Elon Musk: Officially a fraud and piece of shit. Official or unofficial war criminal?

[atomheartbevo 89304]

And before anybody says “haha, he’s just trolling the haters” he’s the fucking owner and CEO and should be hanging out in a James Bond villain-inspired lair on a private island, surrounded by people he’s attracted to, not getting in flame wars at night with randos on Twitter and making advertisers think “yeah, I’m going to need to move those ad buys to Facebook or twitch or Amazon or YouTube.”

 

[Aqua Buddha 14464]

 

[atomheartbevo 89304]

If I had billions to spend, I’m not doing it on a social media platform that will see me spending my weekends and nights figuring out how to own some dude I don’t know on the internet, and coming up with stupid shit that my underlings are afraid to tell me will cost me hundreds of millions in advertising revenue  

I’m  going to have a private island or three somewhere in the Caribbean, hanging out with Sela Ward, the Prime Minister of Finland, Gale Gadot, Hayley Atwell, Jennifer Connelly, Victoria Justice, the actress who plays Bix on Andor, and Danny DeVito.   I think with billions of dollars, I can make at least part of that happen.

And any tweets from me are actually going to be from my PR person, who sends a few out every day making it look like I give a shit about something other than spending my days and nights on a Caribbean island with Sela Ward, the Prime Minister of Finland, Gale Gadot, Hayley Atwell, Jennifer Connelly, Victoria Justice, the actress who plays Bix on Andor, and Danny DeVito.

[Francisco 2.0 32290]

11 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

If I had billions to spend, I’m not doing it on a social media platform that will see me spending my weekends and nights figuring out how to own some dude I don’t know on the internet, and coming up with stupid shit that my underlings are afraid to tell me will cost me hundreds of millions in advertising revenue  

I’m  going to have a private island or three somewhere in the Caribbean, hanging out with Sela Ward, the Prime Minister of Finland, Gale Gadot, Hayley Atwell, Jennifer Connelly, Victoria Justice, the actress who plays Bix on Andor, and Danny DeVito.   I think with billions of dollars, I can make at least part of that happen.

And any tweets from me are actually going to be from my PR person, who sends a few out every day making it look like I give a shit about something other than spending my days and nights on a Caribbean island with Sela Ward, the Prime Minister of Finland, Gale Gadot, Hayley Atwell, Jennifer Connelly, Victoria Justice, the actress who plays Bix on Andor, and Danny DeVito.

 

But see, that's you or me.  Or a lot of other people.  Matt Levine wrote the best way to think about this back in April:

 

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-04/elon-musk-bought-some-twitter

 

Quote

Look this all makes complete sense, obvious, intuitive, simple sense. If you are the richest person in the world, and annoying, and you constantly play a computer game, and you get a lot of enjoyment and a sense of identity from that game and are maybe a little addicted, then at some point you might have some suggestions for improvements in the game. So you might leave comments and email the company that makes the game saying “hey you should try my ideas.” And the company might ignore you (or respond politely but not move fast enough for your liking). It might occur to you: “Look, I am the richest person in the world; how much could this game company possibly cost? I should just buy it and change the game however I want.” Even if your complaints are quite minor, why shouldn’t you get to play exactly the game you want? Even if you have no complaints, why not own the game you love, just to make sure it continues to be exactly what you want? The game is Twitter, the richest person in the world is Elon Musk.

 

 

[Brisketexan 104226]

If I had billions to spend, I’m not doing it on a social media platform that will see me spending my weekends and nights figuring out how to own some dude I don’t know on the internet, and coming up with stupid shit that my underlings are afraid to tell me will cost me hundreds of millions in advertising revenue  
I’m  going to have a private island or three somewhere in the Caribbean, hanging out with Sela Ward, the Prime Minister of Finland, Gale Gadot, Hayley Atwell, Jennifer Connelly, Victoria Justice, the actress who plays Bix on Andor, and Danny DeVito.   I think with billions of dollars, I can make at least part of that happen.
And any tweets from me are actually going to be from my PR person, who sends a few out every day making it look like I give a shit about something other than spending my days and nights on a Caribbean island with Sela Ward, the Prime Minister of Finland, Gale Gadot, Hayley Atwell, Jennifer Connelly, Victoria Justice, the actress who plays Bix on Andor, and Danny DeVito.

