Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

Brain Drain:

Set aside any issues with employees not wanting to work for a Musk-run Twitter if they believe would be more toxic. I would still expect a lot of employees to look for the exit right now.

First is simply the uncertainty involved: Large restructuring, reassignments, or layoffs could occur and it's always nicer to find a new job before you begin to hate your old one or lose it all together.

Second is compensation: Equity via stock options or awards boosts total compensation, but it's much more complicated in private companies. There's been a commitment to the same benefit plan for the next year, but beyond that no new ones can be issued after the deal closes until Musk decides what they will look like. If he doesn't commit to keeping a similar vesting & award schedule then it will be a problem. Then there's liquidity. You can't sell private equity the same way you can with a public company. Again, if Musk doesn't commit to preserving the same liquidity as employees would have in a public company by allowing stock sales back to the company at-will then it will be a downgrade in compensation.

SpaceX uses an internal market to provide liquidity to employees for this, but Twitter will be more uncertain. It will depending on how many current investors decide to stick around & their appetite for increasing their shares. SpaceX is also on a strong growth track, giving awards & options a likely increased value in the future while Twitter is on much more uncertain footing, especially with Musk emphasizing that it's not an economic investment for him. A stock grant equal to $50k today at SpaceX might grow to $100k by the time an employee wants to sell, whereas the same grant at Twitter may not have the same expected growth.

It will also be difficult to hire new people until this is settled. Anyone accepting a job right now will have no idea when or how they'll be able to cash in any stock compensation promised in the benefits package.

As for the ideological issues, that may balance out. People leaving for such reasons by could be offset by new employees seeking jobs because they like the new content direction, although the extra churn will still make operations more turbulent for some time.

>I'm surprised no one has mentioned[...]

Well, it seems you had a notably unique idea. Your comment got presented on the Timcast, and a 20 minute clip containing it has over 90,000 views at the time of writing this comment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyrf5wLit34

I think a lot of the child comments have very valid criticisms, particularly concerns with bloat and other existing character limitations often being more about managing the user experience than bandwidth constraints. But your comment's a magnified part of the conversation now, so we'll just have to see how the narratives develop and the nuts and bolts of "interplanetary twitter" and the "Elon Musk NeuraStarLink Space Dystopia" actually plays out.

IMO, it's still too early to really expect much of interplanetary anything. I would expect Twitter to reach the end of its lifecycle and be replaced by something new, and then for that new technology to reach the end of its lifecycle and be replaced with another new thing which might be ready for integration in interplanetary communication.

Notable too, I think we're seeing here news people sympathetic to the right wing looking for large, active, engaged "intelligentsia" social media alternatives to twitter to quote comments from that use chilling moderation strategies. Ones that aren't completely overrun and saturated by fringe far right content refugees. Hacker news is probably going to get quoted more often by those kinds of sources until its owners/operators feel like taking some Illuminati Deep State money or whatever. That is, if there's any of that money left.

The conspiracy theorist in me feels that the deal will not go through in a few months. It has not closed yet and there is a $1 billion rescind clause in the contract. Somehow I feel Musk just wants to show his power. This will end up with Twitter remaining public.

It would be nice to be able to force a reverse chronological order as a baseline but on top of that be able to filter by a user-selected threshold value of whatever measure they used to order with the other method. That way you could filter tweets by their purported level of importance while still keeping the order you want.

I like Elon, too, but "no qualifications to run a rocket company" is simply delusional. He majored in physics at Penn and econ at Wharton and went to grad school at Stanford studying material science (for two days, just enough to get to signal being smart). I have a harder time imagining what kind of background would be better being CEO of a rocket company.

If he runs Twitter like 4chan, it will surely fail, but I think he has more to his plan than he is willing to share publicly at this time.