From what I've observed over the years, his real goal is to receive attention from as many people as possible. I doubt his sincerity on his stated goals, this is most likely just self-marketing bullshittery.
People still believe in that ?
(TBH I'm not even sure who the previous owners were...)
Ignoring everything else, if a manager at your company has coined a term like "Elon’s rage firings", I don't need to know anything else about the work environment.
I'd say Tesla/SpaceX achieve cool things not because of him, but despite of him.
With something like Twitter the tech is more or less invisible. Users care about trust and relationships, and so do many of the engineers.
Musk isn't just utterly clueless about those, he's hostile to the culture that values them.
This is not going to end well. Odds are excellent it's going to turn into another of those legendary loss-making acquisitions like AOL and MySpace.
He is not running SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell is. He’s just the part-time CEO, very adept at self-promoting.
I'll rest my case.
Gwynne Shotwell is COO, and in my view is the best in the business, and she handles the day to day SpaceX not Elon.
You don't make a formal offer as a troll
He's always been an awful person; the cult that has developed around him just inflated his ego. Here's the result.
You and almost the whole world. There are still some people left believing him to play some kind of genius 4D chess. Same thing happens for Trump and Ye.
I think it’s important not to piss off your existing and upcoming workforce. He doesn’t.
Is he obviously wrong? Time will tell.
Let me know when you find more than a dozen of them.
I beg to differ. People who are crucial to operation will be much better off. Less meetings, less bloat, less bs, probably better salary.
I do consulting. Recession is good for business, companies lay off team of 10 developers and replace it with single remote consultant for 40% of cost. Also less taxes, since I work in different country.... You do the math.
I'm not sure Twitter is in this particular boat yet, but if I was working at Twitter right now, I would definitely be brushing up on my plan B pronto.
Typical consultant. Get other people to do the work while you take all the praise ;-)
If that one consultant can do a better job they're literally a 10X programmer.
I suspect that's true very rarely.
And not all of those staff members were developers I imagine.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/31/technology/facebook-accen...
Do we have 100% concrete first-hand documented evidence this actually happened to more than -let's say- 10 people?
Somehow, I highly doubt it.
You'll also see lots of people claiming Musk somehow broke employment law by not giving notice of termination, which is unproven, and in direct contradiction with what he tweeted himself (he said everyone gets ~90 days of salary IIRC).
I certainly don't agree with everything he has said and done, though I can't help but be skeptical people are just jumping on the bandwagon without any concrete evidence/details.
Getting called back immediately after a layoff seems like a pretty strong indication you can get away with a lot. Also, the quality of the organization's work on your layoff should indicate the quality of work the organization should get. Just take it easy and make sure you don't give them any key knowledge they need in a decipherable way.
The real question here is probably why anyone would pay 44 billion dollars for a company losing 4 million dollars per day. I mean, it's not some promising startup, it's a company that's been around for a while and has only managed to be profitable for 2 years out of the last 12 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income...)?
"Mr. Musk also disclosed that his acquisition proposal was no longer subject to the completion of financing and business due diligence"
For whatever reason, probably his rising annoyance with Twitter, he decided to skip due diligence and rush the deal.
Sure, "laid off by mistake" is a way to describe incompetence...
I would assume the executing people were still people form Twitter before Musk. Or not?
This is par for Musk corps, literally the day after my interview at Fremont they laid off 9% of total staff in 2018 [0] because of how poorly Model 3 launch had fared in the beginning.
I can't go into specifics, much of which are public now, but it was so disheartening after having been so well received and cordial and enthusiastic; everyone was completely there because how important 'the mission' was only to be told 'don't come back' in incredibly uncouth manner.
When they sent the message out the next day, which is how many found out they've been laid off, calamity struck and it was clear that this was a deliberate tactic to re-shuffle and quell not just the rumors of Model 3's shortcomings amongst the rank-and-file staff, but to sweep the poor safety record in the factory under the rug and the have intimidation creep for those who sought to Unionize--at the time I was not in favour of it, but as time went on and I got more insider information from other team members I soon realized that it was likely needed despite my initial apprehension.
In short, I want to see the demise of social media's influence on the Internet (aka Web2.0) and if this represents how the most lauded CEO in SV handles things then I think we're nearing the end sooner rather than later. I think it's a commonly held sentiment that Social Media ruined most of what was magical of the early Internet and ushered in what has been the worst eternal September phase. I just hope it's not too late to correct this as Zuck is killing his corp in an equally embarrassing and out of touch manner.
0: https://www.npr.org/2018/06/13/619426602/tesla-lays-off-9-pe...
It’s like standing on a crowded square and everyone just shouts out whatever they think.
Unfortunately running ads and thoughtful, curious, spacious and timely discussion (and listening!) do not go well. Too often algorithms where (are?) tweaked for drama engagement.
So where I live, you'd be in a prime position to negotiate better paychecks because without both employee and employer agreeing, a termination has finality.
It’s incredibly obvious by now that Elon and his crew of weirdos currently running the show (David Sacks and Jason Calacanis etc) were just marinating for years in an echo chamber of right-wing propaganda full of resentment against Blue Checks, fantasies of "shadowbanning", resentment of rules against hate speech, and lies about politics and other topics.
They are just making things up as they go in what is quickly becoming the new textbook reference of the Dunning-Kruger effect (https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/dunning-kruger-effect)
“Move fast and break things” is a viable strategy some of the time. Works for MVPs. Doesn’t work for surgeons.
The corollary is “the cost of fixing broken things that need fixing because you broke them while moving fast is a fraction of the cost of not moving fast”.
Does any of this apply to Twitter? We don’t know. It could still go in either direction and whichever way it goes in retrospect it’ll seem obvious and inevitable.
That isn’t the case for many others especially those who aren’t JUST in the tech ecosystem.
Any place that can “accidentally” fire you is a place you should stay away from.
They should have him on All In this week, since both Jason C. and David S. are assisting with that process and they keep he narrative that the ship is being turned around and cleaning house is what really needed to be done in order to pivot from growth to profit.
If you can't even take into account what staff members you had cause to layoff, after having the former CEO escorted off the premises after having brought in a sink 'for the lulz' than something needs to be done. Then again, it's a private company and he doesn't respond to anyone anymore.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33496808 133 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33496822 18 comments
When they started the layoffs, and with such short notice, I just knew there was a 0% chance that they'd happened properly and with proper preparation. There's going to be so much domain knowledge and expertise that's been lost, and half the teams are probably just adrift and confused because they now either have to do 2x the work or 2x their timelines, at the very least. Doing 2x the work might then also mean doing a bunch of work you're not informed about, so it might actually be 3x or 4x the work for someone coming in.
If I had gotten the boot and they were asking me to come back, I don't think I'd be saying yes, unless it was necessary from a financial standpoint. And even then I'd only stick around until I found a new job, at which point I would quit without notice.
