped to think about all the individual tragedies that go on every day around us, nothing would ever get done, we'd stop eating and we'd never get out of bed. People have to cope, and we shouldn't have to feel guilty about it.
I think the empathy is limited only in this particular case. Twitter has a) been exemplifying cancel culture itself and b) been a major tool for cancel mobs to organize and defame. The latter was intended and encouraged.
Some here have perhaps been victims themselves, for relatively mild things (I'm not talking about the really egregious cases where cancellation has been justified!).
If you live by the sword, things may turn around at some point.
Too many people are unreasonably attached to their jobs. If you work in a country/state that is "at will", you should take that seriously as if you could lose your source of income at any time.
That includes financial planning and money set aside for these types of events.
but underneath this 'business' there are real humans with kids & mortgages and a life. we dont/should't have to live to feed some capitalistic ideal of maximizing the line rather it should be other way round. looking at US for last 40 years which way you think its been going?
I must confess that I am finding it difficult to muster sympathy for them. And this coming from a man that despises Musk's behaviour, and wished he had been barred from buying Twitter. My reason being that during the pandemic, I repeatedly told people that my biggest fear was not the virus, but the economic collapse that would be the inevitable result of global lockdowns, and the authoritarian dystopia being shaped by the censorship of contrarian views. "First you are working from home, and then you are just... at home.", I said. And people who tried to share that view on Twitter where harassed and banned. Perhaps I will be proven wrong, and the economy will quickly rebound, who knows. But being gagged from even discussing the possibility of the events we now see unfolding, has left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
Watching twitter ban dissenting doctors and scientists reminded me of Hannah Arendt and the Eichman trial: "The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution"
And this from a NYT movie review:
"Arendt concluded that evil in the modern world is done neither by monsters nor by bureaucrats, but by joiners. That evil, Arendt argued, originates in the neediness of lonely, alienated bourgeois people who live lives so devoid of higher meaning that they give themselves fully to movements. It is the meaning Eichmann finds as part of the Nazi movement that leads him to do anything and sacrifice everything. Such joiners are not stupid; they are not robots. But they are thoughtless in the sense that they abandon their independence, their capacity to think for themselves, and instead commit themselves absolutely to the fictional truth of the movement."
Generally the centi-millionaires don't have a fan following cheering them on, so there's less of an opposing view to require a comment like the top level one to be made
I think it would be easier to feel sympathy for these Twitter employees had we seen them show sympathy for the various people that were suddenly banned from using Twitter, and/or other platforms and services, often with the flimsiest of "justifications".
In at least some of those cases, it was a matter of livelihood and financial security for the people who were banned, too.
I won’t quote your reply since you deleted it but I would suggest reviewing that list of suspended Twitter accounts and looking for any example which supports your original claim that this is being done callously on flimsy grounds. Conservative grievance peddling is a popular way to assert group loyalty but it’s hard not to recognize how routinely they leave out the parts about knowingly violating the terms of service repeatedly and ignoring warnings.
People make mistakes but they also correct them and there’s no reason to believe individual Twitter employees were callously nuking accounts, much less at the scale where it’d justify being dismissive about thousands of people losing jobs they were performing satisfactorily.
How do you know they didn’t? Are there any specific cases you can point to so anyone else can decide whether to agree with your assessment of how warranted it was? Speaking of which, why is this blame directed at Twitter employees rather than the managers setting the policies? Why are they also to blame for unspecified “other platforms and services” where they presumably are not in policy-making positions?
The sound of 1000 leetcode warriors printing out 2 pages of tumbleweed, sobbing over their multifunction copiers, then rushing home to record a YT video of why they left their faang dream job
Why would anyone subject themselves to such humiliation? (Well, a fat paycheck is probably an answer). It feels more like a weeding-out process, if I were a giant jerkoff billionaire, I would know anyone who submits to this bullshit will submit to further humiliation...
It's humiliating because printing out code (or more commonly "printing out emails") is literally a meme, and I have read multiple articles alleging that after printing, the employees were instructed to shred the papers, without anyone having looked at them. That sounds a lot like Musk trolling by demanding his underlings print their code.
I think the implication was that they asked everyone to print the code out and then, realizing that nobody actually would be able to evaluate the code, asked everyone to shred the printouts lest they go into a dumpster where the code could be stolen.
To make the example extreme, if you got hired to be a developer, and your boss asks you to clean the toilets, is it okay because hey, he's paying for you to do whatever he wants?
You'd probably say no, because his request is way over the line; to me having a jerkoff know-nothing telling me "Print your work and I'll judge whether you're worth it or not" is over my line.
It's apprarently fairly common for office workers in Japan to clean toilets of their offices. They see as part of taking care of their surroundings (something they perceive as required for harmonious functioning as a human) and not at all beneath them. It starts in elementary schools, where children clean up the school themselves.
Haven't experienced exactly that but I often did non-coding tasks:
- lunch shopping and preparations, clean up
- transport from one branch to another for Factory Acceptance Testing
- at one point I worked as a consultant for a rather large Norwegian company and one thing I noted was the the most senior leader I ever saw in that company (that I was aware if at least) was also one of those I remember who would make sure to tidy the kitchen and make sure everything went into the dishwasher
If you interviewed at a company and got told "Every quarter, the know-nothing jerkoff CEO wants to see 50 printed pages of your code", and you accepted the job, hey, you've accepted that this is the norm in that company...
That’s kind of like the complaints about Body Mass Index (BMI), “Well it misrepresents body builders and says world-class professional athletes are obese!” Yes, but are you a body builder or world-class professional athlete?
Everybody wants to think they’re Andy Hertzfeld, but generally speaking for a whole lot of people not being able to show their productivity in a very simple way means they’re unproductive.
> for a whole lot of people not being able to show their productivity in a very simple way means they’re unproductive.
No, this is completely nuts! It encourages all sorts of pathological behavior to fake the metric, and throws the thing you might actually care about - business value - under the bus. It's even worse for senior people and those with architectural responsibilities. Spend time helping a junior on your team? Well, that's going to count under his commit metric and not yours, so he can figure it out himself.
My point is that if your productivity can be easily measured by LOC, then don’t tell me that LOC is a bad metric.
If your duties are mentoring, show me the meetings you had, the action items from those meetings, and what changed as a result. Nearly every job’s productivity can be showed in a pretty simple way. It’s the people who argue that their contribution can’t be simply shown that are often not that productive.
> My point is that if your productivity can be easily measured by LOC, then don’t tell me that LOC is a bad metric.
OK, so, I fundamentally disagree with the if condition.
This is in no small because of a previous coworker, in a place that shall not be named, who regularly duplicated entire class files rather than subclassing them, and his given argument when we challenged him on this was that he "couldn't subclass because the access specifiers were set to private" (yes really his defence was that bad).
Worse, I'd already added some "TODO: deduplicate this method" comments to the original, because the original was already a mess of copypasta code, and the new class duplicated all of these too.
So, a lot of new LOC that day, but none of them were good additions.
If anything that guy’s a great example of why to use LOC as a metric because when he shows you a huge number of LOC, you say, “That’s a lot more than I expected, let’s take a look…” and you see that his performance sucks.
I think of metrics like this as a way to guide deeper looks and decision making. You just have to accept that “all models are wrong, but some models are useful.” LOC can be useful when it guides you to the right questions. It’s a starting point not the end of the conversation.
The most productive engineers I've known all crank out a ton of code in any week. It's almost like an addiction for them to push commits on a daily basis.
> "Twitter’s newsletter service Revue will be shut down by the end of the year. Revue was acquired by Twitter in January 2021 for an undisclosed amount. The report also says that Notes, a longform posting feature, is on hold, as is Twitter’s plan to build crypto wallets."
All these are look so distant to Twitter's core value.
Why do you think that? Twitter has tonnes of journalists who are running a substack or patreon, Revue would have let Twitter get in on that revenue stream. Building a tool for longer form content seems like a totally reasonable leap for twitter, and crypto - whilst a bit bullshitty - would be a fine way of moving payments into twitter which is another great monetization strategy. All of those projects seem reasonable extensions of Twitters core business.
I don't think the decision to lay off the teams is odd. It is quite clear that Elon Musk's plan is "We're going to fix this by firing 90% of you and expect the remaining 10% to work 10x harder". They're not dumping any of these ideas, they're just expecting to deliver them with far fewer engineers (who, btw, will not be earning 10x salaries).
It wasn't the decision to layoff teams, it was the fact that he did tell them to stop working on the longform product. Maybe he'll take it back once they're done with paid verification.
Some say it's the world's town square. Fine, but how do you support (pay for) that? Town squares are generally funded and maintained by public organisations and tax money. Twitter is a private company and I don't think there's much enthousiasm for giving Twitter public funding in order to run it.
Feel for the workers being laid off and those that remain. I've been in teams that got decimated and the aftermath is rough. Although it's just a job, you can't help forming a bond with those that you work together with.
Hope that those looking for new challenge find it and those that remain can grow into new things without doing the work of 3 people.
Ex-Tweep here. US employees need to really thank the WARN act. Without it everyone would likely be fired on Oct 31 with no severance. Now everyone is kept on the payroll until Jan (NY until Feb!) and then getting one more month of base salary. We'll see what happens with lawsuit if they manage to get their Feb vest and bonus as well. (they deserve the bonus at least prorated to Nov).
BTW, lots of ML people got hit, also some brilliant ones. Cortex org got hit hard. I guess Musk doesn't care about people running experiments in Notebooks on expensive GPUs.
50% layoffs and likely more attrition soon due to mandatory RTO and people who cannot work 996.
as I said earlier, he probably thinks the entire twitter ML/AI can be served by tesla dojo cloud. he might hire more loyalists from tesla to see that happens in twitter.
regarding RTO/996 I dont see why any good developer should still stay beyond say six more months when economy starts to recover. Musk may think he is a Messiah but so far he has shown he's just a slavedriving billionaire. Those who can escape would as soon as they can & twitter will be left with lifers.
THe issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion.
Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive". Musk is not a proponent of that. He is a micromanaging, capricious, easily distracted, arrogant and vindictive CEO.
If twitter thrives then we can expect copycats to try and spread his shitty work philosophy (like everyone idolises Jobs.)
Jobs wasn't like Musk or Bezos, cared deeply about employees, despite the famous youthful tantrum stories (probably also true, but salacious so more famous): my friend's wife had a hard to diagnose condition (autoimmune it turned out, I believe) and Jobs offered unlimited use of his private jet to get her to any doctor anywhere.
I was similarly told to be with my very sick parent, no time constraints, and I was part of an inner sanctum engineering team, and later similar when I had a pet get ill, in all cases because we all had one another's backs, and we all were NOT fungible assets, but, rather, harmoniously integrated by years of working together and a strict hiring filter in the first place.
Yep. I had a stand-up row with Steve in the elevator in IL1. We stepped out to continue it, so others could use the elevator.
At no time did I think there'd be any retribution or problems because of this. We both had strong (and in this case, contrary) opinions, and Steve respected you a lot more if you voiced those opinions rather than just accept whatever he told you. He was also perfectly happy to over-rule you if you didn't persuade him, but he didn't want Yes-(wo)men around him.
I don't get that vibe from Musk. It's like he read some stories about how a maverick CEO can be an asshole and get away with it in some trashy red-top newspaper, and modeled his entire character around that.
The outliers compared to the famous stories, I think you mean.
I think you're right. Thing is what I wrote is factual as can be.
Your comment made me wonder, how much of Bezos and Musk sociopathy is innate, versus imitation of some excerpt popularly known of earlier successful albeit at times abrasive characters. And how might they be different if the decent stories were so well known, because they do exist.
I've been at Apple for 20 years now, and I've received stock every single year. A fair amount of it, actually.
If you don't accept that people new to something will make mistakes, then you're not going to get very far. Steve changed as much as Apple did over the years, and mostly for the better.
Can you please fix CoreBluetooth? It desperately needs async-await APIs :)
Also a non-location-permissions-based bluetooth background wakeup mode would be amazing
While we're at it, not locking new Swift features behind iOS X would be incredible. WWDC each year is basically "here's all the stuff you can use in 3-4 years when you can up the min-spec iOS"
>Jobs wasn't like Musk or Bezos, cared deeply about employees
I doubt if any CEO can pull it off for the long run without being caring enough about his/her inner circle. Even ruthless dictators have to be 'mostly' nice to their inner circle ( guards, butlers etc.).
The larger point being that often they can be ruthless with people who are not in the 'inner circle', sometime justifiably so and sometime not so justified. I'm basing all of this on typical human behavior, not specifically on Jobs/Musk/Bezos, of whom I know nothing. You will see this trait even in families, the stereotype of the current ruthless man being a gentle and loving father to his kids.
> THe issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion.
How bold, to speak for everyone ;-)
I really don't see this as a "treat employees nicely" issue. I'm open to being convinced otherwise. But... Elon's premise from day 0 was that Twitter was mismanaged -- bloated, misguided, bad as a business and broken as product. This echoes the sentiment even by many here on HN over the years. Now Elon owns it, and is undoing the hiring decisions of previous management, to start with a clean slate. Seems to me this was simply an inexorable part of his takeover, and so you may as well be saying it "wasn't nice" of Elon to buy the company.
Also, a completely different counterpoint: If an employee's layoff is inevitable, it is much nicer for that is be part of a mass layoff like this, rather than a surgical one later. Because these people have a perfect explanation for their dismissal when they apply at their next job.
I don’t think the point is that the layoffs themselves are “not nice”—I think most people are in agreement that Twitter was not particularly well-run. But there’s a difference between e.g. the layoffs we saw at Stripe yesterday and what’s happening at Twitter today.
The Stripe layoffs came with a clear message from the top brass, solid severance and benefits continuation options, etc., while Twitter staff have received no communication from new management (until the unsigned and rather robotic letter last night), arbitrarily implemented deadlines that require extreme hours, and what appear to me at least to be attempts by Twitter to construct cause in order to weasel out of severance and notification requirements.
Nobody is owed a job, layoffs are sometimes necessary, and Musk bought the company and can do whatever he wants within the bounds of the law, sure. But I think we’re all better off when we treat each other with respect, and that doesn’t seem to be happening here.
Even if we assume the changes are for good and will "fix" the company, asking people to work nights and week-ends while conducting mass layoffs in less than a week is a "treat employees nicely" issue.
Actually, I think we're more on the level of "threat employees with basic decency".
We don't actually know the situation. If he wants people to work 84 hour work weeks regularly - yeah that's a problem. I looked at it charitably. Twitter is in such bad shape the only choice is to burn out engineers in order to fix it. This points to terrible product management, which points to terrible engineering leadership, which points to a terrible C-suite. It sucks, but once you pass the point of no return you can't hire more people (they take months to ramp up), and you're gutting the low performers (they will slow you down), so unfortunately the work has to be foisted onto the rest. It's not a fun time, it will cause more people to quit, but it's also the only solution to fix a trainwreck if you notice the speeding freight train too late.
> If he wants people to work 84 hour work weeks regularly - yeah that's a problem.
No. The fact that it even crosses his mind as an acceptable demand at any time is a problem. No one, under any circumstance, should ever be asked to work that much in a week. It should be a criminal offense for an executive to even allow employees to work that much.
> Twitter is in such bad shape the only choice is to burn out engineers in order to fix it.
Nope. Even if it would otherwise go bankrupt that choice shouldn't legally be available.
And through a set of misguided decisions initially he caused advertisers to depart Twitter and revenue collapse.
I imagine the last man is dying 500 years from now and thinking "... now we just could have gotten to Mars if Elon Musk hadn't posted that tweet"
Selling advertising is all about the emotions of the buyer: you'd better believe that half the price of ads on the radio has to do with how the business owner feels when they hear their name on the radio and that the first, second and third tactic of the person who sells ads for your local newspaper is "I know this tiny ad in our paper costs about as much as an employee and it might not seem to pay for itself, but if you stop advertising your customers will think you went out of business."
> If an employee's layoff is inevitable, it is much nicer for that is be part of a mass layoff like this,
you mean an illegal one?
I suggest you try it.
Look the issue is this, Musk is creating a climate where it is expected that people effectively sleep at the office. Do you have a family? well you don't anymore.
and through all of this pain, shit stirring and general "disruption", there is no strategic leadership, or clear headed product leadership. Unless you count "pay to spam/harass" & scaring away your advertising partners as a product strategy.
Layoffs are not a strategy, they are a side effect.
* Not treating employees "nicely" (original comment above)
* Legality of layoffs (should be straightforward to determine)
* Environment where people are asked to work unreasonably-long hours --> Irrelevant to layoffs.
I would argue there is very clear leadership happening: Musk made the unambiguous (and by definition, clear) determination that Twitter's staff is bloated by 50%. Cut the fat, take the short-term hit in ads and usage, rebuild it stronger. Whether I agree with how he determined the "fat" isn't important.
While the idea that Twitter was mismanaged is certainly part of his motivation, it doesn’t explain Musk’s behavior at Tesla or “SlaveX”. In fact, flipping the table over the first week belies more than a little arrogance and little motivation to understand what he bought. (There’s reports that he wants to cut half of infrastructure costs. Fail whale anyone?)
He’s a billionaire that treats employees like shit.
> flipping the table over the first week belies more than a little arrogance and little motivation to understand what he bought
Typically you want to make major changes as soon as possible after a transition of power. It sets a new baseline to work from and avoids an overhang of fear that more drastic changes may be coming. You change regime and set a calm new normal.
It's also crucial to not then continue making drastic changes. Tbd on that.
I say that both for the weekend work crunch and the layoffs. The long hours and removal of benefits should be harsher on day one than going forward. You want to set the tone upfront and shake out people who aren't willing to go along, but you don't want to make unsustainable practices a constant. And you especially do not want the overhang of fear of additional layoffs coming.
