Merged Musk buys Twitter!/ Elon Musk puts Twitter deal on hold....

[Chanakya]

I think it has already been mentioned here, but the fact that there are legions of people who laugh at his jokes, might actually be one of the things that has been his undoing.

He would be a bollocks comedian if he didn't have a bunch of simpering sycophants there to laugh at his jokes. It's almost certain that when a person as vain as he clearly is, and used to getting his own way, wades into an area where people are skeptical or outright hostile to him, he is going to have more difficulty. He might think that the cloying attempts at humour will win the day, but they won't.

On top of this, you also have the terrible heuristics that Warp 12 embodies. This is the idea that people who are not as rich as Elon Musk have no business pointing out that things he is doing are mistakes or bad for business. How many submarines have you sent to Mars? Huh huh?

Thinking about it, even his sense of humor clearly belies the kind of person he is. When all of this is going down, people's livelihoods --- because it's entirely possible that not each and every one of these employees will immediately find alternate employment, and many might be put to financial difficulty for a while, and who knows, some even worse --- but the only thing that strikes him, and that he jokes about, is the losses he's himself taking as a result of his actions.

Clearly he lacks that basic human empathy over what he's doing to so many other folks, else he wouldn't have been able to crack that joke at all, he'd instead have apologized to them. Not that an empty apology would have done anyone any good, but still.

 

[angrysoba]

You get idiots like this who think, "well it still works so I guess we don't need all that staff!"

Thousands of Twitter employees have been fired and the platform is still working fine.

Apparently they really weren't needed after all.

Elon was right to downsize.

Link

 

[jeremyp]

You see this whole thing is giving me a weird feeling.

He's failed too perfectly. A person known as a business tech mogul (whether or not that reputation is deserved is beside the point) buying a massive, well known tech company/service and immediately destroying it with this kind of speed and efficiency is just... too perfect. It feels off. It's a little TOO poetic. It's too much of an on the nose punchline to a softball setup.

This isn't the kind of stupid Musk strikes me as.

When a person who legally changes their name to "The Worlds Greatest Belt Maker" and owns the biggest belt company in the world and he buys the second biggest belt maker in the biggest belt company merger of all time and calls a press conference in the Belt Capital of the World on the International Belt Day to announce he's invented The Best Belt of All Time by buying up the 100 best Belt Patents that have ever been issued and he walks out on stage to the roar of the crowd, smiles, and waves, takes a deep breath to begin his speech... and then at that exact moment his pants fall down... well like I said a little too perfect.

In this case, The World's Greatest Belt Maker's trousers have been falling down fairly regularly throughout his career. It's just that now it's happening in public.

You don't have to dig too deeply to find out that Musk has always treated his employees badly. His past is littered with managerial failures. He was deposed from the boards of both zip2 and PayPal because he was crap at being a CEO. He's basically firewalled from the engineering* staff at SpaceX to stop him from interfering. There are really only two success stories that Musk can claim to have a hand in and those are: Tesla - stolen from the people who had the idea - and SpaceX. Apart from this, Musk's record is so consistently bad that I suspect we will find SpaceX was stolen from somebody else too.

To return to your story, if somebody investigated the WGBM and found that his trousers had fallen down many times before the fateful press conference and that on several occasions when they didn't fall down, there was video evidence that he was also secretly wearing braces (USA: suspenders), would you still believe he was the World's Greatest Belt Maker?

ETA: I just realised that might have been the point of your story.

*flight attendants on the SpaceX private jet: not so much, allegedly.

 

[Puppycow]

You could have left out the link to it.

But let's give it a week or two and see if it's still working.

 

[jimbob]

If you're having trouble understanding why it's such a big deal that Twitter is losing all its staff because "it's just a web site, it's mostly already written, right?", here is a thread that goes through a lot of the operation problems that Twitter probably has to deal with daily.

https://twitter.com/MosquitoCapital/status/1593541177965678592?s=20&t=va_Iet2g3VYa0RrSgVQpJg

It's very long, but you don't need to read all of it by any means to get a flavour of the problems of running a web site used by hundreds of millions of people every day.

I think it is a race between technical collapse and legal

 

[Puppycow]

Maybe Twitter can stay afloat from all the people rushing to tweet about the dumpster fire and all the people linking to said tweets.

 

[Puppycow]

I was space Karen first, dammit.

https://twitter.com/kejames/status/1593497948868034560?cxt=HHwWgIC-iaP8np0sAAAA

 

[jimbob]

Maybe Twitter can stay afloat from all the people rushing to tweet about the dumpster fire and all the people linking to said tweets.

How does that help if the infrastructure starts falling over, and the legal liabilities mount up because the CEO has either fired or caused the resignation of those responsible for legally-mandatory operations, sometimes with the resignation of legally-mandatory posts?

