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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

#881

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regular people have been trying to explain this to the "center-right" for a while now: Twitter's moderation policies weren't primarily dictated by their political views, they were primarily dictated by building an advertiser friendly platform. Which Musk exploded almost immediately by endorsing a far right homophobic conspiracy theory about a violent attack on the family member of an elected politician. You can say "…

From what I understand, Twitter's moderation is noticeably more left-wing than that of Facebook. And yet Facebook makes a lot of ad dollars. So I do think there's a discretionary element there. I agree that Musk hasn't been behaving in a way that's advertiser-friendly. Jack Dorsey is super familiar with Twitter and said Elon was the best solution for it if it was gonna stay a company: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/2…

Both internal and external review of twitter shows a bias towards the right. It is probably still "more left-wing than that of facebook" but still distinctly rightwing.

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

#882

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…

There is nowhere to take Twitter, it is on the tail end of its business cycle. The only move to play here is to go into damage control mode and relist ASAP. That way Elon can minimize his loss to 'only' $10 billion or less

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

#883
post #821

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On principal, I hope it crashes and burns and ruins him. And I know this will cause a lot of people to suffer some. I am so sorry for that. But these piss ant billionaires need to start facing real consequences when they behave so abhorrently. I hope all of his ventures fail similarly. Fuck him and his petulant behavior forever.

Wow. The guy who started sending more rockets to space than NASA and almost single-handedly made electric cars cool is suddenly the most evil man alive. Yikes.

The ends don’t justify the means. And his ends are dubious at best. He didn’t singlehandedly do anything. The successes of SpaceX and Tesla are mostly do to the hard work of thousands of workers.

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

#884

Here’s what I don’t understand. Elon has offered no vision for twitter 2.0, only the promise of hard work towards a nebulous goal. He then offered no equity in return for that hard work rebuilding the platform. Why would anyone stay? “Hey, do you want to work triple the amount of hours for me for the same pay?” I wonder if seeing Chinese companies and Chinese factories work has warped his judgement. Without a vision…

> I wonder if seeing Chinese companies and Chinese factories work has warped his judgement.

Reuters reported recently that Tesla plans to start exporting cars from its China factory to the U.S. (Tesla denied the report, btw, but this an Elon-run company we're talking about so that means effectively nothing):

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/exclus...

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

#885

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the people looking at your resume later. Staying at Twitter now will need a darn good explanation, otherwise I guess the assumption is you buy into this BS, or you need your visa. If you need your visa I get it, otherwise that is a stain on your resume

I was saying the same thing to friend last night. If I saw “Twitter X-Y” on a resume where X is = 2023 then I’m going to have questions . The people attracted to that kind of company run by that kind of person set off red flags for me. H-1B is an acceptable reason, almost anything else isn’t.

Why? I'm confused.

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

#886
post #730

How does one follow a come-back-to-office police while being simultaniously being locked out from said office? Is this an employer lockout, the employer version of an employee strike? So many questions! Maybe one of those blue checkmarked Elon's on Twitter can answer! But seriously, how can someone burn down something he just bought for 44 billion so fast and consequently?

That's also my thought. I cannot believe someone could burn through cash possibly this fast in history. Surely, something to be remembered for...

This reminds me of Stephen Elop from Nokia and "Burning Platform" memo.. Nokia lost its top smartphone manufacturer (25% of the market) position in about half-year after that.

But the timescale involved were much longer.. the Nokia losses happened in months, not in days.

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

#887
post #321
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same energy as the following article on the Twitter layoffs: "Twitter hasn’t responded to requests for comment, likely because its communications staff has been included in the layoffs." https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/04/twitter-faces-a-class-acti...

At this point it just seems like a matter of time before Musk and/or his fan club start trying to change the narrative to him purposely running the company to the ground, and the fact that he wasted billions of dollars doing it somehow is noble.

"I always wanted to burn 44 billion dollars! It's tax genius!"

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

#888
post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good word, it gets better from there: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593455727611215872 > And … we just hit another all-time high in Twitter usage lol > Let that sink in … He literally cannot distinguish between good and bad attention. He still thinks he's winning this.

Well, Twitter usage is the relevant metric as that leads to ad impressions, thus revenue. However the question is for how long he can keep the drama and attention till the thing collapses.

Not when advertisers are jumping ship simultaneously. Number of impressions is only one factor in revenue for advertising

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

#889

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would anyone stay? “Hey, do you want to work triple the amount of hours for me for the same pay?” Probably even less pay. No more stocks (and if: limited ways of selling ... unless Musk manages to execute a massive pivot and then go public again)

It’s very strange. I suppose he must be at least mildly autistic, because he certainly doesn’t seem to understand regular people.

He said he had aspergers when he hosted Saturday Night Live. Someone with aspergers is not the person to run a social network.

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

#890

Here’s what I don’t understand. Elon has offered no vision for twitter 2.0, only the promise of hard work towards a nebulous goal. He then offered no equity in return for that hard work rebuilding the platform. Why would anyone stay? “Hey, do you want to work triple the amount of hours for me for the same pay?” I wonder if seeing Chinese companies and Chinese factories work has warped his judgement. Without a vision…

His mentality might be that it's too late to go back and the company is probably going to fail anyway. So he has to radically change the workforce and the culture there. So he's throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks apparently. While that might improve overhead costs eventually, I don't see how it's going to result in a platform that gets the moderation/censorship balance correct while keeping the advertisers…

Was the company really on its way to failure? It was rudderless and with no profit, but with him as CEO would he really struggle to keep finding VC funding? He could have slowly attrited the workforce over 3 months, 6 months, while defining a future vision, making sure he’s got everyone he needs and that he’s found the Jony Ives of twitter (exceptional workers who were stifled by the bureaucracy).

Instead he’s nuked the company workforce? I dunno. Seems a bit reckless to me. Why would twitter be under so much pressure?

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