So important to make harsh decisions day one and then back off a bit going forward.
That's not obviously unreasonable to me. "Half" is a suspiciously round number, but coming out of an era of very easy money, it'd surprise me if any large company doesn't have some double digit percentage of infra spending that's not really necessary.
> Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive".
I can't verify the veracity of this claim. Tech spans a wide spectrum of job conditions. I have worked in traditional suit and tie places, and show up with pizza stained sweat pants places.
Tech is a bastion of one thing in my opinion. It's a place where employees hold disproportionate power over the company. It's the one place where there is such a labor shortage, and enough smart people, that the companies will do what the employee wants in order to keep them happy. Make no mistake, no company tech or not wants to bend over backwards like tech companies have. Hence, all of the effort in outsourcing and getting code camps running.
Don't make the mistake of thinking tech is charitable. A lot of engineers I know are very soft because they think like this. Tech CEOs have a problem no other CEO has. A legion of smart, hard to replace, highly paid people that have enough power to demand more or less what they want.
The whining about Musk has to stop. He's being a dick about this because he has a personal vendetta against the old guard. When you look past the personal vendetta he is doing what anyone would do when a billion dollar turd is dropped on their desk. Dramatic, fast, often negatively viewed change.
Ask yourself, if Twitter was such an incredible company would the CEO have taken the offer? Probably not. The C-levels saw the ship sinking and rightfully jumped at the opportunity. Who is responsible for this lack of profitability? The old guard. So, task #1 is to get rid of them.
>Tech is a bastion of one thing in my opinion. It's a place where employees hold disproportionate power over the company. It's the one place where there is such a labor shortage, and enough smart people, that the companies will do what the employee wants in order to keep them happy.
On the other hand employees hold the power to also enable the company. I'm not accusing you of personally holding the "the company must do what I want" mindset, but at least for me what motivates is the idea of solving problems and helping people rather than lording some kind of power of them. IT has always felt powerful to me (and I'll be honest made me feel powerful in some small way) because it let me automate away things or make them measurably better. Hopefully I'm not alone in that.
Investment banks also face the problem of employees holding disproportionate power but they have a somewhat different solution than tech companies - keep the harsh working conditions and pay top performers huge bonuses.
If you're a fan of Matt Levine, "the modern investment bank is a socialist paradise run for the benefit of its workers."
It's common for a top trader to make more than the CEO at major banks. You'll see this on occasion at tech companies but generally pay is far flatter and so they come up with other ways to entice staff.
What's sad to me is, OK, if being a real hard-driving exploitative ass really is what it takes to organize people to make amazing products (mostly Jobs, a little of Musk), why aren't there any good people who do that to make their employees do great things for the world, and then put the profits to good use? (better use than Musk's "buy a $1M car and crash it immediately" style
.)
I think a lot of people would be OK with being pushed hard to really do something great, if they were paid fairly and the economic profits spent on good areas of society/customers, but not to enable a man-child's ego and waste.
(It related to the philosophical idea (not the implementation details) of Gates's "tax my consumption, not my income".)
Look up Bosch. It's a very large family-controlled company, and their dividends are 92% allocated to a foundation. I think in time we'll see similar examples in tech.
EDIT: Bosch is a tech company too, just an earlier generation.
To be fair, foundation ownership is used more as a way to bypass estate taxes in German businesses [0] as a charitable foundation can continue to give 30% of it’s income to the family who founded the foundation. This is a common corporate structure for a number of other family run German companies (ThyssenKrupp, Aldi, Lidl, Bertelsmann, etc) to bypass estate taxes.
In American terms, it would be the equivalent of the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation owning 60-70% of Meta’s stock, and Zuckerburg’s children continuing to get dividends and a significant ownership stake in FB while also bypassing estate taxes.
I think what would help with that is that we start not contrasting Bosch with tech, given that Bosch is a technology company in the most literal sense of that term. A lot of tolerance for these mistreatments comes from the mistaken illusion that 'tech' somehow requires people to act like megalomaniacs. A fair amount of car parts in Musk's very own car company come from Bosch
Absolutely agreed. But they're also an old school manufacturer as opposed to the more modern form of IP-focused tech company that tries as hard as possible not to be in the manufacturing game.
> I think what would help with that is that we start not contrasting Bosch with tech, given that Bosch is a technology company in the most literal sense of that term
The question I would ask - is that foundation just a tax haven for the family profits, or is it actually doing positive things (could also be both)? Same with Patagonia listed in a child comment - a lot of positive press came from the recent moves, but they were also incredibly self-serving for the family from a monetary point of view.
Both. Foundations allow HNW individuals to pass on large portfolios to descendants while also providing PR, Comms, and Political benefits to the family. (Note to Self - flesh out w/ source).
It doesn’t take being horrible and exploitative to build amazing things - it takes that kind of to make insane amounts of money building amazing things.
Because no one has the same definition of what "great" is, and right when you start making money others will hate you and consider your vision bad (cf. Other comments replying to you)
Musk indeed appears to see himself as an agent of humanity's salvation, including in its treatment of Twitter employees. And to be honest, while I and likely many people would see it as self-serving delusion of grandeur, it's hard to believe he's not at least genuine in his belief: you can't really suspect him of wanting to take over Twitter (and all of its headaches) for money.
Sadly his whole save humanity thing is a schtick..
If you investigate his back story, who he works with, it becomes clear it's not about Mars.
His real enterprise is a massive DoD program, built off the Strategic Defense Initiative (the "real" Star Wars). Republicans have been trying to resurrect it for decades and Elon was part of it since at least 2001. The idea is to intercept ballistic missiles from space and end the threat of nuclear armegeddon. In that sense he is trying to "save humanity", but it's misguided because the project is already aggrevating China and Russia and is fundamentally destablizing to the nuclear stalemate/M.A.D.
This project, operating under the Space Development Agency and working with the Missile Defense Agency, requires Republicans to fund--Biden and most Democrats been trying to stop it. Twitter helps Musk with the elections and boosting Republican power, while currying favor from them when it comes to these contracts.
If you're interested to know more, Mike Griffin is the ringleader.. he goes way back with Elon. Read his career history:
Starlink is building up the basic tech for these constellations--currently just sensing ballistic missiles and hypersonics--but with Starship, putting kinetic weapons in orbit become feasible. Some good references here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Military_capabilities
From your past comments (i was curiois and checked) i see that you cant pass the oportunity to mention Griffin and Starlink and this somehow indicates that sole purpose and motivation for musk is DoD contracts, and hes in the game only for military purpose.
Yes military will use thing they can to theyr advantage, but acording to your logic all industries that manufacture anything of use for military is doing everything they do ONLY becaus of DoD.
Should clarify, this isn't the _only_ motivation for Musk, but building what is basically SkyNet is one of his main considerations and ties in with his AI threat commentary.
> why aren't there any good people who do that to make their employees do great things for the world, and then put the profits to good use? (better use than Musk's "buy a $1M car and crash it immediately" style .)
You mean like the guy who's trying to address the main existential risks facing humanity right now? Last I checked, Musk created Tesla to counteract the existential risk of climate change, Neuralink to counteract the existential risk of AI, and SpaceX to counteract the existential risk of asteroids and other planet-killing catastrophes. Maybe that's why the people at his companies stay despite being pushed so hard?
He could definitely stand to be less of an ass, but I can at least recognize that Musk is actually doing the kind of good work that you're talking about.
Buddy you’ve drunk too much of the kookaide. Musk is telling stories. Look at what he did to the ca bullet train. Don’t believe his “vision”
Is for good.
My claim was not that Musk was "good" in whatever way you conceptualize that. My claim was that Musk's main focuses are commercial ventures that are very targeted at combating the main existential risks facing humanity. This is exactly the kind of good that the OP was talking about.
That's your claim, but it's simply and obviously false. SpaceX is not about "making humanity interplanetary", it is about selling cheap rockets for commercial exploitation of space (and/or it is a DoD weapons "defense" program). Tesla is a car company, aimed at making and selling cars.
Stopping global warming requires more mass transit, and Musk is actively opposed to that. "Making humanity interplanetary" is simply impossible with current or forseeable technology, so there is no sense in attempting yet (especially since we can develop this technology on Earth, by creating self-sustaining habitats in the Arctic desert, if we really want to).
> SpaceX is not about "making humanity interplanetary", it is about selling cheap rockets for commercial exploitation of space (and/or it is a DoD weapons "defense" program).
Sure, as an interim step to making humanity interplanetary. Are you suggesting that he could find commercial success without taking those intermediate steps?
> Tesla is a car company, aimed at making and selling cars.
Tesla make solar roofs and grid level energy storage. Like I said, it's portfolio is very clearly geared at climate change solutions.
> Stopping global warming requires more mass transit, and Musk is actively opposed to that.
Maybe he is (I've heard he's a bit of a germaphobe). I suspect he also recognizes that America is a car culture and that that won't change anytime soon.
> Sure, as an interim step to making humanity interplanetary. Are you suggesting that he could find commercial success without taking those intermediate steps?
My point is that the rockets are the easiest part of settling Mars. We already had rockets, and scaling that up was never a huge unknown. The real problems with settling Mars are the things that Musk is spending nothing on - building safe self-sustaining habitats in extreme conditions. Until we have a 10000+ self-sustaining city underground in the Arctic, there is 0 reason to send more than a handful of people to Mars (like we did to the Moon). So, if you actually care about that, you should be investing in the Arctic city, not Mars.
> I suspect he also recognizes that America is a car culture and that that won't change anytime soon.
We can try to guess what he believes, or we can look at his actions and their results - and in the latter case, he has repeatedly spoken and acted against public transport (in most hyper-loop and Boring Company presentations at least).
> We already had rockets, and scaling that up was never a huge unknown.
Then why did NASA never create cost-effective reusable launch vehicles?
> The real problems with settling Mars are the things that Musk is spending nothing on - building safe self-sustaining habitats in extreme conditions.
I'm not sure how this refutes the claim that this is one of his ultimate goals. He's not going to invest in the kind of research you describe until it's necessary or will plausibly create a return. He has to keep a business focus to continue funding these efforts because governments have been seriously falling short.
> We can try to guess what he believes, or we can look at his actions and their results - and in the latter case, he has repeatedly spoken and acted against public transport (in most hyper-loop and Boring Company presentations at least).
OK, I still don't see why that's problem. Public mass transit is not going to save the planet on its own. Personal transport is something like only 20% of global emissions. EVs can get that down to below 5%, and public transit might make another single digit difference over that. It's just not a big change.
> Then why did NASA never create cost-effective reusable launch vehicles?
Because NASA was usually about pushing the limits of science and engineering, not making money on space launches. Also, it has often been severely mismanaged.
> I'm not sure how this refutes the claim that this is one of his ultimate goals. He's not going to invest in the kind of research you describe until it's necessary or will plausibly create a return. He has to keep a business focus to continue funding these efforts because governments have been seriously falling short.
You're the one claiming SpaceX was created to address an existential crisis. I'm telling you SpaceX is not bringing us any closer to being an interplanetary species, and if Musk cared about this goal, he wouldn't have invested in SpaceX to begin with.
>OK, I still don't see why that's problem. Public mass transit is not going to save the planet on its own. Personal transport is something like only 20% of global emissions. EVs can get that down to below 5%, and public transit might make another single digit difference over that. It's just not a big change.
No, they can't. Replacing all ICEs with EVs would basically require doubling the electricity grid in the USA for example, and that is simply not a realistic possibility - especially given that the grid is already far too dirty and we need to replace a huge amount of it with green tech to reach CO2 emissions goals even without the extra pressure from EVs.
So, the realistic goal is to significantly expand the much much more efficient public transport (trains, buses, trams, metro) to significantly reduce the amount of cars (which will also do wonders for reducing congestion), and convert just the remaining cars to EVs, at a rate that can be supported by the grid while also shutting down existing coal, oil and gas power production.
> Because NASA was usually about pushing the limits of science and engineering, not making money on space launches.
Pushing science and engineering requires using money wisely, and creating a reusable launch vehicle is an obvious way to do that. In fact NASA did have multiple efforts that ultimately stalled, and literally none of them looked like what SpaceX did. You simply have no basis upon which to claim that SpaceX's reusable launch vehicles were not innovative.
> You're the one claiming SpaceX was created to address an existential crisis. I'm telling you SpaceX is not bringing us any closer to being an interplanetary species, and if Musk cared about this goal, he wouldn't have invested in SpaceX to begin with.
I honestly have no idea how you can conclude this. We're taking our first baby steps into space and you're saying baby steps are meaningless because they're far from running marathons. This argument is incredibly unconvincing.
> No, they can't. Replacing all ICEs with EVs would basically require doubling the electricity grid in the USA for example, and that is simply not a realistic possibility
The grid needs to expand anyway to handle renewable intermittency. You're also assuming that EVs would be powered from the grid. Tesla has the powerwall and solar roof tiles to address distributed power generation rather than reliance on the grid for everything.
> So, the realistic goal is to significantly expand the much much more efficient public transport (trains, buses, trams, metro) to significantly reduce the amount of cars (which will also do wonders for reducing congestion), and convert just the remaining cars to EVs, at a rate that can be supported by the grid while also shutting down existing coal, oil and gas power production.
What I'm reading here is that Musk's Tesla is addressing the existential risk of climate change, just not in the way you personally think it should be addressed. Seems beside the point frankly.
> You simply have no basis upon which to claim that SpaceX's reusable launch vehicles were not innovative.
I didn't claim that they were not innovative, I claimed that they were not revolutionary - that is a big difference.
> We're taking our first baby steps into space and you're saying baby steps are meaningless because they're far from running marathons. This argument is incredibly unconvincing.
We have taken our first baby steps into space a few decades ago, and none of what SpaceX is currently doing is bringing us to any place new - we've already been to the Moon and to Mars, and we've been to plenty more exotic places.
The problem of space colonization is just not the rockets.
> The grid needs to expand anyway to handle renewable intermittency.
The grid needs to expand, but the fewer consumers there are, the less it needs to expand, so the easier it is to close down the big polluters.
> What I'm reading here is that Musk's Tesla is addressing the existential risk of climate change
I am saying that overall EVs are at best close to neutral - they obviously pollute less than ICEs if the grid is green enough, but they will also delay the green-ification of the grid if adopted in enough numbers to matter. Not to mention, Teslas are typically pretty big cars. If Musk cared about climate change and it weren't just an afterthought, there are more important businesses he could have gotten into (such as green power generation directly).
> I didn't claim that they were not innovative, I claimed that they were not revolutionary - that is a big difference.
Sure, but I'm not sure why SpaceX has to be revolutionary in that sense. It was revolutionary in the sense of taking space launches private. Or am I wrong in thinking SpaceX was the first company to successfully commercialize space launch, and the first company to successfully dock a commercially financed and owned vehicle with the ISS?
> We have taken our first baby steps into space a few decades ago, and none of what SpaceX is currently doing is bringing us to any place new
So what? You can't build a skyscraper without the right foundation. SpaceX is still building the foundations for routine space flight. Again, this seems like you complaining that you don't yet have a penthouse when they're still pouring the concrete foundation.
> If Musk cared about climate change and it weren't just an afterthought, there are more important businesses he could have gotten into (such as green power generation directly).
Firstly, the incumbents are too large in that industry to compete with. He was a millionaire when he started Tesla, and you wanted him to focus on building wind turbines or solar cells to compete with huge multinationals like Siemens? Come on. Electric vehicles was completely underserved market by contrast, a clear business opportunity that also serves similar ends.
Secondly, nobody is so altruistic that they'd work as hard as Musk does on something that they weren't passionate about, even if it were good for humanity. Musk clearly likes cars. Humanity arguably needs electric cars. Musk combined a passion for cars with humanity's need. This is what progress under capitalism looks like.
To say he should work slavishly on something he's not passionate about for the betterment of humanity is setting up an ethical bar that nobody would clear. The people who do work on non-profits are passionate about that.
> It was revolutionary in the sense of taking space launches private.
Good for him? I'm not sure why that is something to praise.
> Again, this seems like you complaining that you don't yet have a penthouse when they're still pouring the concrete foundation.
It's the other way around: cheap space flight is the penthouse of planetary colonization. The foundation is the ability to build a self-sufficient colony. Once we were able to colonize the least hospitable places on Earth, only then would it make sense to think about how we move this technology to Mars - 50 or 100 years from now, most likely.
It's also worth noting that we have no reason to assume that a human population can even survive on Mars, as we have no idea if humans can live long term or even reproduce in Martian conditions (especially the very low gravity). Before even thinking about this colonization, we would actually have to establish whether it's possible for mammals to live long term and reproduce in low-G conditions. If it's not, there's a whole new world of technology we would have to discover before attempting it.
SpaceX is to Mars colonization like buying your dream wedding dress not just before finding a boyfriend, but before even knowing if you're gay or straight.
> Firstly, the incumbents are too large in that industry to compete with.
You could say the same for the car industry itself.
> Musk clearly likes cars. Humanity arguably needs electric cars. Musk combined a passion for cars with humanity's need.
You mean Antarctica, not the Artic. The Arctic refers to regions/countries along the Artic Ocean which includes Canada, USA, and Scandinavia. The reason Antarctica is not developed is because of an series of treaties known as the Antarctic Treaty System [1]. It's an agreed upon 'pristine environment' for research. Development is prohibited and there are extreme measures to maintain its relatively pureness. For one fun example - poop cannot be disposed of on premises. It needs to be bagged up and shipped back home to be disposed of.
Rocketry is a similar story. Rockets, since the 60s, have gradually become less capable and more expensive. For instance Boeing/Lockheed have been granted defacto unlimited taxpayer money to develop a basic functional 'homegrown' rocket system - the SLS. The goal was achieve little more than we did in the 60s. They started work 11 years ago, have received more than $30 billion, and and have yet to manage to get off the ground. Stay tuned for their latest failure - they will [fail to] launch on November 14th! For reference, we went from nothing to putting a man on the moon in 9 years in the 60s.
