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100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

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Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#51

I think there are going to be two levels of shock: 1) Never give people an ultimatum. It basically never works in your favor. That was such a dumb thing by Elon and his team. I don't think Elon expected the numbers to be so high. 2) Workers often overestimate their own worth within a company or how easily they can be replaced. It's likely that all the people leaving saying Twitter is going to majorly break soon won't…

I find the colloquial use of "Elon" to be pretty lame, like when people call Mark Zuckerberg "Mark" only. News sources don't do that, it's usually only losers who either want to imply familiarity or refer to him in a vaguely disrespectful way. There are lots of instances where people would be getting upset over way less - here I just think it makes one look like a loser (not singling out the parent, there are lots of…

What an incredibly cringe comment. Names are used to reference a person, Elon as a name makes it painstakingly obvious who is being talked about. Mark pointedly does not.

To call someone a loser and dribble about this asinine analysis of familiarity. It is infuriating to read. How I wish you had been born in the middle ages with Lord's and Lady's, you would be happier and so would I for never having to know of your existence.

Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#52
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the colloquial use of "Elon" to be pretty lame, like when people call Mark Zuckerberg "Mark" only. News sources don't do that, it's usually only losers who either want to imply familiarity or refer to him in a vaguely disrespectful way. There are lots of instances where people would be getting upset over way less - here I just think it makes one look like a loser (not singling out the parent, there are lots of…

What an incredibly cringe comment. Names are used to reference a person, Elon as a name makes it painstakingly obvious who is being talked about. Mark pointedly does not. To call someone a loser and dribble about this asinine analysis of familiarity. It is infuriating to read. How I wish you had been born in the middle ages with Lord's and Lady's, you would be happier and so would I for never having to know of your e…

Thanks for taking the time to reply

Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#53

[flagged]

_everyone_ loved Elon when he stuck to EVs, spaceX, solar panels, and boring companies.

I hope that was _sarcasm_... This man is singlehandedly causing more polution, social unrest, and fraud than anyone I've seen in my lifetime. Each of his enterprises is bankrupt without government money and very creative accounting. His behavior is reprehensible and criminal. I can't believe he is not in prison.

Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#54

[flagged]

_everyone_ loved Elon when he stuck to EVs, spaceX, solar panels, and boring companies.

The comment you're responding to is a prescription: what people ought to do.

Yours is a description: what people in fact do.

Yet, you phrased it in the same way, with the same emphasis. It might be a world view shifting shock to you. But I have always thought Elon was an asshole, from the very beginning of his self image marketing campaign.

Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#55
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That brings it down to under 1000 employees So Elon paid $44B for a company now with 900-odd employees. For a 10-year ROI, that's $4.4B per year profit, or $440 million/per employee For contrast, Netflix has the highest revenue per employee at $2.63 million/person, and Apple is second at $2.38 million, and Alphabet & Meta next at $1.64, and eBay at $0.9 million per employee. So, he'll need to get 200x the profitabili…

There's a reason he tried to get out of this deal. He's going to lose billions of dollars on this, the only question at this point is how many billions.

This is an under-explored part of how we got here. Elon did not want to buy Twitter. He bought it only because he thought he could flip it and lose less than what settling would cost (plus what damage depositions would do).

Right up to a few days before the deal closed, Elon was hoping he would not have to actually run Twitter. And that's the second part that is under-explored: Elon could not find a CEO. And he never will until he admits all of his and the coinvestors' equity stakes are now worth zero, and he takes a down round that reshapes the cap table and enables a sane incentive package for a CEO.

Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#56
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

_everyone_ loved Elon when he stuck to EVs, spaceX, solar panels, and boring companies.

The submarine/rescue situation should've clued many more people into his capricious, reckless nature, but yet many persisted. This country has a serious problem with platforming and idolizing narcissists and non-violent psychopaths and it needs to stop. Sh*t-shows like this hopefully have a chance of showing everyone that these monsters don't deserve our adulation.

I'd rate orchestrating a coup in Bolivia and tweeting "We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it." an act of violence.

Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#57

I do know that many on HN are critical of twitter, but since the start of the war with Ukraine, twitter was an essential way to get fresh news/analysis of the situation. Therefore it's a pity that twitter is going down. And I do think it is happening.

That's my regret as well — there was clearly a very popular niche for breaking news and self-organization, although with some very challenging problems around authenticity which are hard to reconcile with such deep cuts.

Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#58

I truly hope all the top tier engineers who kept it going leave and it all goes bankrupt and Elon can have his tarnished brand lol. There are multiple other avenues on social media for the same functions as Twitter, maybe a little less conducive but they will do the job.

Yeah even at a company with as relatively stable a product as twitter, there are so many processes that go on internally that certainly need someone who knows how to operate them. Another commenter mentioned dead-man's switches, but you don't even need explicit switches, especially if an entire team leaves. There will be parts of twitters infra that no one even knows how to deploy, /even if/ it was fully automated. At this point I would be extremely surprised if the twitter infrastructure was anything other than a car with no brakes. It will be interesting to see what parts of it fail first.

Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#59
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a reason he tried to get out of this deal. He's going to lose billions of dollars on this, the only question at this point is how many billions.

This is an under-explored part of how we got here. Elon did not want to buy Twitter. He bought it only because he thought he could flip it and lose less than what settling would cost (plus what damage depositions would do). Right up to a few days before the deal closed, Elon was hoping he would not have to actually run Twitter. And that's the second part that is under-explored: Elon could not find a CEO. And he never…

Neither wanting to flip it nor not wanting to run it explain what he has done once he actually owned though, more the opposite in fact. You don't prepare a company for flipping it by whatever this mess is, nor does it make being its CEO a more attractive job, nor did he have to run in as directly as he does. (Well, unless you don't care about the flipping price. Verizon managed to sell Tumblr after all ;))
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