 

[Puppycow]

Ken White (aka Popehat) and Josh Barro have a new podcast called Serious Trouble, and in a recent episode Ken explained that the idea of "tortious interference" began with rich people "stealing" the services of servants of other rich people by offering them higher wages.

Like, one rich guy would go to a party hosted by another. The food is great. He wants to know who made it. Offers them to come work for him instead. Lawsuit.

https://www.serioustrouble.show/p/taint-tortious-interference-taint#details

https://www.serioustrouble.show/p/tweeting-through-it#details

 

[Puppycow]

How does that help if the infrastructure starts falling over, and the legal liabilities mount up because the CEO has either fired or caused the resignation of those responsible for legally-mandatory operations, sometimes with the resignation of legally-mandatory posts?

Fake it till you make it!!

 

[lobosrul5]

What makes you think he tried any of this with any of the other companies? If he had, I am pretty sure the results will be the same.

I have heard that in at least some positions at SpaceX, 80 hour weeks are pretty much the norm. But anyone applying for a position there is already aware of this.

 

[grunion]

Most tech companies have the ability to offer stock options as an incentive to retain essential talent. Not the case here. I will be surprised if this business can stay afloat.

 

[JoeMorgue]

I mean it's Twitter. It will "survive" in some sense depending on how far you want to stretch the already Ship of Theseus way we define the identity of a business.

 

[lobosrul5]

Most tech companies have the ability to offer stock options as an incentive to retain essential talent. Not the case here. I will be surprised if this business can stay afloat.

Even so, Musk could've done something like saying yes, I need 80 hour weeks, and hardcore programming! BUT, I'll offer incentives. The better Twitter does the bigger your bonus. Then give an outline on specific performance metrics to determine bonuses.

But no. Its you will work harder for the same pay or hit the road.

 

[lobosrul5]

I mean it's Twitter. It will "survive" in some sense depending on how far you want to stretch the already Ship of Theseus way we define the identity of a business.

I bet Google, MS, Apple, or Amazon could swoop in take over and turn it around in a few months. They might offer Elon half of what he paid.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Even so, Musk could've done something like saying yes, I need 80 hour weeks, and hardcore programming! BUT, I'll offer incentives. The better Twitter does the bigger your bonus. Then give an outline on specific performance metrics to determine bonuses.

But no. Its you will work harder for the same pay or hit the road.

It's like all big business people watched The Wolf of Wall Street and somehow came away with the impression that the long hours and burnout where the part of that was supposed to be tempting part and not ya know the money, yachts, cocaine, or naked Margot Robbie.

Or at least that what they want to sell to the people below them.

 

[jeremyp]

I mean it's Twitter. It will "survive" in some sense depending on how far you want to stretch the already Ship of Theseus way we define the identity of a business.

Twitter Death Day is 23rd January 2023. I know this because that is the day on which their SSL certificate expires. On 24th January 2023, everybody's browsers will flag the certificate invalid because the department that is responsible for rotating certificates is down to three mangy cows, a small hen in its 40's and a dachshund named Colin.

 

[junkshop]

Twitter Death Day is 23rd January 2023. I know this because that is the day on which their SSL certificate expires. On 24th January 2023, everybody's browsers will flag the certificate invalid because the department that is responsible for rotating certificates is down to three mangy cows, a small hen in its 40's and a dachshund named Colin.

Don't underestimate Colin. He's basically been carrying that whole department for years.

 

[johnny karate]

Don't underestimate Colin. He's basically been carrying that whole department for years.

Agreed. Colin is a good boy. Some would even say the best boy.

 

[crescent]

You can get people hugely motivated to work very long hours in different ways.

The promise of an eventual huge money thing - like a software product in early development that will lead to something huge. -- But that's not twitter in present day. It might have been Twitter some decade or so ago, but not any more.

The appeal of working on something really technologically innovative. Like rockets that are much more quickly and easily reusable and far cheaper than any rockets that came before. Or electric cars that are far more practical than any previous electric car efforts. That's not twitter either, it offers no new technology, nothing terribly innovative (maybe it did in the past, but not anymore).

What Twitter is, is a social media company in its comfortable middle age. Not very innovative anymore, very influential but not growing anymore in that regard. Competing with many younger startups but (until Musk) mostly holding its own.

He's not going to get many of the people in a company like that to work 80 hours per week. That era of twitter is long in the past, the sort of employees that are hungry and motivated enough to do that are not interested in working for a balding, paunchy middle-aged guy like Twitter.

He'll get a few willing to work that hard. He'll get some who "agree" to work that hard because they need the job but who intend to try to avoid that level of work as much as possible. He'll probably attract a few new people who see Musk as a hero.

But for the most part, he won't get many because that era of Twitter is long over. My sixteen year-old daughter could probably tell me of some young social media company with that kind of potential-based esprit-de-corps, but Twitter ain't it.