If it ever manages to be fit for duty, the SLS is estimated to cost an average of $2 billion per flight, and is completely incapable of landing massive-load cargo on Mars, let alone transiting things back. It's completely and absolutely unfit for duty. Most of everything Musk has done with SpaceX was being mocked as literally impossible by Boeing et al (by Tory Bruno) while he was struggling to achieve rapid reuse among various other technologies which have completely revolutionized the industry.
We would not be getting to Mars had SpaceX (or a similar company) not emerged.
I was actually referring to the Arctic (North Pole), though I did forget how little land is actually there.
Regardless, a self-sustaining habitat is a research project, and it will not be successful without political/diplomatic agreement.
Note that outer space is anyway in the same situation - you can't just settle outer space and claim it's your own - especially Mars, which is still a pristine environment that could even possibly harbor signs of life.
If Musk did have anything to do with slowing or stopping that colossal waste of taxpayer funds I would say his “vision” is superior to any of the politicians who supported it.
Yeah, a what a "waste" to build high-speed trains... I don't even understand how such a gigantic country can even exist without a safe, quick and inexpensive way to transport its citizens (so not by plane or by car).
Safe? Shall we use BART as an existing example of that?
Quick? No. Fast maybe. It’s hard to replicate the quickness of jumping into your car and hopping onto the freeway to get somewhere. Little or no planning required. Yeah the train if it is deployed as envisioned would be faster.
Inexpensive? The latest estimate is 107 Billion. Hardly inexpensive.
"Musk killed the California bullet train" is basically a pizzagate-level conspiracy theory. The NYT reporting among many others makes clear the tragicomic level of shambolic mismanagement from the CA gov't.
The state was warned repeatedly that its plans were too complex. SNCF, the French national railroad, was among bullet train operators from Europe and Japan that came to California in the early 2000s with hopes of getting a contract to help develop the system.
The company’s recommendations for a direct route out of Los Angeles and a focus on moving people between Los Angeles and San Francisco were cast aside, said Dan McNamara, a career project manager for SNCF.
The company pulled out in 2011.
“There were so many things that went wrong,” Mr. McNamara said. “SNCF was very angry. They told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and helped them build a rail system.”
Morocco’s bullet train started service in 2018.
But sure, blame Elon for California setting tens of billions of dollars on fire with nothing to show for it. Also Florida just built a high speed rail in under a decade for about 1/30th the per-mile cost of the CA project and it'll be open early next year.
Separately the Florida "HSR" isn't all that comparable because it only goes 80mph with a planned max of 125mph for future routes, and afaict a lot of it was built on an existing corridor. Again, not to say California HSR has been well managed, but imo it's not a particularly useful datapoint to compare against.
No, the allegation is that he released a white paper to hype people about a nonviable technology he had no actual interest in building in an attempt to derail HSR, presumably because it will hurt his car sales.
That seems so wrong to me that it's hard to take in that people would believe it.
There is - to me - obviously no chance that that would derail HSR, and Musk is definitely smart enough to understand that.
Also, the effect on car sales 15 years in the future in a small corner of the global market is such a tiny thing. I'd easily believe that, as a California tax payer, he was annoyed at $100B being spent on something that probably won't work.
> There is - to me - obviously no chance that that would derail HSR, and Musk is definitely smart enough to understand that.
Well he seems to be that dumb then. That or Ashley Vance is a complete and total liar. fwiw I think it was a long shot but not as absurd as you see it. There was already a lot of opposition to it with decades of no progress and money spent without a single mile of track being built, meanwhile Elon was quite the rising star of green technology. He had a vision for transportation of personal automobiles + tunnels and hyperloop and all he had to do was get legislators to buy into it compared to an unpopular embarrassment of a project.
But either way, you're right I probably shouldn't have included speculation as to why he did it.
> annoyed at $100B being spent on something that probably won't work.
So instead he proposed something that definitely won't work?
Also I'm not aware of anyone at any point that thought it "probably won't work". A waste of money, mismanaged, is gonna get cancelled, etc? Sure, but it was proven technology 30 years ago.
The HSR was boondoggle from the start. It's like designing a downtown to airport subway but then in the political process all political entities in between make it required it serve their community before approving the plan so you end us with a snaking line that takes 60 minutes to get to the airport instead of a straight line taking 15 minutes.
You're a bit off on your points, but that's okay. He really talks a lot, doesn't he?
> Musk created Tesla to counteract the existential risk of climate change,
He created Tesla for the money that's in the growing electric car market
> Neuralink to counteract the existential risk of AI,
Neuralink exists for the possible future where neural computer interfaces are successful and popular so he can make lots of money
> and SpaceX to counteract the existential risk of asteroids and other planet-killing catastrophes.
Actually, SpaceX exists because there's tons of money to be made with government and commercial contracts.
> Maybe that's why the people at his companies stay despite being pushed so hard?
It's probably more because they like getting paid so they can afford nice things while they're not working. It might also be because Musk enterprises are in "interesting" areas of the job spectrum and thus workers might be more tolerant to bullshit because they get to tell themselves they launched a rocket into space.
> He created Tesla for the money that's in the growing electric car market
He arguably created that market. The same applies to your other points. Musk created the markets that didn't exist before. Others had tried and failed, so I'm sorry, but you just can't deny that. It could be luck, so I suppose we'll see.
I have no doubt that Musk is interested in making money. I also have no doubt he enjoys that money from time to time. However, I think it's indisputable that no other billionaire works as hard as he does at his ventures, and I think a lot of his interest in that money is so that he can continue funding work to combat those existential risks.
> It's probably more because they like getting paid so they can afford nice things while they're not working.
Maybe you should read up on the working environment at these companies. There's not as much downtime as you imply. I personally wouldn't want to work for him given his management style, even on these existential problems.
He didn't, he started the company at a time where governments all over the word started to really (depending on the country, obviously) kick companies butts for not innovating. There where electric cars before he started his company. Now, you could argue that he made it popular with the people, but I argue that the market penetration, especially during the early years, hasn't been sufficient for that.
Musk also didn't invent space travel. You may have a point with neuralink, but I have yet to see a successful product come from that so if he is to create that market I'll give him that.
He's really good at making his opinions heard though. Other companies don't have a relatively unfiltered channel like this, so it's easy to see how his viewpoints stick out.
> He didn't, he started the company at a time where governments all over the word started to really (depending on the country, obviously) kick companies butts for not innovating. There where electric cars before he started his company.
Yes, and they all failed commercially. I'm not sure what point you think I'm making. It's undeniable that Musk was instrumental in creating the first commercially successful electric car. If he took advantage of government incentives to do so, that doesn't seem relevant, that's just good business sense.
If your argument is that anyone could have succeeded in that environment, then why was Tesla the only successful electric car manufacturer for literally years? Do you disagree that the roadster made electric cars cool, and changed public perception on electric vehicles?
> Musk also didn't invent space travel.
Again, I'm not sure why this is relevant. Musk created the first commercially successful private launch company. Do you agree or disagree?
I'm not disputing that Musk is also after money and fame and probably a few other things. I'm not sure why that's relevant to my point either. Even if it's enlightened self-interest driving him, it remains the case that Musk either founded or took over and pushed successful commercial ventures that are tackling existential risks to humanity.
> then why was Tesla the only successful electric car manufacturer for literally years
Because every other car manufacturer had no incentives to invest in that space when their ICE technology was working well for them. Musk made the bet that he could go big and make lots of money with that missed opportunity, and he arguably did.
Other electric car companies weren't competing because it takes absurd amounts of money or people willing to give you that money, which Musk has.
> Do you disagree that the roadster made electric cars cool, and changed public perception on electric vehicles
I don't live in the US and honestly, while I saw some tesla cars rolling around here, their popularity correlated very strong with the rise of other brands. It's almost like consumers aren't opposed to the idea of electric vehicles, it's just that until that point all options where shit and tesla finally put some pressure on that market, so the other companies reacted.
> Musk created the first commercially successful private launch company. Do you agree or disagree?
He did, and I argue that it's just like the first point, it was inevitable and Musk made the right call to invest his money in commercial launch operations because there where tons of money to be made.
This wasn't about if he started those companies, it's about the why. And the why is: There's tons of money to be made.
> This wasn't about if he started those companies, it's about the why. And the why is: There's tons of money to be made.
Yes, the question is indeed why: so why did he just so happen to invest in the only ventures where humanity is facing existential risk, when there are so many other ventures that could also have yielded great returns with less risk? Are you suggesting it's merely coincidence? Or is it simply more plausible that Musk recognized the problems that needed solving and found a way to make lots of money from them?
I disagree that those ventures, besides tesla, are things where humanity faces existential risks. We don't need commercial space travel to counteract asteroids. If there is an asteroid that will become a problem for humanity, the whole world will scramble to address it. Those things don't appear out of thin air.
I have yet to see someone successfully explain how neuralink will protect anyone from "AI".
Electric cars may have some success shifting our oil based man-transports to electric, but the world fails to use the advantages that brings and just burns more coal.
Hyperloop doesn't address any urgent problem, it's a moonshot with potential to earn absurd amounts from public contracts.
Twitter is actively harmful for humanity.
So, besides tesla, for which there was probably the best monetary incentive, none of those companies achieve any higher function you advertise then to have.
> I disagree that those ventures, besides tesla, are things where humanity faces existential risks. We don't need commercial space travel to counteract asteroids. If there is an asteroid that will become a problem for humanity, the whole world will scramble to address it. Those things don't appear out of thin air.
Firstly, you seriously underestimate the asteroid risk. They literally do appear out of the void and we do not have the resources to track them all, and existing efforts are seriously underfunded. Having a commercial entity that regularly performs multiple launches per year is invaluable as it means we can react more swiftly in case of a late detection, or have multiple attempts at deflecting it. NASA previously had very few launches by comparison, and the fact that their launch systems were not reusable without significant refits makes it ridiculous to claim that we would be just as safe without SpaceX.
Secondly, asteroid risk is only one risk to planet Earth. Another is nuclear war, or climate change, or an even more deadly pandemic, or any number of other things. Making humanity interplanetary requires reliable and frequent launch capability.
> I have yet to see someone successfully explain how neuralink will protect anyone from "AI".
If you agree that artificial general intelligence is an existential risk to humanity, then why is it a risk, exactly? presumably because it has computational abilities that we cannot match with biology. Does it not then follow that augmenting biology with those same abilities would somewhat mitigate those risks? Whether that pans out remains to be seen, but AI performance is accelerating so this is going to become a serious problem within 20 years.
> Hyperloop doesn't address any urgent problem, it's a moonshot with potential to earn absurd amounts from public contracts.
The boring company is not one of his ventures to combat existential risk, and so is not something Musk cares about too much. Why do you think he called it the boring company? Because its products are boring by comparison.
> Twitter is actively harmful for humanity.
He literally just bought it, and he has explicitly stated that he thinks Twitter is important for a functioning democracy. How about you give him a chance to actually prove it out.
Furthermore he didn’t start Tesla anyway - it was founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Musk didn’t invest in it until 2004 and didn’t become CEO until 2008.
The guy is a loon, and while I think he’s done some good for the world (mostly via Tesla), he’s a walking, talking clusterfsck of Dunning-Kruger, narcissism, and unchecked ego.
I don't know enough about the statistics to really give an opinion on that, but I'm usually in the "progress in technology is good fit humanity" camp, so I think I'll agree here until proven otherwise.
Might want to check again. He didn't create Tesla, he invested in it. ~Musk didn't create SpaceX, he invested in it.~ EDIT: the SpaceX one is wrong.
And IMHO, if he was really concerned about the existential risk for AI, perhaps he shouldn't have let the Ethical AI research team go from Twitter.
To be clear, Ethical AI - being able to trace an AI's decisions and vet that those decisions aren't being biased by improper input data - is a big topic in research groups right now. It's actually quite fascinating.
> He didn't create Tesla, he invested in it. Musk didn't create SpaceX, he invested in it.
Even if true (Wikipedia disagrees), it's a distinction without a difference. Arguably, neither SpaceX nor Tesla would be where they are now without him.
> And IMHO, if he was really concerned about the existential risk for AI, perhaps he shouldn't have let the Ethical AI research team go from Twitter.
Arguably the kind of AI Twitter needs doesn't pose an existential risk. He's trying to make Twitter profitable so that's obviously a waste of money.
AI (let's be real, we're actually talking about ML here) doesn't need to pose an existential risk to harm people in the real world. And given that tweets are displayed and promoted using ML algorithms, the ethicalness of the ML algorithms matters to Twitter's userbase.
Sure, but is that what the Ethical AI research team was actually working on? Because that's not what AI ethics typically means, which is a broader focus on AI alignment problems. Even if so, that may not be the most effective or efficient way to do it. We'll just have to see how it turns out, it's all speculation now, and impugning is character based on such moves is premature.
This is pure speculation, but I'm guessing they were working on ensuring that the ML models built by Twitter to do things like content moderation, tweet promotion, identifying trending hash tags, customer service help, and more were behaving in an ethical manner.
More concretely: Helping the teams who actually build and maintain these models ensure that the behavior isn't biased, that the model isn't being exploited by adversarial data, that the decisions made by the model are explainable, that the decisions are fair, coming up with corporate-standard-definitions for those various mutable terms (like fair), etc.
The usual things handled by a team that is tasked with AI Assurance/Ethics.
Now for my opinion: When it comes to impugning Elon Musk's character, he's done enough of that himself. He doesn't need my help. Additionally, firing an AI Ethics team in a company which requires AI(ML) to even operate speaks for itself.
> This is pure speculation, but I'm guessing they were working on ensuring that the ML models built by Twitter to do things like content moderation, tweet promotion, identifying trending hash tags, customer service help, and more were behaving in an ethical manner.
Sure, but this is just a feature of the product in question, so if you have some metrics to measure such outcomes then the product developers themselves can do this checking as part of their development process. I'm not sure why this would need to be a separate division. Presumably Tesla's autonomous driving developers are also creating metrics to ensure they don't run over dogs and children, they don't need a separate ethics division to tell them this is important.
Literally from the second paragraph from Wikipedia: "Tesla was incorporated in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning as Tesla Motors. The company's name is a tribute to inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla. In February 2004, via a $6.5 million investment, Elon Musk became the largest shareholder of the company."
Also you weren't wrong about Tesla. Elon did basically create Tesla (as well as Straubel). Quick summary:
Originally "Tesla" the brand, was started by Martin and Marc, but all they had was a brand and a vision but no physical product nor prototype.
At around the same time, Elon wanted to build an electric car based off the tzero by AC Propulsion. He was introduced to Martin and Marc who had a similar vision, and basically Elon invested money into Tesla Motors.
It wasn't until Elon put in money, that the first prototype was built (the tesla roadster). Arguably, if Elon didn't join the team and bring on Straubel, Tesla wouldn't be what it is today. Likely wouldn't even have a launched consumer product. Even Elon was the one that managed to get the trademark "Tesla Motors" which wasn't even owned by Martin or Marc originally.
On SpaceX this is false as it was entirely his vision alone from the get-go. There was (is) a joke in aerospace. How do you become a millionaire? Be a billionaire and start an aerospace company. Until SpaceX it was just a blackhole of money in spite of plenty of very clever individuals, including John Carmack, trying to their hand at it.
On Tesla this your statement is technically true, but misleading. 7 months after the company was founded, and made up of just a handful of people, Musk invested and became the majority shareholder and chairman of the board. He would go on to eventually remove the original founders of the company (over disagreements that were never publicly revealed) before production began on their first product. The original founders played no meaningful role in the company we now know as Tesla.
The problem is that improper input data can come from data scientists, or it can be a result of the same issues that cause society's bias. In that later case it isn't improper data so much as data properly collected from an improper society. That is super complicated to adjust for even if you decide to do so. Children of poverty that are malnourished grow up with deficits that might make them less valuable employees, extending the cycle. But the data and AI were not wrong to correlate childhood poverty with performance levels.
Then there is the far trickier case of the AI picking up on real things that we choose not to accept or talk about. Perhaps it is safe to give an example using white men? When they go bald very early in life(prince William for instance), it generally is due to high testosterone. Which in turn leads to all sorts of predictable behaviors and health issues, good and bad. AI would spot all that from a simple picture, judging people on their appearance can occasionally work really well. But that doesn't mean we should do it. And again, it isn't improper data, just data we choose not to act on.
Musk was the primary initial investor in Tesla when it was company with 3 "employees", was chairman of the board and directly involved in the design of the Roadster. He didn't take on an operational role until he forced out the first CEO for allegedly lying about the financials. Musk is certainly more than just an investor in Tesla, it seems pretty nitpicky to argue he is not one of it's creators.
Musk has been the only CEO of SpaceX since he founded the company. Gwynne Shotwell often doesn't get enough credit for her huge role in making SpaceX what it is today, but to say Musk isn't one of the creators of SpaceX is absurd.
Musk has made plenty of bad choices and done unethical things that deserve to be criticized, but that is no excuse for the level of ignorant, misinformed hatred that is directed at him.
Building more cars (basically racing cars that rub tires to dust 2-4x as fast) to save the planet? Sounds like quite the roundabout way to do so. I suspect he just likes driving fast cars?
Digging tunnels and conceptualizing hyperloops instead of improving public transport and bikes? IMO he‘s just afraid of public transport and hates traffic jams.
Ok, so maybe he needed to become the richest person in the world before tackling the really big issues? Yeah, not sure whether distracting himself with the Twitter acquisition is the best way of addressing climate change or even preserving survival of the human race long term.
I think that, like Jobs, he’s mainly scratching his own itches. And paints himself as the world‘s savior in the process.
