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Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

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Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#241

Post by tiahura »

rsynnott wrote: post #208
loceng wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you have him blocked, and just not following him?

So after naughty ol' Mr Car took over Twitter, but before I stopped using the site (this would probably have been around Oct 22), I started, after never having followed or interacted with him, getting multiple inane tweets from Musk in my feed every day, along with constant suggestions to follow him. So I blocked him (I think he was one of three people in 15 years on the site who I felt the need to block). I assume t…

[flagged]

Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#242

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

zwily wrote: post #178
rob74 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is, how many of these "candidates" still love him while/after working at one of his companies?

Elon has an estimated 110,000+ employees across all his companies. Maybe you can find one and ask?

I know one Twitter guy who was a big Elon fan and loved the energy, right up until he got arbitrarily cut in one of the previous rounds of don't-call-them-layoffs.

Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#243

Post by queuebert »

kryptiskt wrote: post #148
nuz wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've cut out things like viewing who liked a tweet etc (for cost savings I suspect) so the site is probably dirt cheap. Can't imagine ads don't pay for the cost of running servers at this point, and a headcount reduction might bring it to profitability.

The ads may pay for the servers and reduced headcount[1], but there is no way that they pay for servicing the $10B of high-interest debt that the company was saddled with. [1] Though with the NYT reporting that the American ad revenues was down 80% to $114M/quarter since the acquisition it might not be so obvious.

Maybe they could declare bankruptcy and sell for pennies on the dollar to a mysterious new holding company: Ksum Nole, LLC.

Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#244

Post by runako »

tiahura wrote: post #237
brookst wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s how much the company can take, and how much Elon thinks the company can take. He subscribes to the ubermensch view, where him and maybe two other superior specimens of manhood could single handedly run the entire company.

Did you think it would collapse when he canned the 80%

Revenue is down by a larger percentage than the headcount, right? I think that counts as "collapse" by any reasonable definition.

Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#245

Post by runako »

brookst wrote: post #203
michaelt wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me "revenue and MAUs have declined significantly" sounds like a reason they would want to reduce employee numbers, rather than a reason they wouldn't . At least in a conventional business that uses revenue to pay wages.

Layoffs are expensive compared to making people miserable so they quit.

Only if you pay severance/etc., which X doesn't.

Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#246

Post by KingMob »

atmavatar wrote: post #187
gtirloni wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> San Francisco has an odd tolerance for the tent communities When I visited SF for the first time in 2019, it felt really weird that such a rich place would have so many people living in tents in public spaces. Being naive, I saw dozens of tents in Sue Bierman Park and thought they were having an event or something. Then it dawned on me what I was seeing and it never made sense because certainly it doesn't take a lo…

I imagine most in the US would be more interested in reducing homelessness by producing soylent green than by producing housing - especially the billionaires.

The number of people in the comments blaming homelessness solely on homeless people is embarrassing. Sure, mental health, the economy, drug use, and housing costs have no effect, apparently.

Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#247

Post by labcomputer »

acdha wrote: post #202
gadders wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

Look, we all know you’re making that up but if we take you at face value, you just defined conservatism as the beliefs bad enough to get Twitter’s famously hands-off moderators to act. Nobody got blocked for advocating for smaller government, business-friendly policies, or talking about their religious or family values – it was threats of violence, slurs, targeted harassment, election misinformation, etc. None of the…

> you just defined conservatism as the beliefs bad enough to get Twitter’s famously hands-off moderators to act.

This sort of disingenuous reply really isn’t helpful. The GP was clearly accusing Twitter of enforcing their TOS for righty accounts, while not enforcing their TOS when lefty accounts would do similar things.

I don’t think they are correct, but your rhetoric is just going to alienate people and makes your argument look weaker.

Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#248

Post by smcin »

chuckadams wrote: post #211
htrp wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like the easy commute you had in San Francisco on muni (the bus and subway network of San Francisco) becomes an annoying hour and a half-long commute on bart (The regional train system) with 2-3 transfers

You need CalTrain to get to San Jose. BART should have gone all the way around the bay by now but CalTrain defends its turf like a honey badger.

Transit in the Bay Area has very fragmented governance: 27 different transit agencies for 7.6m people in 9 counties with little coordination and no regional vision. By most measures, the Bay Area has the most fragmented public transit network in the country. See Seamless Bay Area if you want to make your voice heard for fixing this: https://www.seamlessbayarea.org/

For a map and list of the organizational insanity, see https://www.seamlessbayarea.org/blog/transitagencieslist (2019).

(Large tech companies like Google, Meta, Apple avoid all this by using private employee-only shuttles which take the freeway where possible).

BART from the East Bay is in the process of being extended to downtown SJ (latest estimate: "2036", they are still debating single-bore vs twin-bore tunnel, to save money in construction).

It's not fair to just blame BART vs Caltrain though, there are multiple cities that need to cooperate with other too: as we saw in the neverending saga of the CA High-Speed Rail project, people wanted a midpeninsula stop, but no midpeninsula city (Redwood City vs Palo Alto vs Mountain View) wanted to be the one to incur the increased traffic and enormous construction disruption from underground multistorey parking lots, so it was dropped.

At least, Caltrain electrification is finally promised, fall 2024: https://www.caltrain.com/projects/electrification/project-be... (more reliable (=> fewer breakdowns and delays), less noise, cleaner air quality)

Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#249

Post by runako »

kryptiskt wrote: post #148
nuz wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've cut out things like viewing who liked a tweet etc (for cost savings I suspect) so the site is probably dirt cheap. Can't imagine ads don't pay for the cost of running servers at this point, and a headcount reduction might bring it to profitability.

The ads may pay for the servers and reduced headcount[1], but there is no way that they pay for servicing the $10B of high-interest debt that the company was saddled with. [1] Though with the NYT reporting that the American ad revenues was down 80% to $114M/quarter since the acquisition it might not be so obvious.

> American ad revenues was down 80% to $114M/quarter since the acquisition

Debt service was estimated at ~$100m/mo, with the likelihood that rates on some of the debt could increase substantially since the financing was initially booked in mid 2022.

If these numbers are directionally accurate (and they do not report, so we don't know for sure), this thing is probably closer to losing a billion $ annually than to breakeven.

Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#250

Post by nomdep »

jorts wrote: post #162
toast0 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what the established criteria are for 'reasonable commuting distance' in the SF Bay area, but seems like a big forced transfer like this might need a WARN act notice, which is going to get the company in the news for layoffs. And probably in the news for not providing the notice in a timely fashion, too. This would be a bad look for a company that cared about how it looks.

SF to San Jose would be a horrible commute via car, which not everyone has.

Because they are paying SF rents? If they moved to San Jose wouldn’t they solve two problems at the same time?
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