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Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

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Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#21

Post by mlindner »

awinter-py wrote: post #17
mongol wrote: post #2

How will Musk's failure at Twitter affect market confidence in his other ventures?

they're going to have to rehabilitate him or make it clear he's not in operational paths 'chief creative officer' sort of thing with a sandbox always wondered if he bought twitter to boost spacex IPO; for now, good thing that it's private or it would be getting hosed to mortgage twitter fail like tesla is tesla build quality and self-driving snafus may get assigned to him as well

Who is "they"? Elon has controlling interest in SpaceX and all the largest other shareholders are largely his friends. At Tesla while he doesn't have controlling interest, he does have de-facto control because of 2/3 majority required on the board for certain actions that could remove him from control.

Short of some legal action forcibly removing him from the companies from breaking a law, he's not going anywhere.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#22

Post by TylerE »

tomlockwood wrote: post #15
davidw wrote: post #14

@dang - maybe let one twitter story through to the home page?

Yeah given paulg's tweets I'm wondering if our free speech absolutist view as a website, actually holds here.

I always found HN much more VCist than free speech. any comment criticizing plutocrats tends to get downvoted

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#23

Post by barbazoo »

BeefWellington wrote: post #8

Regardless of your feelings about Elon Musk as a person, this kind of behavior is absolutely crazy for the leader of a company. I can't imagine what investors who signed on to do this with him are thinking unless their goal was to simply destroy the company.

Agree. Mostly I feel for the people working at a place that chaotic. Life is hard enough for many, no need for an eratic, eccentric billionaire with a short fuse to make things even more complicated.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#25

Post by pschuegr »

I hope that the wheels stay on sufficiently to get an idea of where EM wants to take Twitter and find out what kind of value it can bring. Having said that, he really made it obvious to me as an eng that the severance is the option I would be taking. Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people. But somebody who takes over the company and accrues so much social debt so quickly for no other discernible reason than looking like the smartest person in the room misses the bar for "the right people" by a pretty significant margin.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#27

Post by UncleOxidant »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #12
minimaxir wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the cause of this measure. (most employees did not commit to the hardcore pledge)

Do you have a source for "most"? I've seen many quitting, but nowhere near 1,500+.

I've seen some tweets saying that in some engineering groups 75% didn't click the 'yes' link. But those are tweets so... who knows?

https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1593154189345316864 [@GergelyOrosz] Internally, there are polls at what % of current Twitter software engineers plan to stay, and these usually point to about 25% indicating to stay for Twitter 2.0, and the other 75% planning to take severance. Don’t forget: this is less than 50% of the original staff.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#28

Post by mishac »

labrador wrote: post #16
heyitsguay wrote: post #3

Is there precedent anyone can point to where these sorts of wild dramatic moves under new leadership led to turning a large company around into success?

Steve Jobs returning to Apple comes to mind

Steve Job's return to Apple was not like this at all. For all his faults Jobs was never as erratic as Musk, and he never pulled stunts like causing 80% of the staff to be fired or leave, nor did he ever lock the buildings in Cupertino.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#29

Post by andrewinardeer »

heyitsguay wrote: post #3

Is there precedent anyone can point to where these sorts of wild dramatic moves under new leadership led to turning a large company around into success?

Jack Welch at General Electric. Granted it wasn't a tech company though.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#30

Post by itsdrewmiller »

labrador wrote: post #16
heyitsguay wrote: post #3

Is there precedent anyone can point to where these sorts of wild dramatic moves under new leadership led to turning a large company around into success?

Steve Jobs returning to Apple comes to mind

What did Steve Jobs do? He wasn't even at the company for half the layoffs that happened, and wasn't CEO until they were over. He killed some boondoggles 6 months after being formally named CEO (and over a year after NEXT was acquired).
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