I also have my doubts about the wisdom of the Twitter move, but it isn't hard to see a line of reasoning that puts fixing twitter as a key part of the path to addressing climate change.
If you view the massive endemic corruption and polarization of our political system as one of the key reasons we are failing to solve climate change, and you also view Twitter as the core public square through which our political system can be fixed, then Twitter is not a distraction at all.
I don't personally think that twitter has a major role to play in fixing our political system, but maybe I'm wrong.
Dude. If he wanted to make humanity link arms and sing Kumbaya, he’d be investing in water facilities and dropping LSD into it.
Musk got bullied into buying Twitter by a bunch of WallStreetBets folks, took a puff and tweeted out a number, and surprise surprise, the offer was accepted. And he’s been struggling to get out of the deal ever since.
I agree he's probably regretting it. I suspect he's going to try to make Twitter more profitable as fast as possible and then maybe sell it when it's on its way to being good. It's a distraction from things he cares about more, but it's not unimportant.
He didn't create Tesla. He bought it. He may have grown it, which is impressive, but he certainly wasn't the creator, or funder of the original creators. Ironically, he's more of a Thomas Edison than a Nikola Tesla, in that regard.
Starting an AI/transhumanism company as a CEO who's known for software-locking and remote-controlling his sold cars, isn't very reassuring. I'm quite certain we're going to see "pay $80 a month to unlock your now-societally-vital brain-to-brain communications!" Or a tiered model to his probably inevitable digital eyeballs replacements. "$20 a month for 720p vision, $40 a month for 1080p, $60 for 4K..."
As for SpaceX... so far that's been pretty badass. Government/NASA hasn't been doing crap for exploration or transportation innovation. Nor satellite internet advancements. He's doing all of it himself. To that, I applaud his efforts (and his impressive engineers, to that extent).
He bought Tesla before it had sold its first car. People try to use the fact that he didn't technically create Tesla as some gotcha that implies he bought his way into the car market.
> Last I checked, Musk created Tesla to counteract the existential risk of climate change
Musk didn't create Tesla, he bought it. I don't claim to know why he bought it, but here are two options: maybe it was to solve climate change, and if so it was a failure. Maybe it was to make himself immensely wealthy, and if so it was a success.
I mean, if you want to quibble over the precise meaning of "created", I'm not interested in that. Replace "created" with "drove to commercial success" if you prefer, the fact remains that Tesla as a brand didn't exist in people's minds until he invested and spearheaded the design on the roadster.
As for whether it's a failure, that remains to be seen. Combating climate change is a long-term battle. All of Tesla's products are clearly geared towards this end though, from electric cars to solar roofs to grid level energy storage.
Yes. To solve global warming, we have to greatly reduce our reliance on cars, and come up with other solutions in as many places as possible - replacing all ICE cars with EVs will not be anywhere near enough.
"Needing" to reduce reliance on cars is debatable; that's certainly one way but not the only way. I doubt Musk would deny that replacing all cars with EVs would be enough. That's why Tesla also offers the solar roof (which needs more attention from Musk IMO) and grid level energy storage.
Tesla has discontinued the solar roof, as far as I know. That was basically just a stunt to use Tesla's money to bail out Musk and his brother. The solar wall is a better example of what you mean though.
People are great at finding ulterior motives for people they've already decided they dislike. I don't think Musk is an altruist, and I'm certain he has multiple motives for the ventures he cares about, but I think it's hard to deny that he's found success where others have struggled, and that his ventures will ultimately benefit humanity.
You can order it, but apparently [0] they are deploying on the order of ~20 per week overall, so it's unclear if you'll ever get one. You're right though that it's not discontinued - sorry about that.
I am very skeptical of atmospheric carbon removal as a viable path to stopping global warming - especially given the extreme systemic risks of most of the ideas I heard, such as seeding the oceans with iron; but also the extreme difficulty of others, such as re-seeding enough forest area to actually matter.
So, my temptation is to say it's just a publicity stunt. But, I am prepared to praise it if it produces some viable solution, as unlikely as I believe it is.
I responded on the assumption that the original poster was saying Musk intended counteracting an existential risk to be an audacious goal, a visionary moon shot, rather than just a "net contribution". By that measure, he's not succeeded. In any case, he's not been as successful at solving climate change as he has been at increasing his personal fortune.
There are a lot of shades between saving the world and evil.
My position is that Musk has focused largely on business that can or do make the world better, and also make a profit. The two are not mutually exclusive and I think the former is a major factor in what Musk selects. Obviously good is determined from Musk's perspective,but I have generally agreed with him with respect to Tesla, spacex, boring, neurolink, solar endeavors, and xprizes.
I don't believe that those
up thread were actually claiming Musk will or thinks any of his ventures single handedly will solve climate change. If that was your assumption, I think it was wrong.
I am curious if you agree that his work in these areas is laudable?
I agree that it seems like he is more successful at increasing his fortune than solving the world's problems. I don't hold that against him because the latter is a very tough challenge. I don't hold the fortune against him because it was made from companies that advance humanity, and most of it is tied up in other ventures that also advance humanity. I don't know about the whole Twitter thing, which could be a deviation from this, but I am open to the idea that it could be an improvement over the current state, if not particularly relevant to humanity. I am also open to the idea that he thinks it is more relevant than I do.
How does Neuralink counteract the risk of AI? If it ever works, it seems like it would exacerbate that risk.
How does SpaceX counteract the risk of asteroids? NASA has developed a successful asteroid-killing rocket, and SpaceX's work has nothing to do with that field.
> How does Neuralink counteract the risk of AI? If it ever works, it seems like it would exacerbate that risk.
AI is a threat because of human information processing limits. Neuralink's ultimate goal is ostensibly to remove eyes and hands as inherent limits to I/O, and augment human information processing in the ways in which we are weak (formal computation).
> How does SpaceX counteract the risk of asteroids? NASA has developed a successful asteroid-killing rocket, and SpaceX's work has nothing to do with that field.
Cheap launch to orbit is critical in any efforts to counteract asteroid threats. Musk has also been very vocal about colonizing Mars in case something happens to the Earth.
The idea behind neuralink- the real one, not the publicly stated mission- was to make it possible to put elon in a robot body so he could fight the AI singularity.
It would be funny if Musk's long con was to get all the liberals driving his electric cars and then change his political affiliation to get all the conservatives on electric cars all in the service of reducing co2 emissions
Elon musk is no friend of the climate. He proposed hyperloop to distract California from building its high speed rail system, a rail system that will do more to help the climate than any electric cars will.
He bought a McLaren F1 and wrecked it ~1 year later. [0] If you don't follow cars, this is an extremely special car. It was designed and built before the modern supercar era, long before computer design had the power it does not, and it still utterly destroyed anything that had come before it, and would come after it for quite some time. The engineering detail in it borders on absurd. They only made ~100 of the road-legal versions.
We don't really have a plan to stop using fossil fuels for electricity generation so this is a bit overstated. Electric cars are good but it's not a complete solution.
Lots of companies are in this space doing what they can, but they’re focused on actually doing the work and getting their hands dirty as opposed to Musk’s wide noise making. Look at immunotherapy and age research, the trying to find a cure and mechanism for Chronic Fatigue (an illness which disables millions), the people who documented the genome of humanity, and NASAs astronomy stuff. There are biologists trying to prevent further extinct amphibians. There’s linux, and git, and countless open source software we use daily.
And yet there's reason to believe that that the unloading of those 10% of Tesla shares was to cover a looming $15 billion tax bill. And he would have done so anyway.
Amazon cash sign on bonus is absolutely insane in this market. Making pure cash while all stocks are down probably makes the Amazon pay $100k more than a competitor.
> Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive". Musk is not a proponent of that. He is a micromanaging, capricious, easily distracted, arrogant and vindictive CEO.
Layoffs aren’t the same as mistreatment. It matters more how he treats the employees who stick around and the new ones he brings in
Classic free market fallacy. It's only a free market if there are other options available. Those in power control the options available and low regulation free markets enable them align at the lowest common denominator.
> Classic free market fallacy. It's only a free market if there are other options available. Those in power control the options available and low regulation free markets enable them align at the lowest common denominator.
People don't pay good developers lots of money because they want to pay lots of money, they pay because good developers are in short supply.
Hmm this poses an interesting theory. We know that part of the motivation of Obama's "Learn to Code" initiative and the coding bootcamps was to increase the supply of developers. Now that there is supposedly a recession coming it might be the case that in the end it will end up tilting the scales back in the developers court. The reason being that not 100% of the bootcampers are in it fore the love of the job but only for the money. We will see people dropping out of the market and once it recovers we might be back in a situation where there were too few devs.
Highly paid Twitter SWEs have a lot of other options, although the tightening job market is making it harder. Twitter’s competitors are also recruiting directly from it
Twitter employees are compensated better than 99% of the US population and have more employment options available to them than virtually anyone on the planet. Give me a fucking break.
At present there are other options available for Twitter workers. You make a reasonable point though; Its easy to imagine skilled engineers are doing well but equally we could say that its just the lowest common denominator terms and conditions for that kind of job are better than those for most other jobs.
Are you saying all other companies are just Musk-company clones and thus treat their employees as Musk does? I get the feeling people think Musk's management style is an outlier and that's why they are complaining --but you seem to be sayin, "they're all like that and we have no options".
This. Who kill by capitalism will be killed by capitalism. What's that noise (tik tok reference) about that "creating and Ethical A.I." and I'm a God you not you trust. Nonsense. ¿What that noise?
> Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive".
Maybe that was what the field was letting visible, but in reality that has never been the case. There is everyday news about unicorns where employees complain that the culture is toxic, and that the CEO is impossible to work with. Only need to read Glassdoor pages.
I think deep down we all knew that burning people out has a decent chance of getting you solid results in the short term. The problem comes after, when people who understand best how your systems work will quit because they’re burned out husks of their former selves.
This is obviously not sustainable, because it’s difficult to recruit after you’ve built a reputation as burnout central.
Unless the business is run by a “tech visionary” who is “making the world a better place” and has millions of fans. These millions of fans would jump at the chance of working for him.
Musk burning out Twitter employees by making them do twice as much work is fine, because he’ll have no trouble recruiting. He might be able to turn the business around.
It’s quite possible there will copycats, but they’ll have less success than Musk.
Twitter employees were treated nicely. Too nicely. And yet they were not productive. The only new features they introduced in 10 years were losses in excess of 200MM to 1bn+ and the banning/shadow banning of those who went against the group think, fun police, and thought-gestapo. Each staffer had 10 bosses and every department had a ton of waste.
Musk could never show up again after some changes, and the company would perform better than under the previous leadership.
As a German, I actually take offense to this kind of expression. You apparently have NO IDEA what Gestapo really was if you think banning gaslighting assholes for hate speech is in any way comparable or even remotely in the same neighborhood as the Gestapo.
These kind of phrases ridicule and downplay the horrific crimes and offenses against human rights committed by that organization and even the most unreasonable and idiotic ban on Twitter cannot ever be compared.
Words matter - and that's why we deal with "free speech" differently than Americans. Btw it's also pretty clear what holds on court and what doesn't - independent of how strict or unreasonable private social networks moderate their content.
Valid or not you do hit upon something I'm genuinely curious about. What do developers for something like twitter even do?
Twitter does one very specific thing, and it doesn't look like it has changed its goal much over the past 10 years, so what is it they're trying to develop so rapidly they need hundreds (thousands?) of developers.
The legacy border-radius assumptions regarding the "Set Up Profile" button may be no longer valid and need to be deeply investigated. We are therefore setting up a cross-functional taskforce to tackle this issue. MVP is due one year from now.
Not a direct answer to your question, but it reminds me of the first chapter from The Mythical Man Month
> One occasionally reads newspaper accounts of how two programmers in a remodeled garage have built an important program that surpasses the best efforts of large teams. And every programmer is prepared to believe such tales, for he knows that he could build any program much faster than the 1000 statements/year reported for industrial teams.
Why then have not all industrial programming teams been replaced by dedicated garage duos? One must look at what is being produced.
In the [attached figure] is a program. It is complete in itself, ready to be run by the author on the system on which it was developed. That is the thing commonly produced in garages…
He then goes on to describe how you can take a program and make it a programming product (by generalizing it, adding testing, documentation, maintenence) and a programming system (requiring interfaces and integration with the rest of the system)
>banning/shadow banning of those who went against the group think, fun police, and thought-gestapo.
Why would they agree to a ToS that clearly lays out things like "don't intentionally misgender people" if they fully planned on breaking their agreement
"But no one reads the ToS!" sure, but when you have your account suspended until you agree to delete a specific tweet and are given the exact area in the ToS you agreed to that you violated, then you should revoke your agreement to the ToS
When it's brought to your attention that you signed a document agreeing to Twitter being the thought Gestapo, just... cancel your agreement. Don't continue to agree to it in writing while whining about it publicly.
Some see it as their duty to fight back against unjust laws/rules. You and I might do it by breaking terms of service, Musk does it by purchasing the platform and adjusting the terms. Two sides of the same coin really, only difference being which end the agency is coming from.
That's like agreeing to take your shoes off when entering a building, leaving your shoes on, and then complaining when the employees/owner/whatever asks you to leave if you're not going to take them off. If you think a rule is stupid, then rebel against it by not agreeing to it
states “You may use the Services only in compliance with these Terms and all applicable laws, rules and regulations”, and links to the Twitter Rules and Policies:
> We prohibit targeting others with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.
In the Wayback machine, it looks like that direct language was added in an update between October 19 and October 28 of 2018, about four years ago:
Thank you, I'm surprised it's explicitly called out but not too surprised.
That said, I have trouble believing that "why would you agree to a ToS that you don't actually intend to ascribe to 100% of the time" is a question that requires serious consideration.
The key part is how you react when the ToS gets enforced. Like I said, if your account gets suspended and the specific violation is brought to your attention, then either delete the offending tweet or revoke your agreement.
It is incredible to look at these companies and see the staggering amount of losses and costs they have, plus the headcount.
There could be entire departments dedicated to figuring out whether or not the "like" and "retweet" buttons should have rounded corners or not, that sort of thing.
At some point, reality has to hit and apparently, Musk is the one who's going to bring it.
Is it being done in a shocking way to those who haven't been through this with other companies? Maybe. But how else is this company going to actually ever become profitable?
Musk paid huge money to get that thing. He paid multiple times the estimated price. The company is now in deep deep debt that was not nearly as large before - because company now owns the money Musk did not had.
He is not hand of the market. He is someone who made pretty bad business and has very little chance to fix.
And yes, there is likely someone doing UI decisions. Usually it is good idea to have special people good with visuals to make these artistic decisions.
Neither I nor person I responded to knows. However, person I responded to took issue with mere existence of such position.
I know that that comment was just pure emotion and hate. But, the fact is, there is nothing wrong with having department for visuals. Or department for marketing or department for communication with advertisers or what have you.
With this kind of mass and rapid layoffs, I will expect more losses in medium and long term since you destroy a working system. A lot of failures will emerge because no one is left for monitoring or fixing some issues.
Destroying a work system that loses 1100Mm a year is not a strategic loss. It is a gain in the direction you want to take the company (gain instead of loss)
Then stop being employees. Jesus Christ, you people take those massive salaried yet act like little children throwing tantrums because you fear your boss may not coddle you as much.
Sure, but there is an actual moral distinction between seeking the most by endangering the livelihoods of ~7K-10k(the number of employees, dependents + indirectly supported workers) and seeking the most by ensuring the worlds wealthiest human can only remain in the top 10 wealthiest humans. If the workers really push him, he might only have a hundred billion instead of hundreds. Tech workers are well paid, but their bosses have the wealth of kings.
Elon Musk isn’t going to be kicked out of the country he’s settled down in if he loses his Twitter job. Elon Musk isn’t going to lose his healthcare, his livelihood, his means of housing and feeding himself, just as the winter holidays are about to begin in the United States.
Yes I think it’s immoral to put a person with a visa in a situation where they risk deportation unless they get hired just when hiring is slow, not just because of the job market but because other hiring managers are literally spending time with their family.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I think a fair number of people think CEOs and entrepreneurs are immoral for acting in a self-serving, self-enriching manner, and a fair number of people think employees are immoral doing so.
I see the moral point pretty much exclusively brought up against CEOs, managers etc, and virtually never against employees. Your (then ex-) boss might be angry that you've leaving because you've gotten a better offer, but barely anyone else will judge you (very rare cases exist, I'm sure, but they're rare).
Everyone is optimizing their personal outcome, be it the CEO firing people, people quitting their jobs to work elsewhere, people quitting their jobs to live off of benefits, people having children early, or having children late, it's what we all do: look out for what's best for us.
I find that totally okay, but I prefer to be honest about it, and don't pretend that it's not perfectly normal, or that people aren't doing it.
I think the general take is that the higher you are up the money/power hierarchy the more strictly you should be judged for your choices, because acting in a self-enriching way becomes less and less necessary. An almost incomprehensibly rich person like Musk should be given less leeway for acting in a grasping manner.
In a sense it's the inverse of the "it's moral to steal bread to feed your family" argument.
I agree. You have more options and fewer constraints the higher up you go, but I think that also applies to (most) Twitter/BigTech employees. A good chunk of those fired will be millionaires themselves, they're far from worrying about how to feed their families.
Nobody has to be there to survive, everyone is there willingly because they saw it as the most advantageous place to work, and they'd switch to a different company tomorrow if they got the right offer. Loyalty is a term from a different era.
Oh, yeah, there's definitely a scale to it. A twitter customer service employee is paid much less than a software engineer... though even the latter isn't going to have been at "will never need more money in their life" levels, particularly given the American social safety net or lack thereof.
That said, I do find that people are fairly loyal to a company that treats them well.
