Live data from Hacker News

Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

arstechnica.com

271–280 of 458 posts

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would this happen? From the outside, it seems like Elon is absolutely decimating employee morale. See for example this thread from an engineer who has no beef with Elon and wants to see Twitter succeed, but still took the severance: https://twitter.com/peterclowes/status/1593458225533313025

Nobody in their right mind would publicly support Elon right now because they would be mobbed

Nobody in their right mind would publicly support Elon right now because he's acting like a lunatic and therefore undeserving of support.

Regardless of what you think of Twitter's future prospects, none of these destructive antics make it stronger. Twitter could still be saved, but it could have been saved even easier without all of this pointless and public display of arrogance and incompetence.

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#272

I've been reading the left and the right sides on this whole thing... and I kinda agree with this one: https://www.newsweek.com/tantrum-twitter-reveals-how-privile... We're pretty damn spoiled.

It's not that we're spoiled, it's that other folks are abused.

I would say Elon is spoiled though, in thinking he can treat folks as fungible.

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#273
post #109

In my opinion Elon miscalculated the type of people at Twitter. These aren’t people like the ones in Tesla or SpaceX where there is some sort of idealization of Elon. The number of fan boys he has at Twitter must be super low. None of the Twitter employees signed up to work for him, it’s pretty obvious from the public tweets that most of the staff has posted that they don’t have much respect for him. On top of that,…

The people who worked on SpaceX and Tesla were probably incredibly ideologically aligned with Elon genuinely believing they were changing the world for the better. Its really easy to pitch someone to work long hours when you are making one of the worlds first mass market electric car and honest to god rocket ships. Meanwhile we are a years into total disenfranchisement with entire concept of social media. The sell ju…

He’s also done nothing to communicate a vision beyond “work for an abusive psychopath.”

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#274
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect he is working but probably has a very short attention span.

It's only 9am and he's already tweeted several times this morning about random nonsense - including a complaint about congress ignoring the FTX fiasco overlaid over an image of two Rhinos having intercourse. Which is another misleading claim as FTX is being actively investigated by DoJ and SEC lol: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2022/11/17/the-failure-of...

It’s bizarre that his tweeting pattern these days is blatant misinformation (mostly Republican propaganda) interspersed with the occasional “twitter is the best source of news, better than all the fake journalists”.

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#275
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An other component is that if you're working on rockets or EVs you might consider that rewarding in and of itself, and accept lower comp or worse conditions. Twitter? I'm sure twitter employees were proud of their work and doing things they believed meaningful, but not "halve your effective comp', in a company with all the joy of an abattoir, for a narcissistic egomaniac. And if you're a rocket engineer, the field is…

"halve your effective comp" And also work double time for the indefinite future. So effective comp is quartered, by my accounting.

I was thinking of double time (hence talking about effective comp), I didn't see mentions of salary being cut but mayhaps I just missed it?

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Supporting the Republican party who I hate for lying about or supporting people who lied/are lying about election fraud. 2. Linking to an article that claimed Paul Pelosi's attacker was involved in a gay love triangle and it was a lover's quarrel. 3. Pedo guy 4. Making blue check marks paid leading to many parody accounts mimicking companies making offensive tweets. Then when those companies cut advertising claimi…

> Republican party who I hate I switched to Republican party since 2020 election, I wouldn't vote for election deniers [1] but plenty of people are doing the right thing. Rationality and reason seems to have shifted from liberals to conservatives. We can't even say biological facts. Many others are leaving the woke non-sense, I want my damn liberal party back from the 90's that was pro free speech and had a kernel of…

"Rationality and reason seems to have shifted from liberals to conservatives. We can't even say biological facts. Many others are leaving the woke non-sense,"

Isn't it the Republicans that are still saying homosexuality is a choice? Aren't they the ones aligned with QAnon woke-conspiracies? Aren't they ones that pushed that Obama was born in Africa?

What biological facts do Democrats say you can't say? At worst, Dems maybe bend over too much to be inclusive to those that historically haven't been included.

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming that someone leaving immediately causes things to break down. A lot of things will take some time to see the effects of people leaving. Fire your entire payroll department. No one will notice... until the biweekly paychecks don't go out, and now your employees aren't getting paid. Fire badge security. No one will notice... until you need someone to make a new badge for a new employee. Fire your IT sta…

He fired badge security, deactivated all badges & then asked that guy to come back just so workers could get out of the parking garage which required a badge to do so. You can see the tweet about it. It happened YESTERDAY.

That was a parody tweet. In fact, the account name had "(Parody)" in it.

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#278
post #13

At this point, I'm kinda wondering if Musk's deal to finance the Twitter acquisition included some Brewster's Millions -style clause where he gets to keep the company and the $44B if the company goes bankrupt within 90 days.

I had a similar thought - perhaps Elon was visited by a time traveler from the future who convinced him that the only way to stave off some impending disaster is for someone to drive Twitter into bankruptcy as quickly as possible, and he heroically offered to ruin his fortune and reputation to save humanity. That's a stupid idea, but it would elegantly explain his recent behavior...

> That's a stupid idea, but it would elegantly explain his recent behavior...

I think Elon Musk's character as we've publicly known him last few years explains this behavior elegantly and comprehensively enough. As someone else in this thread said, he's a "techno-feudalist", he gives the orders and peasants comply. He's been operating on this mode for a decade now.

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming that someone leaving immediately causes things to break down. A lot of things will take some time to see the effects of people leaving. Fire your entire payroll department. No one will notice... until the biweekly paychecks don't go out, and now your employees aren't getting paid. Fire badge security. No one will notice... until you need someone to make a new badge for a new employee. Fire your IT sta…

He fired badge security, deactivated all badges & then asked that guy to come back just so workers could get out of the parking garage which required a badge to do so. You can see the tweet about it. It happened YESTERDAY.

The badge employee was not real. Musk just played along. It's becoming hard to distinguish these things.
Post reply on HN