Are you me?

[SimonBolivar 10890]

1 hour ago, atomheartbevo said:

If I had billions to spend, I’m not doing it on a social media platform...

I'm making Alcorn State the richest university on the planet and I'm also going to have sex with Danny DeVito  

[Surly Bevo 24686]

19 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Are you me?

No Hoffs on that island for you to tell stories about so doesn't seem like a perfect match.

[atomheartbevo 89304]

57 minutes ago, SimonBolivar said:

I'm making Alcorn State the richest university on the planet 

I’m making Texas State the richest university in Texas and I’ll use NIL to have Texas State steal recruits from aggy.

57 minutes ago, SimonBolivar said:

I'm also going to have sex with Danny DeVito  

[Grade of D as in David 13253]

1 hour ago, Surly Bevo said:

No Hoffs on that island for you to tell stories about so doesn't seem like a perfect match.

She's on my island

Edited November 8, 2022 by Grade of D as in David
If we're calling dibs

[Schulz2.0 28710]

 

[Bama Chick 28596]

lol he’s such a little bitchmade shitlord

[NoName 16265]

8 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Yeah, put all of Twitter behind a paywall.  I'm sure that will work.  Lots of details:

 

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/7/23446262/elon-musk-twitter-paywall-possible

 

 

 

 

 

 

  Hide contents

I. The botch

Friday’s layoffs had been brutal for all involved, including those involved in planning them — many of whom themselves lost their jobs. While the process varied by team, some managers were asked to submit to Musk’s team two sentences about all of their direct reports: one sentence explaining what the employee did, and one sentence justifying their continued employment at Twitter.

“You were like, this better be a fucking good sentence,” one person asked to write such a list told me.

Managers agonized over the decisions and jockeyed with their peers in an effort to preserve employment for the most vulnerable among them: pregnant women, employees who have cancer, and workers on visas among them, a former employee told me.

Some teams were cut more than others; several were wiped out entirely. As it turned out, though, the company went too far. As I was the first to report on Saturday, within hours of the layoffs, some managers were already being told to ask select laid-off employees if they wanted their old jobs back.

It began as a rumor on Blind, the app where employees of various companies can chat anonymously with their coworkers. But within a day it was being posted in public Slack channels.

“Sorry to @- everybody on the weekend but I wanted to pass along that we have the opportunity to ask folks that were left off if they will come back. I need to put together names and rationales by 4 PM PST on Sunday,” one such message from a manager to employees read. “I’ll do some research but if any of you have been in contact with folks who might come back and who we think will help us, please nominate before 4.”

“I think we might use some Android and iOS help,” the manager added. The company has been reaching out to both engineers and designers over the past day in an effort to get them back, Platformer is told.

Some employees are nervous that if Twitter can’t get them to return voluntarily, the company will formally rescind the notice they received Friday laying them off. Under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, businesses with more than 100 full-time employees are required to give 60 days notice if they lay off 33 percent or more of the staff. At Twitter, that notice included a promise to pay people for the next 60 days and give them a month of severance.

Now workers fear that if they refuse to return voluntarily, Twitter will fire them for abandoning their jobs, depriving them of what otherwise would have been three months’ pay. 

Some workers have begun to consult with lawyers over their options in the event that they are recalled. Others are in open revolt, tweeting public threads about various aspects of the organization that have been broken after the ready-fire-aim disaster of Musk’s layoffs process.