Who do you think has more leverage to optimize for their personal outcome? The CEO or the average employee?
Why do you find it OK for the ones to have power to leverage it in order to get even more? Where do you think this will end up if allowed to continue longterm?
> Who do you think has more leverage to optimize for their personal outcome?
At Twitter? That's hard to say, lots of places are hiring, and getting good people is hard for all of them. Many of those that were fired will probably come out ahead financially. Twitter will probably continue to exist.
> Why do you find it OK for the ones to have power to leverage it in order to get even more?
What do you think salary negotiations are? You go in, say you want even(!) more money, and if your value is high enough, you have the power to make them do it. Again, both Twitter and the employees are playing the same game, they're just on different sides of board, but neither of them is a charity.
It's funny how the most privileged act the most spoiled. Imagine steel plant workers or car manufacturing jobs. Demand goes down? So does your job --union or not.
WallStreet is used to the ups and downs (they are somewhat comparable compensation-wise), and it's a way of life. You win big and you lose from time time. In tech you have some people who think it's their birthright to have good jobs with good pay and benefits and never have to go through a downturn.
This is the story of our industry. We are so lucky and don't even know it. I've been privileged to pull substantial salary and equity outcomes at various tech groups with "top tier" engineers who get away with murder because there are literally no stakes in the job performance. If you are approximately 'smart' and get a minimal amount of work done you can get away with murder. I've gotten junior engineers jobs in this industry, and when I check back in on some of them they are like yeah I work 1 hour a day and make well into six figures. And managers and bosses are terrified of asking for any outcomes lest they lose and have to try to rehire.
The crazy part is taking the huge salary then demanding your employer take on some social justice cause that they have been neutral on or actually already accommodating on.
They out here saying tech workers are the downtrodden proletariat... they are not. They are firmly within the bourgeoise--top < 5% of wage earners in USA, and top < 0.5% in the world.
Social justice (communism) killed upwards of 100 million last century, by famines, gulags, mass exterminations, etc. and ruined billions of more lives. Fascism killed about 50 million (WWII + Holocaust), give or take. Both are abhorrent, but social justice wins the "Worst Thing Ever" award.
Absolutely ridiculous. Social justice is not communism. Calm down: Treating women and gays and minorities and poor people equally as human beings is not going to destroy civilization. You've been brainwashed and you're parroting fascist propoganda. Take a break from Fox News or cocaine or whatever you're on, because it's making you insane.
Social justice goes far beyond treating women, gays, minorities and poor people as equals. Equal treatment is enshrined in the US constitution, for example.
Social justice means not "equality" but "equity": looking at perceived disparities between social groups and then equalizing them by taking property from perceived "oppressor" groups and transferring to "victim" groups. This is exactly what Stalin, Mao, etc. did.
Why does no one argue that Hitlerism/Mussolini-ism/Francoism wasn't real fascism? "Real" fascism would of course usher in an era of peaceful law and order, harmonious cooperation between govt and business... /s
Don't watch Fox and don't touch coke, neither cola nor powder (debatable which one is worse for you.) I took classes on social justice at Brown. When I actually understood what the profs in the space were saying, looking at what it takes to implement it in the real world, the results have been pretty horrifying every time we humans have tried it. The thing I couldn't get over is the idea of "class guilt" sometimes cast as "class privilege".
Then why are you so unhinged and out of touch with reality?
>Social justice (communism) killed upwards of 100 million
>social justice wins the "Worst Thing Ever" award
You're absolutely insane.
Social justice is NOT communism. Got it? Because I'm repeating myself, and you're not listening to me or refuting what I said.
Apparently you have convinced yourself that phrase means something totally different than it actually does, and you're histrionically obsessing and freaking out about it.
You don't get to make up your own whacky definitions of words, and expect people to think you're not crazy or just another worthless troll when you keep insisting you're right and they're wrong.
So social justice is "communism" and the "Worse Thing Ever", huh?
Please link to the professor at Brown University and the syllabus of the class you took where you were taught that social justice is equivalent to communism, and the "Worse Thing Ever". Or perhaps you're just making shit up, or completely misunderstood what they were trying to teach you.
Do you really believe that's what the original poster was referring to when they wrote "demanding your employer take on some social justice cause"?
Exactly who is demanding their employer support communism or perform the "Worse Thing Ever"? You mean stop paying their employees and insist they keep working for free, or mass murder hundreds of millions of people?
Is that what you're afraid Twitter will do? Then give me some evidence of that, or admit you're just making crazy shit up and trolling.
If you're simply against health care, and for racism and fascism, and hate to pay any taxes, and you abstain from using any government services like public roads or police or air traffic control, then just come out and say it, and stop beating around the bush.
Come back when you'r less unhinged, and can use the same language and definitions that the rest of the world does.
This is "no true scotsman". The ideas underpinning Communism, Marxism, Socialism, and Social Justice are intrinsically linked and overlapped. Castro himself supposedly said "No hay comunismo ni marxismo, pero... justicia social". At the core is the proposition that certain classes / socio-economic groups are "oppressors" while others are "oppressed", and that we in the present must right the social injustices of the past. None of this is controversial or a mischaracterization.
My professors at Brown of course advocated for socialism and social justice, and I too drank the kool-aid while I was there. I graduated 15 years ago so good luck finding links :) (As an aside, there is current a prof of econ Glenn Loury who publicly takes the anti-social justice stance, he has a YouTube channel. Other profs I knew such as one who escaped the Cultural Revolution in China are surely opposed to it as well, but they keep it on the DL.)
Back to the original post, employers who play the SJ game find their employees dividing themselves into oppressor and oppressed groups, and starting grievance wars which ultimately distract from the mission of the company. It's a silly exercise at companies like Twitter where most employees would be within the top 0.5% of wealth worldwide.
Capitalism, free markets, and democracy a.k.a. "liberalism" on balance has created the greatest era of flourishing and peace humanity has ever experienced--we all live twice as long thanks to it. This is not a defense of colonialism and American interventionism, its simply a statement that liberal systems work far better than any other that has ever been tried.
It's not crazy at all. If you are a worker, you are the one actually making the company productive. If the majority of workers want their company to do a thing, that company should listen.
I see the username, but I still want to ask... how would your ideal company deal with a situation where all employees want to run the business in the ground?
I'm a strong believer in workers cooperatives and democratic organization. Usually, people don't want to run their livelihood into the ground, but sometimes they make errors. (Just like executives, if Amazon games and stadia are any indication.)
People are absolutely free to do those things right now. There are tens of millions of people with those sentiments. Why don't we see more attempted co-ops?
So, we have some giant coops out there. Some making billions in revenue.
But in the US it's really not well supported. If you want to found an LLC you click a few buttons on a form online and talk to any lawyer.
If you want to found a co-op, you generally have to file the paperwork in person or via the mail. No one in the municipal government will help, because they don't know anything except LLCs. You'll need to find a lawyer who can draft not only the articles of incorporation, but also can advise on the issuing of shares, democratic operation, and how new members can join.
Because profits are controlled by the workers, capitalistic investors won't know what to do with you, so you'll need to put in extra effort to find investors who are willing to be paid but not be made owners (or not more than any workers).
It's a high, high initial cost. But once it's going it can be incredibly self sustaining. Every dollar of profit ends up back in the pockets of the people working there, equally. Or they can collectively choose to use that profit to expand.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. Sometimes the lack of cooperatives is framed as some sort of Capitalist conspiracy against them. It is much more tractable to point out friction in the system that make starting co-ops hard and then find solutions to solve those over time.
Yeah, I don't think it's particularly intentional, but it is systemic. And self perpetuating - there are few co-ops, so investing in making more is a low priority.
I like the idea in principle, but I can't imagine a situation where a worker cooperative would vote in favor of a risky, but necessary pivot / layoff / long-term investment. Sounds like a recipe for killing intra-company innovation.
Right, the co-op solution is not to fire members, but split the burden of lean times across everyone. I don't think I've ever seen a CEO say, "I'll forgo my income this year to ensure we can keep the people here employed".
I thought higher pay tended to often to together with higher other benefits, like coworkers thinking you're important and management wanting your to think they're you're friend.
You’re right, everyone should just completely uproot their lives for the hell of it and start completely untested startups with no safety net whenever their boss cracks down, instead of justify complaining about his insanity
The same is true of leadership at all levels. The US political situation isn't looking that great because of the popularity of all kinds of jerk behavior that has become the norm. Ironically, Twitter itself is partly responsible for that, as crapping on your political opponents has become more important than having policy proposals or solving problems. It's a downward spiral when we accept shitty behaviors from leadership, because of exactly this copycat tendency of people--they emulate behavior of elites, sometimes unconsciously.
> But Gingrich had a plan. The way he saw it, Republicans would never be able to take back the House as long as they kept compromising with the Democrats out of some high-minded civic desire to keep congressional business humming along. His strategy was to blow up the bipartisan coalitions that were essential to legislating, and then seize on the resulting dysfunction to wage a populist crusade against the institution of Congress itself. “His idea,” says Norm Ornstein, a political scientist who knew Gingrich at the time, “was to build toward a national election where people were so disgusted by Washington and the way it was operating that they would throw the ins out and bring the outs in.”
> Gingrich recruited a cadre of young bomb throwers—a group of 12 congressmen he christened the Conservative Opportunity Society—and together they stalked the halls of Capitol Hill, searching for trouble and TV cameras. Their emergence was not, at first, greeted with enthusiasm by the more moderate Republican leadership. They were too noisy, too brash, too hostile to the old guard’s cherished sense of decorum. They even looked different—sporting blow-dried pompadours while their more camera-shy elders smeared Brylcreem on their comb-overs.
> Gingrich and his cohort showed little interest in legislating, a task that had heretofore been seen as the primary responsibility of elected legislators. Bob Livingston, a Louisiana Republican who had been elected to Congress a year before Gingrich, marveled at the way the hard-charging Georgian rose to prominence by ignoring the traditional path taken by new lawmakers. “My idea was to work within the committee structure, take care of my district, and just pay attention to the legislative process,” Livingston told me. “But Newt came in as a revolutionary.”
> For revolutionary purposes, the House of Representatives was less a governing body than an arena for conflict and drama. And Gingrich found ways to put on a show. He recognized an opportunity in the newly installed C-span cameras, and began delivering tirades against Democrats to an empty chamber, knowing that his remarks would be beamed to viewers across the country.
Newt Gingrich and Roger Ailes have done far more damage to political discourse than anything social media could hope to do.
Yes, everything is a conspiracy orchestrated by ${group you don't like} for ${nefarious purpose}. There's no way that people legitimately change their own views.
Stating a goal of ending bi-partisan politics and following through on enacting that goal all in public in a very documented way isn't a conspiracy. There is a direct connection between the dysfunction in politics today and the explicit and public actions taken by conservatives to make it this way.
'treat your employees nicely' exists in tech for one reason only: to deter unionization in the face of overwhelming profiteering at the expense of an overworked tech cattle.
if twitter employees understand now the excess capital from their labor has been extracted without due pleasantries such as notice or severance, then Musk has done far worse to the tech industry than just lay a bunch of people off, hes galvanized the case for tech worker unions.
Tech "treated employees right" because for awhile software engineers had a "monopoly on skill". If you rewind to around 2008 and earlier there really were more getting work done, building real things jobs out there than people who could do it. There were a lot of startups that hand a hard time getting people to just build the initial CRUD apps to start their business.
Startups and smart companies realized that if you couldn't compete on pay you could compete on how you treated employees. In the years leading up to the start of the current boom the pay differential between big companies and startups was't as vast as it is now.
Then industry started pushing hard to create more software engineers from the traditional path of increased undergrad comp sci enrollments to the development and expansion of the bootcamp industry. Then the money started to go up and more and more people started rushing into the industry for the money. When I started in tech ~2005 almost every software person I knew got into the field because they loved to write code and build things, when I talk to recent software engineers almost all of them answer that compensation is their main driver today.
Now anyone hiring today (or let's say 3 months prior to today) will claim that it's still really hard to find good devs. However the amount of work being done that is essential and productive has dramatically decreased. Head counts have been expanding because money was flowing and managers need more people under them to get promoted (this logic flows even to the CEO level).
But now this long, long tech bubble is starting to burst and we'll companies across the board start asking "how much of this work is really necessary? how can we become profitable?" and we'll realize as an industry that we are way over indexed on software engineers.
This is exactly what happened during the dotcom era, I guess most people are just too young to remember. Anyone who could use a computer got hired to work in tech, paid ridiculous for the time, there were tons of people enrolling in EE and CS, a huge number of software engineers. The the bubble burst and a lot of the engineers disappeared, CS enrollments dropped radically, salaries went way down, and the only people left in the industry were people who just really like writing code and building things.
There's parts of what you wrote that are somewhat accurate but for the most part this is nonsense.
> when I talk to recent software engineers almost all of them answer that compensation is their main driver today.
I don't really understand what you're saying here. If you're trying to imply that folks are getting into the industry solely to make money, there is some truth to that but it's hardly the majority. That being said it's foolish to imagine that if the money dried up that everyone writing software would keep doing it. But software isn't going anywhere, so neither will the money.
Outside of a few areas, the global situation is that software engineers make decent salaries but are far from the top, especially outside of North America.
I suspect that part of this is a re-buttle to WFH. In the past, managers generally could see who was doing what. Now it's based on trust. If someone decides to watch TV all day while sometimes checking slack... well then they can. No one ever had any idea how long coding tasks took anyway. Some people are doing fine in this new world, and some are struggling. Whether I'm succeeding or struggling depends on the day.
It's been known for a long time that the output of teams is highly variable, and difficult to compare within an organization. If your team isn't delivering, and you are delivering slightly more than the average - where does that leave the company?
I mean, there's the possibility that Twitter was entirely mismanaged and they had tons us useless staff. Given their profitability, I'd say this is exactly the case.
I think you're giving Musk too much credit by classifying this as not "treating employees nicely" - he's mismanaging things in every way possible. The individual treatment of employees is such a small subset of it (e.g. Bezos also mistreats employees but seems much more grounded & competent than Musk).
My real curiosity from the whole affair is gauging the actual impact a CEO can have on a company's success / failure. No doubt Twitter's had issues as a product for a long time, long before Musk came along. Whatever direction the company goes next, will be be due to or despite Musk's input.
SpaceX does not seem to have a problem attracting talent and even poaching it from competitors.
The difference might be in the fact that Musk founded it and allegedly takes part in the recruitment process himself. Maybe he wants to do the same at Twitter. Turning an already existing company with an already existing company culture around is much more complicated, though.
SpaceX is going somewhere. Twitter is going nowhere.
This is a political play.
Musk may be a competent engineer, but he's used to being Emperor. He's completely out of his depth with culture and politics. So he's unprepared for the brutal muck-racking, humiliation, and character assassination that underpin political power games.
The "You can have free speech for just $8/month" accidental branding is already such a bad look. I don't see that he has the instincts, talent, or experience to even understand why - never mind to do better.
I think the difference is SpaceX doing cool cutting-edge things with rockets. People want to be a part of that and are willing to take less pay and poorer working conditions to do so.
Twitter is boring. Its explosive growth days are behind it, working there now is basically about maintaining a legacy platform that has a bunch of problems that mostly aren't technology problems. It's about as interesting as working for a big insurance company; if the paycheck and working conditions aren't there, you're not going to be able to attract talent.
Does Twitter have the ability to have a mission vision that people will sacrifice for? That's what keeps the recruiting pipelines full for the other companies and allows for the "we put up with Elon's BS" culture.
There's already a bigger org doing this - Amazon. They are constantly hiring and struggling to replace those who leave - even during their new corporate hiring freeze.
Tech workers are still in very high demand. And the younger generation seems much more willing to unionize or refuse poor working conditions.
Amazon is a completely asinine company that not only recognizes the need and difficulties to continue replacing turnover, they continue to actually maintain a turnover goals and mechanisms.
I really do think they are going to speedrun themselves to labor pool exhaustion in a first for a company in the US. Their management seems fully head in sand.
But hey, even Bezos said in an interview that he doesn't see Amazon lasting forever, even 30 years tops.
This is the part that concerns me as well. WFH was a fluke of sorts and the timing allowed a lot of workforce to maintain rather adamant pose. My company's management is already using all the 'key' words in meetings like 'in person collaboration' and so on suggesting they are planning an RTO.
They just don't seem to dare to do it yet, because they poached a whole lot of people from companies that did RTO. This would like leave a bad impression.
It depends. People are jumping to conclusions on this point before full information is available.
There are many carve-outs that will dismiss WARN liability: if severance packages are offered and accepted (with appropriate conditions), the WARN act is irrelevant.
This is basically fake news and a performative suit.
The WARN act states that companies that dont provide notice have to pay 60 days severance. the penalty is reduced by any severance pay from the employer. Twitter is already paying 60 days of severance.
I know this is a heated topic with diverse opinions, but lets try to improve the quality of information and knowledge..
> tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they will be productive"
Is/was it? The shortage of qualified engineers have made some employers extra careful/generous, to attract and keep them. Or some others to divert brains away from their own occupations which could have ended up competing with them.
Alternatively, if Musk is successful then it will show that a lot of firms are bloated and this rot is maintained under the guise of "treating employees nicely", in the same way that union featherbedding is considered a "nice" practice.
I think Apple (esp successful as it was under Jobs) and Amazon (known to put its employees in the wringer) have already made that point. China is going to make that point louder over the decade to come (eg TikTok is successful here, a lot of it on the backs of people working "996" over in China).
Luckily we'll still have Oracle as a counterexample...
Tech companies that treat their employees right might put a veneer of strategy to it in order to make it palatable to shareholders ("we're not wasting your money, we're retaining critical talent"), but I think the real reason that some CEOs and company cultures value treating people right is just for the sake of it, not because of ulterior motives. I guess, as the boss, it's kind of nice to work at a place where people don't hate your guts bc they think you're a psychopathic monster. Being nice to employees is a value that's easier to sustain when there's massive profitability growth but it is not necessarily done in pursuit of profit itself.
