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Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

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Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#661

Post by pydry »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #605
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's looking for. It'd be even cheaper if he had the sense to not play chicken with Twitter's board only to get called on his bluff. Nothing about how he's handled Twitter thus far suggests that he ever took his offer to buy them seriously. He was showboating from the beginning and screwed up, and thous…

I may be missing something, but would it have been that hard to fail to get financing and get out of it, since it was a bad deal that others shouldn't want to finance, if he had started working on failing to get financing before he... succefully lined up financing? I guess it would have been a hit to his ego if he had failed to get financing... it'll probably be a bigger one to drive twitter into the ground and throw…

I think there was a $1 billion fine if he quit the deal.

That would have stung.

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#662

Post by fredley »

autospeaker22 wrote: post #593
awinder wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congratulations, you just lost all your invested capital on Truth Social 2.0.

Better in theory than IRL. You think the Don was able to get top dev talent lol?

I don't think you even need top dev talent to build Twitter now. Maybe you did back when it started, but it's not something a team of experienced, competent, 'regular' engineers couldn't build and more successfully than 'top' talent.

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#663

Post by Crusoe123 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #570
cmh89 wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting rid of remote work is an excellent way to chase away your best employees while retaining people with nowhere to go.

the correlation in my experience is if anything the other way around. The best and most productive employees tend to be involved and in-person is still the best way to get things done and actually exchange ideas. This is the one thing Musk is 100% right about, remote work is awful for productivity and it's most popular among the "least amount of effort" crowd. It's also why almost any major tech company after covid i…

You do realize that doing something with the "least amount of effort" is the definition of productivity?

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#664

Post by rob74 »

ericmcer wrote: post #604
nonrandomstring wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made a half-joke here on HN a few months ago that Musk was buying Twitter just to destroy it for the lols. Maybe everyone's wasting their time with rational economic analysis, trying to figure out a pretty simple guy with an obscene pile of fuck-you money and an axe to grind.

Everyone is looking at it too short term. Twitter isn’t going to disappear and he has shown a willingness to ride through rough economic times to reach his vision. Social Media is how people interact with the world now, most info we receive is filtered through it in some form. In the last 10 or so years the idea that these platforms need tight moderation to control what and who is speaking on them has become ubiquito…

> Twitter isn’t going to disappear

Isn't it? Ok, maybe Musk has a magic wand that he can use to make it profitable (which it has been for only two out of the last 12 years), or is willing to subsidize it indefinitely out of his deep pockets... but I wouldn't bet on it.

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#665

Post by [deleted] »

autospeaker22 wrote: post #549

I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's looking for. Let's say Elon had set aside a budget to hire some of the best developers he's ever worked with or heard of, and lets give them an imaginary salary of 1.5 million total comp per year, at about 10 devs for easy math. And let's say another 500k for bennies. So our operating expense for top…

[deleted]

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#666

Post by anonyme-honteux »

rmbyrro wrote: post #637
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's looking for. It'd be even cheaper if he had the sense to not play chicken with Twitter's board only to get called on his bluff. Nothing about how he's handled Twitter thus far suggests that he ever took his offer to buy them seriously. He was showboating from the beginning and screwed up, and thous…

I think he did want to buy since the beginning. He's got bigger plans for it beyond short messages. The free speech thing is just marketing.

My cynical guess:

Elon Musk's big plan is simply to build a huge personality cult around him and Twitter is perfect for that.

It's not enough for him to be exceptionally rich, he wants to be adulated.

He wants to hear he is the new Steve Jobs, that he is better than Leonardo Da Vinci. That he got this right, we are living in a computer simulation.

Why do everyone keeps assuming he is playing 10 dimensional chess?

Have you seen his dumb tunnel under Las Vegas? Why would a brilliant engineer build that? What's the big plan here?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8NiM_p8n5A

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#669

Post by PartiallyTyped »

autospeaker22 wrote: post #614
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And let's say another 500k for bennies. So our operating expense for top dev talent comes out to 20 million a year. You can have an elite tier dev team, for 20 million a year that could easily build a twitter. He could've tried to interview ex-Twitter and get feedback on technical debt, pain points, problems to have fixed in the newly architect-ed model. No, you won't. There's a lot more to running a social media s…

Alright. Even if you double it to 40 million to hire the elite tier dev team, ops, and sre. They could definitely build, ship, and maintain. Yes, he'd be losing money at 40 million a year just on salaries, but I'd imagine they could build something pretty amazing at that rate. Advertisers have already pulled out of Twitter and Elon is talking about publicly shaming them. How is his current reality any better than sta…

> Advertisers have already pulled out of Twitter and Elon is talking about publicly shaming them.

Either Elon is delusional, or he is posturing. Either way, he is in no position to demand anything [1,2]. In [1], Elon was told by industry leaders what the issues with his approach are, and then Elon blocked one of them. Elon claims that activists are pushing advertisers but according to industry leaders, that is not true [1].

> Elon, Great chat yesterday, As you heard overwhelmingly from senior advertisers on the call, the issue concerning us all is content moderation and its impact on BRAND SAFETY/SUITABILITY. You say you’re committed to moderation, but you just laid off 75% of the moderation team!

> Advertisers are not being manipulated by activist groups, they are being compelled by established principles around the types of companies they can do business with. These principles include an assessment of the platforms commitment to brand safety and suitability.

So really; free-speech absolution does not work. Read the post I linked to.

> He could've invested in building technology from scratch to handle hate speech and removing bad apples.

Probably no. Read the post in the comment above.

Handling hatespeech from an operational perspective is one thing, and from a technical perspective e.g. identifying and categorizing it is a whole different thing.

Elon has already gone back to his free-speech absolutionism [3].

His tweets:

> Twitter will not allow anyone who was de-platformed for violating Twitter rules back on platform until we have a clear process for doing so, which will take at least a few more weeks

> Talked to civil society leaders @JGreenblattADL , @YaelEisenstat , @rashadrobinson , @JGo4Justice , @normanlschen , @DerrickNAACP , @TheBushCenter Ken Hersch & @SindyBenavides about how Twitter will continue to combat hate & harassment & enforce its election integrity policies

As for this one:

> How is his current reality any better than starting fresh.

He has users, for now. This means that he doesn't need to spend money on growth.

[1] https://www.mediaite.com/news/elon-musk-gets-pilloried-by-to...

[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/09/tech/musk-twitter-brands-...

[3] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/right-wi...

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#670

Post by runarberg »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #583
autospeaker22 wrote: post #549

I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's looking for. Let's say Elon had set aside a budget to hire some of the best developers he's ever worked with or heard of, and lets give them an imaginary salary of 1.5 million total comp per year, at about 10 devs for easy math. And let's say another 500k for bennies. So our operating expense for top…

> I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's looking for. It'd be even cheaper if he had the sense to not play chicken with Twitter's board only to get called on his bluff. Nothing about how he's handled Twitter thus far suggests that he ever took his offer to buy them seriously. He was showboating from the beginning and screwed up, and thous…

When you are this rich, stuff like this doesn’t matter. Even if he lost all the 40 Bn USD means he’ll still be the richest person on earth, that’s how much money he has. To keep with the poker analogy, his “bluff” involved only 40 poker chips, but he has 200 after the fact, while his “opponents” have 1 or 2 each.

But in the end, money will always end up in his hands no matter what he does. When you are this rich, you’ll always end up making money.

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