Meanwhile, remaining managers are bracing themselves for a much higher workload than they were previously used to. One person I spoke with was told that any technical manager should expect to manage at least 20 individual contributors, while also spending at least half their time writing code. Others have been given much higher numbers of direct reports.

II. The two Twitters

As today began at Twitter, there were essentially two groups at the company, one employee told me: those working on projects that Musk has been deeply involved in, such as the revamped Twitter Blue subscription, and everyone else.

“The couple of teams that are on his pet projects are doing 20-hour days,” one employee told me. “But the majority of the company is kind of just sitting around. No chain of command, no priorities, no organization chart, and in many cases, no idea who your manager or team is.”

To learn what they are supposed to do, employees looked to some unusual sources. After a number of celebrities and high-profile accounts began to impersonate him, Musk announced a new policy, via a tweet, that anyone found impersonating someone else would be permanently banned without warning. That was news to what remains of Twitter’s policy team, I’m told, and afterward some employees began discussing how to implement Musk’s edict.

Meanwhile, the health team was told to listen to Musk adviser David Sacks’ podcast for insights into why they had just lost half their colleagues, according to a former employee. Sacks, a venture capitalist who has been helping to manage the Musk transition, co-hosts the “All-In” podcast with fellow Twitter adviser Jason Calacanis and VC Chamath Palihapitiya.

“The most recent podcast covers the current layoffs happening across tech and provides some insight into why this is happening/necessary,” a vice president told employees. “I think it is worth listening to in order to understand the macro environment we are operating in.”

Most employees were more interested in their health benefits, which had suddenly become a question mark. The company’s open-enrollment period was supposed to begin today, according to its global calendar, but no information was available in the company’s human-resources system. Employees posted several questions about benefits inside Slack today, but all went unanswered by management.

III. The Blue disaster

By the day’s end, I’m told, at least some teams had begun to hold meetings in which employees were informed who their managers are, what their organization charts look like, and what their priorities will be.

But several employees I spoke with were still wrestling with one overarching question: do Musk and his team have any idea what they’re doing?

On one hand, the company is telling advertisers that it is thriving, The Verge’s Alex Heath reported, adding 15 million daily users since the end of the second quarter.

But the rollout of Musk’s first signature project, a new version of the Twitter Blue subscription that will allow anyone to get a verification badge, has been a disaster.

The company rolled out a new version of the app on Saturday with release notes that said the new Blue was now available. (The copy, written by Calacanis, was widely derided for sounding like a phishing email.) The problem is that Blue was not available, and so those who did subscribe found that they had merely gotten access to the current version of Blue.

Then, after a debate about the potential effects of unleashing thousands of new verified accounts onto the platforms in the middle of the US midterm elections, the company postponed the launch.

But the new Blue likely faces larger problems. The existing version only had a little more than 100,000 active subscribers, Platformer has learned. The new version will be 37.5 percent more expensive, and its value seems murky for most regular users of the platform. It’s unclear how the company will persuade enough people to subscribe to justify the effort.

Twitter employees tried to sell Musk and Sacks on the idea of asking business accounts to pay for extra features since many of them use Twitter to reach large audiences. But they were dismissed in favor of offering wide-scale verification first, I’m told.

Other employees have warned about a secondary feature of the new Blue that Musk added at the last minute: reducing ad load in the Twitter app by half. Estimates showed that Twitter will lose about $6 in ad revenue per user in the United States by making that change, sources said. Factoring in Apple and Google’s share of the $8 monthly subscription, Twitter would likely lose money on Blue if the ad-light plan is enacted.

“The business fundamentals are just not there,” said one former employee who worked on the plans.

Musk has been heavily involved in the chaotic launch of Blue, participating in standup meetings and exchanging regular emails with Esther Crawford, a director of product management at the company. “There is one decision-maker and that is me,” Musk told workers, according to meeting notes shared with employees in Slack.

“Any detail of Twitter Blue must be clear w/ him down to the last detail,” the message added.