Are people really expecting Twitter to survive The Musk? His rash actions almost feel like sabotage. I honestly expect Twitter to be dead or irrelevant in 2 years at most.
996 culture in China already highlights this as a valid strategy. Perhaps a little too obscure for the typical pointy haired boss. Elon will be a great poster boy.
I do agree there's a lot of people in tech who don't work hard and the problem has only gotten worse recently. I personally appreciate a blue collar approach to development. Don't be arrogant, do what you say you will and make sure that you're putting in your 40-50 hours a week of work, not 20 hours of work and 20 hours of ping-pong and bullshitting. Above all, be a professional.
However, if you think for a second that you can replace US developers, building products for Americans with someone from Nigeria you are off your ass. The hardest part of software development isn't yolo-ing code into an IDE. It's collecting requirements, troubleshooting and translating that into both code and requirements docs for other teams.
This is hard for native english speakers and approaching impossible for offshore teams. It works reasonable well with teams in the Americas because the timezones are close and the culture/language barriers aren't as high.
> However, if you think for a second that you can replace US developers, building products for Americans with someone from Nigeria you are off your ass.
I've been a SWE for decades and have worked on large, complex projects. I've always been an IC, never officially a manager (personal choice), but at the moment as part of my regular job writing code I am also managing a team of 10 developers from a country where they are being paid around 1/5th our rates and they are doing a very good job at at it.
I don't make the hiring decisions where I am at the moment, and this was the decision. It turned out that, yes, good developers from country X can easily replace good developers from country Y.
It's the same skills, you either have them or you don't.
>if you think for a second that you can replace US developers, building products for Americans with someone from Nigeria you are off your ass.
Looking at some of the crap coming out of the faangms - and a few others - I'll take a bet on the non-us developers ('nigerians')/ ui-deciders making a quite a few substantial improvements, and certainly not changing things just for the fuck of it.
My hosts file is now full of the software-i-use-the-most's ip adresses so they don't/ can't auto-update when they try to phone home and all end up looking the same, whereas previously each had 'character'.
LOL. You're completely delusional. How exactly do you suppose multi-billion dollar companies selling to Americans while hiring Indians, like Freshdesk, operate? The average IIT grad is going to smack you - as cute as it is you think you're worth 6 figures because you can "collect requirements in English"
This arrogance is why you'll be out of a job in ten years. The rest of the world is here to eat your lunch, yet American egos refuse to see the signs.
I'm not saying international developers are incompetent, it's quite the opposite. I've worked with great engineers from all over the world, but I'm willing to say that on average, American engineers in American companies do a better job building products for Americans and Western Europeans.
Come try to get my salary, I'm doing my best to stay ahead and justify it. We'll see who wins but I've been here before :)
> * The hardest part of software development isn't yolo-ing code into an IDE. It's collecting requirements, troubleshooting and translating that into both code and requirements docs for other teams.*
Pre-agile development laundered all that through a bunch of heavyweight documents and such. And while it had issues - leading to the whole agile thing - it also didn't completely not work.
If actors and football players can unionize so can software developers. There’s no point in intentionally allowing our peers to be treated worse, because then it allows our bosses to treat us just as badly. The most famous actors have all the power to demand better and yet are still part the guild because the demands they can make actually rise as the floor of actor treatment also rises.
The audacity to think that running a company well involves running your employees into the ground is peak Republican stupidity. There are thousands of companies that are great and profitable and yet are still great places to work.
> trying to unionize despite being the most privileged class of people in human history.
That's absurd. They're not even close to the most privileged class today, let alone in history. The most privileged class of people today are old money, born wealthy. Apart from them, there are plenty of new-money C level execs, finance people, celebrities, and so on who are rich enough to never work again, let alone unionize. Religious leaders can be extremely privileged as well.
I dont think Musk necessarily thinks all of that is ending.. more that he doesn't want to pay for all the employees that currently exist at twitter so he's making life miserable for them.
It's funny because you would've been one of the first people fired at Twitter given that you seem to work in sales. I also imagine you do not in fact work 14 hour days 7 days a week like Musk demands which would seem to make you an entitled softy.
Insanely profitable trillion dollar company that the entire world depends on ? Let me guess you're in saas sales or some other unproductive garbage like that
big tech layoffs are actually very good because they release into the wild a slew of competent workers with great credentials who will hopefully get hired by a company which does something useful for humanity instead of selling ads
Big tech layoffs are never really "good." Even in the way you're describing. Its a nice notion... but I imagine most of the laid off workers will be doing the same thing, just at another company.
As the first paragraph of that article points out, advance notice is required by federal law, if the company is sufficiently large and if sufficiently many people are being laid off at the same time. At-will employment is not relevant.
Yeah, the Warn Act doesn’t require you let them work for 60 days. If it’s triggered, it just means you have to pay them for 60 days. It is very common to not let them work, particularly when concerned about sabotage.
Sure. I haven't seen the actual legal complaint, so I don't know if it's just a publicity stunt, or if they actually have evidence that Musk is planning to not pay out the extra wages that he's (presumably) required to.
That probably works in the US but in some jurisdictions (e.g. parts of Europe) -- where I presume Twitter has [or had!] employees -- there are requirements for an actual consultation process before substantial layoffs.
You can give them notice when the decision is yours to make. And the then the termination can be legal at X days beyond that, if the legal requirement is X days notice. I don't see how "I Just bought it" matters?
The NY Times makes it sound like there might be a legal case for a different reason:
> While federal and California laws require companies to provide advance notice of mass layoffs, it was not clear whether Mr. Musk had done so. A spokesman for California’s Employment Development Department said on Thursday evening that it had received no such notices from Twitter, which is based in San Francisco and is expected to report mass layoffs to the agency.
I just don’t understand that. It is very common to give the layoff notice on the date of termination and to then pay them for 60 days. That complies with the Warn Act. I’m not a California lawyer, it that must be true there too. There’s no way they’d make you bring in hostile workers.
Layoffs are really tough on anyone, but Silicon Valley lay-offs are met with more indignation. Most people get laid off, they take the severance, and they start looking for a new job. With Twitter, etc The decision to lay someone office met with such indignation like how dare you lay ME off.
The whole response to the layoffs just doesn’t sit well with me. It’s the righteous elite complaining that they have to eat cake
having a bunch of yes-men working for you isn't a recipe for innovation - it might lead to possibly some short term profit (if any), but absolutely and surely a long term decline.
Is everyone using the same version control system? I wouldn't be surprised if some people have code that would get missed if they just had IT pull everything.
> “To help ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data, our offices will be temporarily closed and all badge access will be suspended,” the email reads. “If you are in an office or on your way to an office, please return home.”
Welcome to the dystopian future... I find it a bit galling how companies can force you into home office nowadays if it suits them (you want to avoid your underlings congregating in the office in such a situation), but also force you to come to the office when it suits them.
If anything, this is more akin to the baker calling their employees to say "you'll be baking from home today, I'm firing a lot of people today and need to protect the bakery."
They aren't 'forcing' you to do something - they're offering you money in return for doing it. If you don't like the money they're offering you don't have to accept the deal.
"Really dystopian that they're offering me $300k a year + benefits to be able to ask me to work in one of two locations" doesn't really work does it?
"Really dystopian that I can walk up to a baker and force him to give me a loaf of bread by offering him the agreed price in money."
Did you read the article, or at least the quote that the parent offered? This isn't about Twitter changing work site expectations/status. It's about blocking physical access for employees who were expected to show up at the office, without prior notice or any change in contract terms -- i.e. without their work site actually having formally changed.
This isn't even dystopian, it's just a management clusterfuck. Whoever thought this is the right way to handle this kind of a situation should be the first to go in these layoffs. Wow.
> without prior notice or any change in contract terms
Pretty sure it's within their contractual rights to deny people access to the office for any reason or no reason at all? Did you put a contractual clause in about the right to office access when you signed?
> Pretty sure it's within their contractual rights to deny people access to the office for any reason or no reason at all?
Of course it is. The point I am making is that it's extremely bad management to handle layoffs and firing like that. You have the team leads schedule an appointment with the people who have to be let go. They tell them they are being let go, effective from X, with such and such terms (including access rights if they're in any way more specific than "you can't come to the office after X"). You have them thank them for their work and offer them a recommendation if they need it. This isn't some advanced HR management guru advice, it's common sense that should be standard adult behaviour.
Telling people who you have not yet fired that they can't come to the office anymore, possibly minutes before they come in to work, but also insisting that they go home so they can get the email that they've been fired is just about the worst way to handle it.
There's a potentially infinite set of actions that are within a company's contractual rights to do. Not all of them are okay.
What do you mean “whoever decided should be the first to go”? Musk decided. He’s pissed he overpaid and he thinks the whole company is a clusterfuck. This isn’t a “management failure”, it’s by design. Elon is cleaning house. Speed, not collateral damage, is his priority.
I mean whoever decided that the proper way to handle a layoff is to tell someone who has not yet been fired that they can no longer access company premises while they're on their way to work, or possibly wondering why their badge doesn't work, and should instead go home and wait to be fired from there. This breaks just about every management rule about how to handle a layoff, not to mention common sense.
Well, they did a “lockout go away” back in the 90’s when my company died. Fear of ‘rm -rf’ or some other act of digital vandalism or theft. Doesn’t say much about the business I guess,
Had a similar experience back in the early 00’s. Kinda back-fired though - one of the developers had happened to notice that a .com domain name they’d been desperate to buy for some time (because it was the name of their licensed IP) had become available a few days beforehand.
He’d bought it immediately planning to hand it over to the business… wasn’t quite so keen once they laid him off!
I would say less as that requires a bit more skill and risks being found upon code review. Acting in the heat of the moment seems far more expected. Although perhaps this situation points out up that “planning against all eventualities” is a good skill to have?
So Twitter employees can work at home "forever", but they should work 80 hours a week while under explicit threat of layoffs, and return to the office for 12 hours a day, meanwhile the office is closed, go home if you are in the office now!
This is really what has happened inside of just the last 8 weeks. I can't blame anyone who just can't keep up, especially while that 12 hour a day death march was going on. This is really not how you should treat people, even for a day.
I mean, if you don't like it then quit. I think that's the point. Elon is going to run Twitter like his other companies which means he only wants people who actually want to be there and want to put in the hours to make the business work. Anyone not willing to do so should leave. It's a private company so he can set whatever expectations he wants, if the former employees don't like it they can start their own business.
I can't quit working at Twitter because I already don't, but I am downloading an archive of all my tweets as we speak and I'll be having my finger on the trigger to delete my whole account, which I'm totally sure coming from me, a nobody you never heard of, is, like, an equally serious threat – I mean seriously though, have some solidarity with the workers. Do you want to work under those conditions?
If it paid well then yes I would work under those conditions. I don't have to stay at a job for life, I can put in extra work to earn extra money and then quit when the schedule or environment no longer suits me. I'd much rather have that option than be stuck in some crappy unionized shop where everything moves at a glacial pace, get underpaid, and have it be nearly impossible to find another job because all other workplaces are the same and no one is hiring, firing or growing.
If you want to work there, fine, I hope it pays well! But I'm telling you, I saw a tweet when this all began about how someone once set about $2B on fire to buy Yahoo! and what fun they were looking forward to having (as a Twitter user) helping Elon set the new record for cash bonfire volume and speed-run, and from my perspective we are now watching that play out in real-time. I don't want to work there, I don't even want to be mentioned in the same sentence as there. You can find me on Mastodon from now on.
Some people blame victims aa a defense mechanism. It's so they can justify in their head that it can never happen to them because they are smart, and hardworking and deserving and whatever else.
It usually takes such tragedy happening to them personally for them to gain empathy. Even then, some of them don't. They only end up having empathy for their own tragedies, other people's tragedy is deserved
I've been laid off before and I've lost jobs for a variety of reasons including the company going under. What I've learnt from it is that you just have to keep moving forwards. If you try to cling to the past or hold on to a mental framework or lifestyle that isn't working it'll just drag you down. I get that people want security but in the end the only real security is that which you provide for yourself, if you put blind faith into systems that you don't have any control over at some point they will fail you, most of the time through no fault of their own and you'll be left to fend for yourself. That's why I always start from that position, I make sure I'm able to protect myself first. Everything else is window dressing.
If you go from earning $250k+ at a highly recognizable company to homeless then you fucked up severely somewhere along the way. You'd have to have 0 savings, massive debt, and completely fail at every job interview afterwards.
Reading the article and not having a stake in twitter (no account, no stocks, don’t use it at all), seems reasonable. It’s basically, we’re closing office tomorrow, exit the premises please.
Not dystopian at all and there was nothing in the article about go home and work, just go home and receive decision information.
> What about Foxconn China not allowing employees to go home because of ,,zero COVID policy''?
It is a little dystopian, but (assuming you're talking about the Zhengzhou story from a couple of days ago) it's also not Foxconn's decision. The local government mandated that the industrial park be locked down.
It's also worth noting that many workers at places like Foxconn live in on-site dorms anyway.
You could generate all the electricity needed for the next 20 generations by harvesting the energy generated by the eyes rolling of people who live in countries with workers rights who just read that comment
All our contracts are managed by unions and you can't just fire someone out of the blue, there's notice periods on both sides (unless there's just cause for termination)
I would say upper middle class joe has is better in the states. Everyone else is barely clinging on to their lives in perpetual serfdom because of no universal healthcare, extreme housing costs, extremely expensive education, etc…
Statistics about average and median income in the US and EU is widely available. Also the graph linked above about disposable income shows that only in the lowest 10th percentile people in Europe are (marginally) richer that in the US. Starting with lower middle class the gap becomes quite significant already, and what's important is only growing.
Yes, and most of the time the fired employee will be sent home during his notice period, so im not sure what you are talking about?
The thing is, mass layoffs are often discussed widely in Europe since its mostly blue collar employees and the unions and politicians are often trying to prevent the layoffs.
Precisely. Most places in Europe, you're able to find ways to fire individual tech workers with whatever notice period dictated by the contract terms. Mass layoffs of tech workers is quite rare.
Mass layoffs (or some kind of forced unpaid leave) is typically something that happens for blue collared jobs when there is a reduction of demand for their products.
The twitter case is different, though. Twitter was a hostile takeover (even in the end, it was the company that forced the transaction). The takeover was not done for economic reason (or that was what was claimed), but because the new owner wanted to radically change the values of the company.
For employees that base their personal identity on those old values, this makes them natural enemies of the new owner. When Musk carries the sink in, he is like an enemy warlord accepting the surrender of an enemy tribe.
After a short tally, the enemy warlord lets half the prisoners go, after disarming them (takes away access to accounts and buildings), while the other half are allowed to join his forces, if they desire to.
This is probably the way this had to go. Letting everyone keep their access to the infra would be crazy. Now the question that remains, is how much does he have to pay those that got fired.
That's just modern technology. I'm not aware of any country where labour laws would prevent logging employees out remotely. There are some where you can't be laid off immediately, but even there you could be denied access to the systems and just get paid for the rest of your tenure I believe?
So? If they need specific people to come in then they'll probably just call them, I'm guessing they're running with a skeleton crew while they do the lay offs. Most of the people in the office probably won't even be Twitter employees.
You are so confused I don’t know where to start. There is no country in the world where you have the right to go into a corporate office against the will of the owner. This has absolutely nothing to do with employment status. We’re talking about current employees being told to stay out of a physical office.
No, and workers rights are usually about the amount of compensation for all this. In France, which we cant argue is laissez-faire capitalist, they can burn the company to the ground with all your work stuff for all we care so long as they compensate heavily, financially, for all the surprise unemployment.
People think work is democratic but it s not: it's transactional and worker rights are just here to pay workers more, not give them any sort of novel ownership of the work tools.
That can be done, but it s called communism and never works because workers want money not access to their work pc, and leaders want money not management oversight of every single work tool. So you end up with people pretending to work for people pretending to pay them in a lunatic worker paradise where there are no humans anymore, just workers and their work tool mindlessly fullfilling the glorious work tasks assigned to them by mindless work allocators.
In the past such a thing wouldn't have been possible because of the need to keep up day-to-day operations. Now companies can just decide if you should work from home or from the office as they please. And home office was initially promoted as giving more flexibility to the employees - looks like the companies are now exploiting this flexibility to their advantage while restricting the employee's flexibility (x mandatory office days etc.).
I am assuming this is a hint at how large the layoff will be. If are getting rid of 5-10% of your workforce, no issue with using the office but if you are axing some number greater...lets say 25%, it sounds like a security nightmare.
Maybe it wouldn't rub me the wrong way if it wouldn't come from the same guy who said that Tesla employees have to come in 40 h per week, the rest they can work from home (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/06/musk-to-tesla-an...). Well, he seems ready to embrace home office when it suits him...
This is quite a curiously Pavlovian response. It assumes so much from that "please return home". The whole comment stands as a window into a life lived under abusive working conditions where the Individual knows only the control of the Company.
Nothing in that 'please return home' is anything to do with forcing anyone to have a home office, to go there and work, to do anything really. The company doesn't control you.
The not showing up to the office is kind of irrelevant.
Not having a consultation period, whether people are working or on "gardening leave", is illegal in CA, NY, the UK, and many other places for an employer of that size.
I don't think you understand how mass layoffs in big companies work. There's nothing new or dystopian about it. You probably haven't heard of garden leave as well?
One thing I’m surprised to see such little commentary on is the fact that Musk violated California’s WARN Act by not providing appropriate notice of layoffs.
