My understanding is Twitter always had cultural issues but it was not very different from other tech companies of the time, and what most of us would consider "directionally correct." I have it on pretty good authority from a very senior engineer who left before Elon took over (so no grudges other than, you know, "because Elon") that a lot of the things he said publicly about Twitter's technology was highly misleading or downright false. Like, IIRC, something about them not having CI/CD. Total lie.
The deal with tesla is that there is a relatively small employer pool, so you can be fairly bad employer but still get good outcomes. The same with spaceX. Sure early tesla had some stories about it being fun, but there was/is a darkside.
The issue with xAI is that researchers have a whole bunch of other employers to choose from. Even at meta, where it used to be fairly nice for researchers, the pressure of "delivering" every 6 months lead to bad outcomes. Having someone single you out for what ever reason the boss had a bad day, is not how good research gets done.
We have seen (A few of my friends were at twitter when it was taken over) that Musk has a somewhat unusual approach to managing staff (ie camping at work). Some researcher love that, assuming that they have peace to research, and are listened to. But a lot don't.
Usually just firing 3 to 5% of any company workers have terrible consequences for the company that does it.
It does not speak so well about the workers.
At the time I joked that like Chaos Monkey, we should have an "Elon Monkey" to "fire" arbitrary people by sending them on mandatory vacations with no connectivity to see what falls over.
The ones with stock options in, now, SpaceX?
Aren’t employees also subject to a lock out period where they still can’t sell their stock until $x number of months after an IPO unlike employees of public companies that can sell as soon as they vest?
Honest question, I’ve worked for public $BigTech but haven’t been at a company pre IPO
I'd wager you were saying the same thing about bitcoin until last year.
Is it meant to draw equivalence between crypto and Tesla/SpaceX? That each has roughly similar (i.e., low) value to humanity, or value as businesses?
Is it that the metric of whether a person makes others money is invalid?
The comment seems coy, possibly to avoid making any claim at all, but it must not be that because that wouldn't be very sporting.