But all of that could be a prelude to the biggest change of all: charging most or all users a subscription fee to use Twitter.

Both Musk and Sacks have discussed the idea in recent meetings, according to a person familiar with the matter. One such plan might allow everyone to use Twitter for a limited amount of time each month but require a subscription to continue browsing, the person said.

It could not be learned how serious Musk and Sacks are about the paywall; Twitter did not respond to a request for comment. It also does not appear imminent, as the Blue team is wholly occupied with the launch of expanded verification.

Still, given Twitter’s huge debt burden, the backward economics of Blue, and the recent pause in spending by major advertisers, it’s clear that Musk and his brain trust will have to do something to significantly increase revenue. And whatever they choose, it seems increasingly clear that Twitter will never be the same.

 

 

holy shit this is the most Elon thing that has ever Elon'd

someone told him that people want to see less ads, so they made Blue have 50% fewer ads

Quote

Other employees have warned about a secondary feature of the new Blue that Musk added at the last minute: reducing ad load in the Twitter app by half. Estimates showed that Twitter will lose about $6 in ad revenue per user in the United States by making that change, sources said. Factoring in Apple and Google’s share of the $8 monthly subscription, Twitter would likely lose money on Blue if the ad-light plan is enacted.

Twitter losing money on Blue would be an incredible direction change lol

[NoName 16265]

8 hours ago, Aqua Buddha said:

 

re: birdwatch, from the tweet Cuban is replying to

[Bateshorn 9853]

9 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

 

I’m  going to have a private island or three somewhere in the Caribbean, hanging out with Sela Ward, the Prime Minister of Finland, Gale Gadot, Hayley Atwell, Jennifer Connelly, Victoria Justice, the actress who plays Bix on Andor

I’ll be in my bunk

[Francisco 2.0 32290]

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/11/elon-musk-twitter-poor-management-layoffs-advertisers/672029/

 

Quote

Elon Musk has spent the past 12 years tweeting whatever comes into his mind, often without major negative consequences. That was before he owned the place. Now, less than two weeks after his $44 billion purchase, the world’s richest man is finding that his actions—which recently included tweeting a baseless conspiracy theory to Hillary Clinton about the assault on Paul Pelosi—may actually have consequences. Advertisers are fleeing, the employees remaining after a round of mass layoffs are alienated, and onlookers are completely vexed by a freewheeling approach that has coincided with a rise in hate speech on the platform, among other problems.

 

Quote

Musk’s fans see the billionaire as a visionary, but it’s worth noting that many casual observers—people whose only real understanding of Musk is as the guy who put the fancy electric cars on their streets—have also internalized the heuristic that he is Good at Business and the type of man who spends his waking moments dreaming of how to save humanity from its existential problems. But what the past two weeks demonstrate is that Musk is, at best, a mediocre executive—and undoubtedly a terrible, distracted manager.

 

Quote

Musk is obviously wildly financially successful, and the companies he owns have a reputation for taking futuristic-sounding ideas and dragging them into the present. But what Musk is showing us in real time is the folly of equating financial success with intellect, managerial savvy, and good judgment. I reached out to some experts to see if I was possibly missing something about Musk’s performance so far. Given Musk’s current focus on advertisers leaving the platform, I called up Rick Webb, the COO of Timehop and a co-founder of the Barbarian Group, a major digital-ad agency. Webb also served as a marketing and sales consultant for Tumblr during its heyday. I asked him to assess Musk’s first few days on the job, and he did not mince words.

 

 

Spoiler

“The advertisers are gone because of his awful tweets,” Webb told me. “There’s no room for debate. He stated his intentions up front. He cared about advertisers and didn’t want them to leave and then he told us they’ve left.” Webb suggested to me that Musk’s now-deleted Paul Pelosi tweet was perhaps the most expensive tweet ever: It may have cost Twitter billions in advertising revenue. Companies including General Mills, Audi, and Pfizer are pulling their marketing from Twitter because they likely don’t want their brands to be associated with anything remotely scandalous. High-level executives—CMO types—are the ones ultimately deciding what these brands spend on Twitter, and “those people are, to a T, conflict-avoidant,” Webb said.