In all the brouhaha about the Twitter acquisition this piece of info had personally escaped me:
> Musk’s deal to buy Twitter included making the company take on $13 billion in debt from banks, which means Twitter will owe about $1 billion a year in interest payments
puts things in a slightly different perspective. I had somehow assumed that all the acquisition money had come in from Musk himself together with a bunch of other business "friends" or investment vehicles, didn't know there were direct bank loans involved.
There is not much difference. This is just one way to structure that. Basically, this is like a mortgage, where if Twitter goes bust, the bank takes a loss. But if Twitter just falls in value compared to the purchase price, the bank gets their money back. For Musk (and potential other owners), this means he doesn't have to offer any other collateral than Twitter for that loan.
I was mostly thinking on the recurring price of paying that debt, which, if I’m not mistaken, in cases like this one falls entirely on the acquired company (Twitter, in this case). This is irrespective of Twitter’s financial status, that money has to be paid on a recurrent manner.
That’s an extra cost on future Twitter of which I was not aware of, a cost entirely brought by this acquisition.
Either, you still believe in the long term vision and that some day it make you rich or you can't find another job. Is the first choice even plausible now?
One thing that's always felt distasteful is the practice of essentially making the company buy itself.
Musk bought Twitter, but Twitter itself is on the hook for $13 billion of that. It reminds me what happened with ToysRUs. It was saddled with the debt of having been taken private by vulture capitalist, eventually couldn't make its interest payments and folded. Despite never really having a down year of sales.
That's right, it was sold, not because it was losing money, but because it wasn't growing at the time. Profits were stagnant. So they were essentially made to buy themselves and the people who engineered this deal and "bought" ToysRUs collected consultancy fees and percentages and made out like bandits.
The difference here is that I don't think there's a clear way for Musk to extract that kind of money from Twitter in the same manner.
Now is a good time for us all to chill, take inventory as the year draws to an end and uncertain economic conditions have us all a little on edge.
Change happens, it's uncomfortable at first but it can be made to work for you too. Change isn't always bad. Can anyone look at Twitters performance as a public company and say that no changes were warranted? Twitters "mission" wasn't exactly being well executed either. Something was bound to happen eventually and this was a long time coming.
Had it been some Generic Private Equity Company that took Twitter private nobody would even be talking about this at all. But since you-know-who lead the buyout a lot of people have their tails in a knot over it. Has anyone considered what a giant hornets nest Elon has kicked in all this? I personally feel sorry for the poor bastard myself and I bet he wishes he could go back in time and ctrl-z all this terrible idea.
More or less he's put a big chunk of his lifes work on the line over a silly tweet about buying Twitter. You know this all started off as a silly tweet, that turned into a funny joke, that got serious and became a potentially career wrecking mistake with too much momentum to stop.
> More or less he's put a big chunk of his lifes work on the line over a silly tweet about buying Twitter.
It's a forty-four billion dollar drunk ebay purchase. But it comes after previous occasions when he'd been told by the SEC to stop making stock-price-moving announcements on twitter. It's just astonishingly irresponsible of him to have got in this position in the first place.
The lesson here is that he is not exempt from the consequences of his statements. And good! Hopefully he learns a lesson. When someone has such a gigantic platform in which to influence the lives of so many people, he absolutely should be humble and thoughtful about what he says. If it takes a $44 billion dollar lesson to teach him that, then oh well.
Saw a leaked video yesterday from a meeting that Elon wants to basically copy WeChat and become the "everything app" in America. He also laughed at the engineers when they told him that "edit is incredibly complex". Couple that with mass layoffs/restructuring. This saga is gonna be interesting to say the least.
Does this mass layoff comply with the WARN Act and California's mini-WARN?[0] What about all of California's protected classes?[1] The pregnant ladies let go before their FMLA seem especially aggrieved.
Maybe some lawyers here can chime in: How soon will we see some class action lawsuits?
Do they? Or does Elon have to explain in front of a judge that employees about to go on protected leave/ older workers/ less fanboy were not unfairly targeted?
My money is on settlement to prevent any judge from seeing how the firing decisions were made.
In the US, the presumption is innocence until proven guilty. The pregnant women would have to prove they were targeted with evidence, not the other way around.
Any method of firing is allowed as long as it wasn't based on protected class, even if they pulled names randomly from a hat. The person suing would need hard evidence. Firing based on lack of fanboy attitude is also perfectly legal. Age and disability are not.
Anything is possible, but my money is on nothing happening.
I got laid off but least I had the dignity of being told in person, given time to hand over my projects, allowed to remove my personal stuff from my work laptop (did not have any) and a generous severance package - it was about a month.
If you worked for a high profile company that just went through a tumultuous acquisition with a polarizing figure. Do you suppose you would have been given the same dignity?
These actions aren’t about you the individual. They’re about protecting the business against malcontents. With large polarizing companies this is a likelihood. Not so much with random company b with a couple hundred employees.
It is the 2nd biggest retailer in our country - 90,000 people.
I am a professional adult not some immature kid that is gonna delete databases or servers - did not even lose my dev rights to our SAP systems or company email until the last day.
If you lay off 4000 people where perhaps 1000 could seriously harm the company, and where you know that a large fraction hates vehemently, I think it's wise to take precautions.
I'm personally quite curious how much alignment there is between Jack and Elon, and yet.. Jack was the CEO not too long ago. Jack didn't fix a lot of the things Elon is worked up about. Which makes their communication and cooperation perplexing.
Some context, these are the platforms that are at 1 billion or getting close to 1 billion users:
FB
Instagram
Youtube
Linkedin
Notice that twitter, despite it's age is nowhere close to closing on LinkedIN's current 700 million users.
Those worried about Journalists have not followed the upswing in Instagram users by journalists...some well known Liberal leaning journalist networks are now current Instagram users and creators.
The Twitter employees let go, got a gift of being freed from working for someone that factually is perceived as white superior race advocate including racism.
Advertisers, current Twitter employees and users all have the most important vote and objection to this...our feet and attention.
Hot take, this was bound to happen at one point or another. Everything I’ve read, and witnessed from using the platform always came back to this thought: “how are they even making money on it?”
Policies also placed were just not popular regardless from what you heard from the vocal minority.
I personally hope Twitter develops into a platform that has more fair policies, and makes some sort of profit.
It sucks to be laid off, but honestly it was a bubble waiting to burst. At least these people are getting some sort of severance.
The only thing I hope is that the COs don’t get their golden parachute. They haven’t done much for the platform, and only made it worse for a majority of the user base.
Link to search LinkedIn for Twitter employees posting in the last 24 hours. It's more or less 100% people looking for work (at least from the view of my network), so it's a great place to start for people looking to hire. https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?authorCompa...
I was curious about the second Tweet on that page, which states:
>"Yep, the team is gone. The team that was researching and pushing for algorithmic transparency and algorithmic choice. The team that was studying algorithmic amplification. The team that was inventing and building ethical AI tooling and methodologies. All that is gone."
Does anyone if this team published any of their research on algorithmic transparency and algorithmic amplification? Could anyone say more about their work and what if any literature or tooling might be available to the public?
I interviewed for this team and the interview experience was so, so bad. The manager was extremely rude, and I was treated poorly in general.
I don't like Tesla, but Elon having trouble with this team in particular is no surprise.
The ethical AI folks who wrote the fairseq library at Microsoft have done more for AI Ethics and fairness than every single one of twitters AI ethics and responsibility folks.
Let's all open our personal professional networks to help these folks laid off find work. Nothing we can do about Elon owning Twitter now but what we can do is help those affected by the layoffs.
I’d be more likely to work with Twitter now to be frank. Elon is obviously trying to implement an engineering lead organisation where coding and productivity are valued.
A lot of these companies tend to be manager heavy, I’ve worked in places where it seemed over half the people in meetings were managers or other unproductive people. It frequently felt like these people were stifling the work as they all had their own agendas etc.
Elon is an engineer first and has s big vision. If you’re one of the people left it must feel like the company has taken a new direction.
Given how Musk treats employees, I was wondering where the kind of sycophant ready to sacrifice their life at the altar of an uncaring billionaire actually existed.
I don't see how his ventures could have made the progress they have with a business/finance/sales person calling the shots. Elon is adept at engineering; you can see it whenever he is interviewed and goes down rabbit holes about metallurgy, simulations, manufacturing, etc. The achievements of Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink and others would not have happened without thousands of correct evaluations of and decisions on technical matters, and Elon is the singularity around which all of that orbits.
Do they often publish transparency reports about their ML systems that cannot identify months-long spam campaigns where scammers post identical messages tens of thousands of times?
Can you explain how the team added value to shareholders who want to maximize their long term ROI (which is the job of the CEO)?
We're living in a world where voting rights of pensioners have been delegated to big companies like Vanguard and Black Rock. They clearly are not keeping the best interest of the shareholders which would be their duty, and vote politically instead.
That's easy. I work for a company that has a similar body. Its a PITA but they prevent over-zealous POs and engineers from building creepy things that get the brand in trouble. (E.g., "why don't we record our users and predict their sentiment from facial expressions and tone of the voice" - those people will tell you why it's a bad idea). There, hope it helps.
That just sounds like your product owners and legal department have outsourced one of their core competencies to another department, perhaps to reduce their own accountability.
If you look in the medical industry for example ethical decisions are always managed by a different group than Product/Legal because it's a completely different set of skills and competencies.
Even more so at places like Twitter which are heavily dependent on ML models to make real-time decisions. And so you need a dedicated team that is proactive rather then reactive like a Legal team would be.
Putting the "what will our users think" question in an ethical framing is not obviously (to me) going to benefit users. (Especially when modern fashionable ethics centers around utilitarian normative ethics, but that's besides the point.)
Right. The real point is of course to make sure what gets built is good for the brand. That revealing how something works won't make people mad, disgusted, less likely to use its services, do business with it, etc. Of course hardly anybody really cares about the ethics per se - only for the perception of the company.
Some companies, such as for instance Procter & Gamble or Apple care about their brand equity a lot, since they rely on it to charge above market premiums. Twitter needs to care about that too, since if they get caught doing something unsavoury they will turn toxic to their advertisers, or at least those who care about their brands. I am not a marketing exec but if Twitter now drops the pretense of caring about ethics you will see major advertisers pull out, and make a point of communicating why they do it. Thats the ROI on having functioning ethics teams.
POs have different incentives - they usually get rewarded for features built. A good PO has lots of ideas, some of those may be good for the product ("we will serve more relevant ads if we spy on our users!") and bad for the brand. The ML Ethics teams are usually part of the legal teams and are staffed mainly with lawyers. Not sure how it was with Twitter. It's also entirely possible those teams did not do a very good job, considering what a sh1thole Twitter is, so they may as well do without one.
I consider much of the practices of social media companies designing for dopamine hits to be unethical, but it had been very lucrative for shareholders for more than a decade. It’s still lucrative but shareholders are taking it on the chin for other macro reasons.
But even that approach does not work for very long. With regulators tightening the laws everywhere, and eying bans on fully automated decision making in some industries (e.g. mine - in HR), you either staff those internal ethics teams with intelligent, well connected lawyers, or you get truly nasty surprises and jeopardize the brand itself -- and lose $$$.
Ideally the society where the companies operate in should provide the safety rails, thus allowing the company to do whatever it legally can to maximize profits.
But that wouldn't be the crony capitalism that we're stuck with now. Also, things have been moving too fast for a long time, making it nearly impossible for governments to keep up.
I guess you have zero understanding on Twitter's business model, which even Elon has some degree of. Advertisers are extremely sensitive on their brand safety and they will simply cut their budget if they see a certain amount of risk on publishers. YT had to implement various brand safety measures after Elsagate to appease advertisers. After Elon took it over, advertisers immediately cut their advertising budgets on Twitter because they see it as an existential threat to the platform. This is a REAL problem, which just you don't appreciate.
Rising political opposition and talk of government intervention in companies like Facebook and Twitter is very much a threat to the future stability and ROI of said companies. Fewer and fewer people buy the argument that "The Algorithm" just does what it does and isn't influenced by its builder.
As political discourse and more elections are swayed by rage-bait and disinformation pumped into voters retinas by these platforms, the political risks to these platforms and their bottom line will increase (and become wildly unpredictable).
ML ethics and accountability is beneficial to both society and to any company which has an interest in self-preservation.
People who talk about regulation of social media should spend 5 minutes reviewing the Supreme Courts’ approach to regulating speech over the last 25 years. Never going to happen.
I don't see the purpose of this condescending comment, you could have explained why and provide knowledge for the person posting the initial statement.
> Sure, something nobody has heared of and nobody knows why it should be at a company like Twitter.
Actually almost everyone who is in the Data/ML space knows about it.
It's one of the biggest challenges in ML which is making sure that models don't amplify biases in the training datasets and cause harm to users and the company. There have been many stories with TikTok for example recommending accounts which promote unhealthy eating [1] to users with a known eating disorder.
'Ethics, Transparency and Accountability' is a decently important part of any data warehousing company.
If you are going to be hosting petabytes of data and in the business of showing advertisment, a lot of recommendation algorithms work in the background. A lot of times they aren't perfect and end up showing information which could be very high correlated but culturally sensitive, offensive or avoidable. People working in fairness and accountability run a lot of experiments to make sure biases don't get amplified in service offerings.
However, Musk's stated intent when buying twitter, was to make it a non-partisan town square. This comes with a context of the US currently being divided more and more into two competing "tribes" of similar size and power. (Ie. the perfect setup for a civil war.)
If you look at the "ethics" teams kind of like law enforcement, it's important that they are neutral to this partisan divide, and don't have a "My side good, other side evil!" attitude.
If Elon is of the opinion that Twitter has been engaging in a partisan way, it is natural that roles like this are torn down and built from scratch, where the new teams are thoroughly screen to make sure they have as little affiliation with each of the tribes as possible, and to make sure that any affiliation remaining is balanced between the tribes. (Kind of like one does when recruiting a jury for a high profile court case, and also how presidents should select supreme court justices)
Hopefully, Musk goes through with this the way he has stated, by aiming for non-partisanship, and not in a pro-Republican way.
> Sure, something nobody has heared of and nobody knows why it should be at a company like Twitter.
Because Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have gotten under fire multiple times for the shit their artificial "intelligence" did - promoting content harmful to society (antivaxxers, flat-earthers, antisemitism, ...), sending them into outright radicalization spirals (YT autoplay), banning of people by automation based on shoddy input or without context...
If you're running AI that has a direct impact on wide society and you're not running an ethics oversight program, you should be arrested for endangerment of society.
It's interesting how the firing process presented in the movie Up in the Air (2009) was supposed be inhumane and insulting. Well, look where we are now.
Either you or I, and I suspect you, have misunderstood the film's intention if you think that we the viewer are meant to agree with any of the options used by Clooney's character's company, that they were the humane option.
Humane would be telling the person who works for you that you can no longer employ them, not hiring some stranger to come and tell them.
I don't think that either the direct or remote methods presented in the film were humane. Certainly not what I meant. I do think though, that checking your e-mail at 9AM to see if you're fired is considerably worse.
Truly hope that we can use this as an opportunity to make something people want. Obviously we all use Facebook and Twitter because I guess that's all there is. I hope this create an experience vacuum for people on the web because virtual reality snooze offices and/or racially and class deriding ad driven posts that are 140 words are less is not what I thought the future would be.
I'm never happy with mass layoffs, but reading some tweets and going through some profiles linked to the article, it is clear to see that some people who were fired, weren't happy with the company. So regardless of their performance, maybe was everything that they needed to find their happiness in another company?
Personally, I'd keep the software devs + QA. Most of them probably don't care so much about politics/culture and are hopefully motivated by doing a good job. Without dev+QA, there's no Twitter. So I would understand a total mgmt purge....
Elon is pushing a giant reset button on Twitter. This is long overdue and the pain is a result of accumulated managerial debt.
Twitter will be fine operationally. It might have some short term hiccups as people pick up the pieces but the network effects and the value proposition are unchanged.
Letting go of these people also makes room for more wild thinkers and hacker types to join the party.
Sometimes the team that got you there isn't the team that can take you to the next level. I feel bad personally for everyone who liked their job, but many of these jobs existed for years longer than they should have.
These are all smart individuals who have a big important company on their CV. No one is going to fault them for being laid off from Twitter when the cuts are this deep; they're already neck deep in recruiter spam if they have any degree of competence.
> This is long overdue and the pain is a result of accumulated managerial debt.
The pain is the result of Elon Musk overpaying 3x for a company he didn't want to buy and aggressively cost cutting to lower expenses.
1 billion a year in debt interest payments due to the 12 billion in loans he took on to purchase Twitter matches reality more closely than "accumulated managerial debt".
> Twitter will be fine operationally.
I'm unsure how anyone can say this with any confidence.
> Letting go of these people also makes room for more wild thinkers and hacker types to join the party.
I think I met you at a gathering in SF once and had to walk away from the conversation.
Notified of your being let go via a personal email? So no opportunity to back up your data, save contacts (which might come in handy for finding other employment), any notes or drafts... Brilliant idea, honestly ...
You'd think a little bit of forethought would cause you to have done that at any point in the last few weeks since this shit-show started, just in case.
Literally no place I’ve ever worked in my decades in the tech industry were laid off workers allowed any physical or virtual access to company property post layoff. I’m sure it happens sometimes, in rare circumstances, but to pretend that this is especially egregious is disingenuous.
I honestly hope this forces twitter to crash and burn. I feel sorry for those who would lose their jobs. That said, twitter is utter garbage and is nothing but a place for people to complain
I fear Elon may have inadvertently laid off potential baby mommas for his next family. Literally throwing out the baby with the bath water type of situation.
So, article is a bit vague on who were let go. Is this gonna have any real impact on operations going forward? Could you really axe half the staff and not?
