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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

#881

Post by gautamdivgi »

monksy wrote: post #864
philliphaydon wrote: post #829

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2020 the company I worked for did ~25% temp salary reduction so they could feel safe that they could keep everyone employed and such. 3 months after everyone did it they said "thank you thank you we are so happy we don't need to let anyone go". 2 months later they laid off ~50% of the development team and people throughout the company... At the end of the year they said no bonuses, followed by an email saying desp…

Zebra did a 5% salary cut during the start of the pandemic while saving costs on the offices, forced a pto burn, hiring freeze, and then had to spend $500 million to buy another company it wanted to buy. These large companies are struggling.

A lot of times this is to make dividend payments and to boost financial numbers by sucking up the operating profits of the acquired company.

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

#882

Post by aiwv »

The key to understanding Musk is that he truly believes that he will be the most powerful person in the world (see https://web.archive.org/web/20200725103243/https://www.nytim... for his friend's take) and that he is utterly shameless and will do whatever he thinks is best in service of that destiny.

One cannot take anything that he says at face value. He is a repeated and proven liar (fully self driving cars in 6 months!). When he says he wants more free speech on twitter, I think it's fair to assume the opposite. Whatever the true Elon may be, his public persona has become that of a megalomaniacal bully, not unlike the ousted troll in chief. Whether this is cynical or authentic, I want no part of any organization with him at the top.

My personal theory is that he bought twitter specifically to make it his private megaphone. Owning the platform will prevent him from being turned off ala Trump. It also will allow him to silence his critics. He won't outright ban them, but by removing content moderation, he will allow those who criticize him to be harassed by his human army of troll bots until the platform becomes so toxic that they all leave.

The bankers love this because twitter is also the platform where the most people are directly criticizing corporate capitalism and challenging its bedrock assumptions. They win no matter what Musk does. In silencing his critics, he will also be silencing their critics. If driving them off of twitter somehow is good for business, then they get a return on their investment. If instead it kills the platform, they can just write off their losses on their taxes. The financiers are very unlikely to actually lose any money on the deal, but the silencing of their own critics would almost certainly be worth $40B to them anyway.

Now that the deal has closed, twitter is in a liminal state between life and death. Its demise has been pretty much written into the terms of the acquisition.

One question that I'd pose to everyone is do you want to live in a world in which Elon Musk is the most powerful person? Do you really believe in his vision? Is it a positive vision for the world or a dystopian one? Does it reflect the worst of us or the best of us?

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

#883

Post by Rapzid »

aiwv wrote: post #882

The key to understanding Musk is that he truly believes that he will be the most powerful person in the world (see https://web.archive.org/web/20200725103243/https://www.nytim... for his friend's take) and that he is utterly shameless and will do whatever he thinks is best in service of that destiny. One cannot take anything that he says at face value. He is a repeated and proven liar (fully self driving cars in 6 mo…

Musk bought Twitter as a bad deal. He's way upside down on the worth vs the debt to investors and bankers. He needs to squeeze blood from a stone.

The end.

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

#884

Post by danans »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #612
danans wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wouldn't it make the most sense to announce those decisions before making layoffs? Let people self select whether they want to stay and work for you and then make your layoffs after to ensure all teams are properly staffed. He's got huge debt and declining revenue - both of his own making - so he doesn't have time for employees to self-select based on minor incentives. He has to strip down the car fast while someho…

> He has to strip down the car fast You know what we call a vehicle thats undergoing Rapid Disassembly? An Explosion.

Hah. Funny! But I do think you're on to something.

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

#885

Post by TigeriusKirk »

From his all hands today -

Employee: Why is our leadership trying to increase attrition rate if we’re already understaffed and barely able to keep things running?

Musk: I’m not trying to increase attrition, but I think we are not understaffed. I think we are overstaffed. That is my opinion, which you’re welcome to disagree with.

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

#886

Post by danans »

aerostable_slug wrote: post #805
danans wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wouldn't it make the most sense to announce those decisions before making layoffs? Let people self select whether they want to stay and work for you and then make your layoffs after to ensure all teams are properly staffed. He's got huge debt and declining revenue - both of his own making - so he doesn't have time for employees to self-select based on minor incentives. He has to strip down the car fast while someho…

> both of his own making Really? I was under the impression that Twitter was hemorrhaging money.

To which he added $1B a year in liabilities.

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

#887

Post by bitwize »

memish wrote: post #836
dragonwriter wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He also wants to recreate the place per his own vision, so it makes sense to get rid of as many people carrying the previous culture as you can and then start hiring as necessary with the kind of people you want So, he's destroying all of the institutional knowledge, the brand image, and the existing business relationships, while pivoting to a radically different market. He wanted a fresh startup to sink $44 billio…

It's weird how many people are experiencing sudden onset amnesia. Prior to Elon getting control, everyone understood Twitter was a mess, was losing tons of money and not able to get anything done for the past decade. Obviously it needs a major shakeup.

But back then Twitter was run by the right sorts of people, not a wildcard with conservative leanings. They were running the business into the ground, but they were card-carrying socialists, so it just meant they were fucking the shareholders over and protecting workers and the marginalized. Musk is acting purely out of self-interest and spite.

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

#888

Post by aorloff »

yrgulation wrote: post #156
kypro wrote: post #23

I am split on the remote work thing from a productivity / creativity perspective. I do think there are times when I'm less productivity working from home compared to the office. I also think as a team we're less creative. Some of the best stuff I've done in my career has come out of casual conversations with my team about the stuff we're building. I've noticed I don't think about what I'm building as much when workin…

> Were I working at Twitter I'd probably be looking for a new job after this announcement. Highest impact is mid project. You know, to make it hurt.

If you aren’t mid project surely you already got canned

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

#889

Post by threeseed »

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

Digg, Myspace, Google+.

They don't have to disappear but they can fade away into irrelevance.

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