They are laying off a large portion of workers who have previously expressed being hostile to the new leadership. There is bloat, laziness, aimlessness, and the company is being taken in a radically new direction. It’s pretty tactful so far, as far as I am concerned. We haven’t even seen the severance.
You have nothing to complain about. First priority is to protect Twitter systems, so locking everyone out temporarily (or as the case may be, permanently) makes a lot of sense.
Yeah that’s about payroll, effectively. You revoke all access, and tell the employees their project is over. Pay salary until a termination date 60 days in the future.
The termination is still “no cause”. At least in CA.
And all duties are typically over on the day of the layoff notice. Turn in your badge, take your stuff off the premises, etc.
You can be terminated for cause without notice. Layoffs are different, and different again in each jurisdiction. Both the federal government and California, where Twitter is headquartered, have specific laws for this exact situation, and Musk et al are in clear violation of those laws plus the agreement under which he acquired the company. Either your partner in HR (notably not legal) is misinformed, or you misunderstood what they told you. Regardless, you're the one who's confused - and that's trying hard to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Typically in a tech layoff you revoke all access, 2 months paid salary, and effectively say “your project is complete, termination date 2 months from now”.
That’s compliant and it happens all the time in CA.
You’re making the claim they are not compliant and you have none of the info needed to make that claim. (You’re the disinfo, bub)
Right. That’s why 2 months paid salary is standard. With any severance on top. I've had this done a few times and I've witnessed it a few times.
You guys were going around essentially saying "THEY ARE BREAKING THE LAW!!!" it's a no notice layoff!!!
And obviously there is no evidence for that.
They are basically about to do the layoff "notice", which will also involve telling these people to stop working immediately and turn in their assets. Telling them to stop working is totally in compliance.
I'll admit that I am not in HR. But, to be clear workers are still legally revoked all access and told to cease producing with no notice and that's fine.
Layoffs exactly like this take place all the time.
The context is if they are laying people off without giving 60 days, they are breaking the law. IDK what they are doing. But that is what people at Twitter are claiming (in some circumstances).
Right. Yeah the people claiming law breaking seems to come from a few (5) employees who started a lawsuit on the day of (may even be a coincidence). NYT and others blindly parroted the info that a suit as been filed (of course, in NYT's language, it's like: "laid off employees sue Twitter for breaking employment law!")
The only claim someone might have is if they individually fully terminated in the past ~30 days. Then there is question about whether they were "part of" the layoff or not and therefor required more days of payroll / benefits.
This is why in a medium+ company, if you are fired even individually, they often pay the 60 days salary + benefits, with any severance on top. It leaves them the option of being able to fire other people in the same time period without exposing them to a BS lawsuit where the plaintiff/s may claim they were part of a layoff and weren't given 60 days.
I might be a bit idealistic here but I like the notion of respect. Disabling badges, laptops and email addresses of your employees with no direct communication isn't very respectful in my book.
Regular companies do meetings, shady companies send a pre recorded video to their employees, and then you have Musk, just logging you off. I guess he missed the part were "transhumanism" still contains "humanism"
> I might be a bit idealistic here but I like the notion of respect
Doesn't respect work two ways? You give respect, you get respect?
It's easy to make Elon Musk the bad guy, but people who were let go were freeloaders. Let's not try to make them anything but that, we've all seen plenty of Twitter employees using up work-time to be active on various social media. They didn't show respect to the employer because their work and demeanor did not reflect it.
The "boss bad, worker good" just doesn't apply here. Twitter is a troubled company, I'm surprised Elon bought it in the first place but I'm absolutely not surprised by the wave of layoffs.
You can assume the moral high ground and employ the talent that Twitter has decided to part with and prove your words with actions. Are you ready to do so?
Should we, the IT experts, not be thrilled by so much experienced talent being available for employment?
It seems like people have a totally different thought process when it comes to Elon Musk and Twitter and I can’t pin down why.
Whenever a layoff announcement is posted on HN, many people closely scrutinize the wording of the announcement and the severance conditions. Words of consolation are given freely, and occasionally people will offer to help with finding new work. In this thread, though, I find people saying that former Twitter employees need to suck it up and not be entitled babies.
Many who have ardently supported remote work policies (and would raise pitchforks if their employer tried to drag them back into the office) are calling Twitter employees entitled and coddled for attempting to push back.
Elon Musk is great at building new things. Time will tell if he can re-invent an existing thing. So far, it's not looking great.
Corporate raiders / PE usually have a well defined thesis and plan to hit the ground running - Elon clearly does not. His plan seems to be "I need to double free cash flow ASAP, we'll figure out how along the way". Trying to figure out how to lay off half of the company, without negatively impacting free cash flow, in a week seems like a fool's errand.
I think his success has gone to his head. But time will tell.
> Corporate raiders / PE usually have a well defined thesis and plan to hit the ground running - Elon clearly does not.
He clearly does, but most people don't care to engage with it in good faith.
Something like:
- Twitter's value is its integrated GLOBAL network of professionals/leaders/celebrities
- Twitter Co has not remotely leveraged this, going for a FB/Reddit/etc content-centric advertiser model instead
- Sprinkle in some "super app" ambitions. If the new KYC subscriber model is successful, then Twitter could disrupt LinkedIn, then possibly payments too.
SV has been captured by advertisers and many people think "there are no alternatives". But there clearly are.
> Yep, the team is gone. The team that was researching and pushing for algorithmic transparency and algorithmic choice. The team that was studying algorithmic amplification. The team that was inventing and building ethical AI tooling and methodologies. All that is gone.
If you want to justify your position, I would suggest highlighting the positive changes you _did_ make, rather than the positive changes you _intended_ to make. If you didn't make any notable positive changes over the time you worked there, that might explain why you no longer do work there.
'Ethical AI' in my opinion is essentially the AI version of 'positive discrimination', i.e. they will keep biasing the inputs and outputs until the algorithm yields the desired result. In this case the desired result in not equality, but "corrected equality". Don't get me wrong, biased and misleading training sets are a problem, but the AI itself is not unethical.
Also I would like to know whether algorithm transparency included blue check-marks (that were obviously biased), or government take-down requests, or the promotion of completely random people for no apparent reason? There was never any intention for algorithm transparency, this is Twitter's 'secret sauce' after all.
> If you want to justify your position, I would suggest highlighting the positive changes you _did_ make, rather than the positive changes you _intended_ to make.
Imagine where the world would be if bell labs didn't invest all that money into positive changes that people _intended_ to make.
The comment you replied to did sound callous given the fact that the author probably just got laid off.
Specifically on your response: while planning specific changes is good and so is attempting to solve hard problems, during mass layoffs the teams with few accomplishments are usually hit first. Ambitious plans seldom help. Mass layoffs are rare, but this is something one should keep in mind. My 2c.
Specifically on Bell Labs, new employees until the 1990s were told "you have a job for life" (paid by the AT&T's monopoly generating huge cash flows). But when the AT&T became less profitable and mass layoffs did start, as far as I know they followed the same pattern.
Yep. Something like "We engage selected ethnic communities for feedback on our algorithms and practices, helping to improve Twitter's social culture" translates to "I meet my ethnic friend for lunch and we hate on internal Twitter politics".
I'm not saying that some of these people are not doing good work, but I think these people need far more criticism than they get.
An AI doesn't have agency in the same way humans do. The AI has zero understanding of holocaust denial, in the same way another tool does, or a dog, or a child.
The specific team the article mentions, the "inventing and building ethical AI [stuff]" seems like a very reasonable choice for layoff. This is a company in debit, and as such I see no good reason for them to have a long term, unknown timeline, unknown outcomes and (likely) expensive team. Especially considering how much AI critics accuse AI of being racist, sexist and all sorts of impossible to judge human behavior without bias.
I'm pretty sure Elon has more confidence in the Tesla AI team. I suppose he will move someone he trusts into a team lead for whatever AI activities (if any) Twitter will have in the future.
Musk is capricious, cruel, and clueless. Whether or not you liked Twitter, it's a culturally significant platform, and Musk has almost certainly destroyed any hope it had of surviving. In barely a week. Hopefully it destroys him, too.
Twitter’s cultural significance is almost net negative. It has been a vehicle for divisiveness and culture wars and not only a vehicle but a self driving one if you catch my drift.
That depends on which aspects of Twitter you focus on. It has added a ton of value for niche interest areas, open source intelligence and reporting, news from underserved areas or issues, and so many others.
The value isn't in the loudest and most active accounts, but the long tail of expertise that was previously either not widely visible or connected in the way Twitter enabled.
I disagree. The internet has increased the reach of individuals by many orders of magnitude: we (humanity) are experiencing the consequences of something we're not equipped for, but that isn't the fault of Twitter or Facebook, it's a consequence of the internet connecting us all.
What, specifically, has Twitter done, that has been a negative influence on the culture? If you look at, say, Donald Trump, he was across the internet being divisive in every venue he could get his hands on, from Facebook to Reddit... and outside of the internet too, on Fox News and the like.
If we went back 2 decades and put all of humanity on a bbs or newsgroup instead, you'd have the same outcome.
Twitter is a cesspool. The three times I've created an account I have deleted it in less than 24 hours because I couldn't figure a way to filter good content from all the noise, toxicity and low quality content. Reddit is not much different but at least you can reduce the scope by staying in small niche subreddits. I'm following this with curiosity to see if all these changes improve the situation or drive Twitter to the ground, but both seem to me like they would be an improvement.
I only tried following a few people that posted programming related stuff, but more then half their posts were completely off-topic, so I had no way to filter all the noise. Everything else Twitter suggested was rubbish.
I think you are out of touch with how poor Twitter is as a medium currently. Either Musk brings it back to some validity or he puts the final nail in the coffin and creates a space for some new better technology to fill the void (that last bit is a bit sarcastic about the new tech).
does that mean anything? (especially "mention" seems to carry no predictive value here.) were layoffs mentioned for years and nothing happened? were they put on hold because the ex-CEO wanted Musk to take the blame?
Sure, but I imagine the pre-Musk layoffs would have been similar to what we're seeing in Twitter's peer companies (~10-15%, generous severance payouts, etc.) as opposed to what's happening now. To throw your hands in the air and claim that layoffs were an inevitability is a weird way to shield a dude that is just being cruel because he thinks he's God.
Twitter is hundreds of millions of authenticated messages a day, delivered with an expectation of instantaneousness and simultaneity, to hundreds of millions of clients.
There are images and video embeds and URL previews on tweets. There are fraudulent and abusive users who are trying to spam the user base. There are users whose threat model includes ‘will be attacked by the concerted cyber-offensive capabilities of sophisticated nation states’, as well as ‘will be cyber-bullied by the collective force of 8chan’, or ‘will be cyber-stalked by legions of k-pop stans’. Not clear which of those is more dangerous.
The SEC considers statements made on Twitter by corporate officers and company accounts to be material disclosures. Tweets are embedded in New York Times and bbc news articles. Courts take Twitter messages as evidence. Law enforcement organizations throughout the world have frequent interest in finding out what activity users have had on the platform.
And on top of that, it’s trying to run an ad business that takes that firehose of craziness and turns it into a marketable stream of attention that can be sold to advertisers.
Don’t downplay what Twitter does as ‘just moving 280 character messages’. It’s way, way more than that.
I 'll keep downplaying it. It's a 280 character asynchronous telegraph office that crashes more often than whales wiggling their tail, has had 100 awful iterations of the interface , spam issues, terrible search etc etc. But it's popular because it's the Chosen One by the mainstream media, which brought politicians and CEOs in it. If the MSM decides that it's too rightwing, they will take their toys to the next twitter clone that barely works and all of their audience will follow.
I remain constantly surprised that people on Hacker News of all places can be so wrong in their underestimations of how technically challenging a company's problem space is.
Building and maintaining a distributed system like Twitter is far from easy, as any one of the talks their engineers have given and papers they've written should tell you.
Let's at least base this discussion on realistic and reasonable determinations of the company and its operations.
Not sure how lean do they run their stuff - I'd assume at least lean-ish, considering they have (had?) a lot of good engineering talent working on it. Asking for a large reduction while at the same time culling staff seems like wishful thinking.
I went to visit a team at Twitter that seemed to have very little to do with their core business. They'd bought some company that my company was using (can't even remember, Fabric or some crash profiling thing?) and I got invited to see their fancy building on Market Street.
But my sense was there were many peripheral teams that your average Twitter user would never notice if Twitter were to cut them.
Yeah, but lots of the debt is actually on company's books - as is the case with LBOs. This is yet another case of barbarians at the gate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarians_at_the_Gate) - corporate raider running a company into the ground.
That only works when the company has enough cash or assets to buyout the new owner for more than they paid. Twitter was definitely not a case of sitting on a mountain of assets that can be broken up and raided.
For sure, as far as LBOs go, this is probably one of the worst ever. Normally the raider pays a bit of a premium over the assets, then divides them, props them up a bit, and collects a profit. I can't imagine this being possible with Twitter. Nothing to break up. Nothing to prop up. And if he gets his way, he will be competing with Parlor for the niche market it caters to. Or 4chan :)
October 6, 1997: Michael Dell makes an infamously bleak appraisal of Apple’s fortunes. Asked what he would do with the struggling company, the founder of Dell Inc. says he would “shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”
very exciting times. taking Twitter out of the hands of the woke mob seems to be a real chance to create a useful social network again.
we currently do not have a proper social network:
* Twitter is infested by bots
* Facebook is a ghost town for our parents
* Instagram is just for narcissists in yoga pants
* TikTok is literally a Chinese cyberweapon designed to degenerate western youth
Reddit is somewhat OK, I guess, but like HN, feels too anonymous and therefore not very social.
I have a question: why companies like Twitter need so many people? I'm sorry but it doesn't seem that hard to replicated Twitter functionality and scalability (with the right people on team). What are the engineers actually doing the whole day? Why do they need so many lines of code? All mysterious to me.
It's a fair question, and shows that a lot of these sites are like icebergs - they look simple until you delve beneath the surface.
How are you detecting human trafficing and reporting it (FOSTA-SESTA)?
How are you detecting CSAM and reporting offenders to NCMEC?
How are you detecting and removing spam? How are you preventing fraudulent ad clicks? How do you deal with "whale" accounts (very large follower counts) and returning an algorithmic feed for their followers?
I interviewed for their deveng team and they were doing things like build-caches because it sped up compiles and increased productivity. Also optimising the Scala compiler (more productivity gains).
My experience is that software businesses and teams have an internal pressure to grow the number of software engineers on staff. I have seen three things swirl together to cause that.
1 - During periods of company growth (increased revenue and profits), there is a tendency of leadership to not have their hands on the wheel. You tend to see growth in company "cost-centers" instead of "profit centers." So you'll get new efforts that don't directly contribute much in increasing revenue. Early in my career I wasn't tuned into the need to really build your work and projects directly into profit center activities.
2 - Internally, I have seen people grow the number of staff underneath them as an almost weird way of justifying a promotion (eg, "executive VP mucky-mucks have N employees and I'm now managing N employees, promote me to executive VP mucky-muck").
3 - I have seen smaller companies really focus in on the revenue and/or profit per employee number to guide hiring plans. So during a good period of revenue/profit growth, a CEO/owner-type will say something like "It looks like every engineer I add at $1X0,000 is resulting in $[2|3|4]X0,000 additional revenue or profit - let's just keep adding engineers." These napkin calculations are devoid of deeper market analysis.
If you went one-on-one with every single software engineer at a big tech company or in a smaller org, you probably wouldn't find many who aren't busy with work. You just probably would find a bunch on "nice to have" work instead of real revenue generators.
I don't get all this antipathy towards what Musk is doing. It's an established maxim of the venerated Warren Buffet that the very first thing you need to do after buying a company is clean house, and get rid of the people who put it in the shape that made it buyable to begin with, starting, and especially, at the top.
I would say, a lot of it has to do with style?
Even if something is necessary - and I have now idea if it is - but even if, there are better, more friendly and respectful ways of dealing with all of this right?
You suggest you don't even know if it's necessary to cut staff, but if you had bought Twitter, currently losing money for 3 years in a row, what would you do to turn the ship around more "respectfully?"
I think most people who are whinging about this -- especially here, on this forum -- are people who wouldn't think twice, if this were happening at any other big "Web 2.0" company. And, in fact, they'd probably cheer on the "decisive" and "courageous" leadership. I think they just don't like Musk, and don't like that he's bought Twitter, because they believe the narrative -- as I've seen many people suggest -- that it's going to somehow veer hard right, and become 4chan 2.0.
The line between public and private has been blurring very badly since 2016. People are treating Twitter like it's an extension of the executive branch and somehow it's illegal for Musk to just buy it and run it how he sees fit.
The ML Ethics, Transparency, & Accountability team. i find it interesting Twitter need a ethics, transparency and accountability team for ML. is Twitter worry about creating a Skynet or something?
How many of these employees signed a letter of "demands" towards their new CEO?
I'm sorry, but I have a really difficult time feeling anything other than schadenfreude for these people. You guys are making how much money working at a company which appears to be unable to actually make money, and at which you appear to see yourselves more as activists than employees.
The gall of these people to then put together a letter of "demands" (not suggestions or requests, DEMANDS), and then the next week complain that they're being asked to show what they've been working on for the last month is just...
Sorry guys, but the gravy train of $250k/yr as a 23 year old product manager working 2 hours a week remotely while making tik toks about how cute your life is are over.
This is ironic if you consider all the complaining that Musk does in the public sphere about "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment only applies to government censorship, but Musk likes to pretend not to), but it's also significant because -
Smart journalists are going to stop relying on Twitter's API now. News and blog sites love to render Twitter URLs as a preview of the tweet; but if Twitter under Musk is going to start removing tweets that go against its corporate interests of the hour (is it against Twitter policy to post screenshots of any corporate Slack channel, or only Twitter's own?), then people had better take screenshots of the tweets they want to quote, just in case.