Musk seems to understand this—according to reporting from Kara Swisher, he realized that ad execs were freaking out and tried to quell concerns on a conference call last week. It did not go well. “There were CMOs who literally paused/shifted budgets DURING the call because of the uncertainty,” Swisher tweeted. Worse yet, Musk has either alienated or fired some of the employees—such as Twitter’s chief customer officer—who maintain crucial brand and agency relationships.

As bad as that sounds, Webb argues that the reality is worse: “What people might not understand is that the advertisers don’t need Twitter. They barely cared about it at all before Musk. The only reason those people cared about Twitter ads is because they had personal relationships with members of Twitter’s marketing team or because there are hundreds of Twitter account reps making them pay. And Elon may have fired those people.” Twitter is much smaller than rivals like TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, after all.

 

With each passing day, Musk seems to be digging a deeper hole. This morning, to the dismay of many brand advertisers who strive to be apolitical, Musk used his 114-million-follower platform to endorse the Republican slate of candidates for tomorrow’s midterm elections. “The dude could’ve napped and saved billions of dollars,” Webb said. “Every decision he’s made has lost him money. It’s astonishing.”

Musk’s marketing debacles are not the stuff of visionaries, but they pale in comparison to his management skills. Here’s a brief summary of how he has steered the company so far.

Before assuming control of Twitter, the billionaire reportedly floated the idea that he could gut the company’s workforce by nearly 75 percent, which created a sense of low-grade panic inside the company. Despite the specter of mass layoffs, Musk walked into Twitter headquarters like a court jester, filming content for his own Twitter feed. In his first hours, Musk fired some well-liked executives and, on his first full day, pompously asked engineers to print out their code so Tesla staffers could review it. (Later, he reversed course and asked staffers to shred their printed code.) When it came time for layoffs, he cut nearly half of the company via email (though word leaked beforehand and left many employees wondering about their fate) and, in an act of extreme cowardice, didn’t even sign his name. Many staffers found out about their termination ahead of time, when their work accounts stopped functioning. The cuts—which hit or completely destroyed big chunks of the trust-and-safety, policy, machine-learning, social-good, accessibility, communications, ethical-AI, data-science, and research teams—caused realconcern that the company may now be especially vulnerable to outages and attacks, which could be particularly dangerous during the midterms. Inside the company, managers scrambled. They told employees to work 80-hour weeks to build products for Musk (lest they be terminated too) and instructed employees to come up with ideas to tantalize their mercurial new owner. The vibe was like “hack week, but with a gun to your head,” a Twitter employee told the New York Times podcast Hard Fork.

This is awful, chaotic management. Johnathan and Melissa Nightingale, who run the Raw Signal Group, a consultancy that focuses on coaching managers in the technology industry, told me that Musk is putting on a master class in what not to do to run an effective organization. “Absolutely nothing he’s doing is cultivating an environment that helps people be creative, consistent, and innovative,” Melissa Nightingale said. For the employees who remain, Musk has created an atmosphere of panic and uncertainty, which destroys trust and leads to employee resentment. Musk has created a vast network of ex-employees who will go on to talk trash and share nightmare stories about Twitter. This is already backfiring spectacularly: Some of the employees had skills necessary to build products Musk actually wants to launch and were terminated by mistake, Bloomberg reported, and the company is trying to lure them back.

Had Musk listened to people with experience running social networks (like those I cited in this magazine two weeks ago), he might have understood that they are complex, fragile systems and that staff reductions must be managed carefully. But instead, Musk surrounded himself with a group of yes-men advisers, many of whom also lack specific expertise. These men and Musk all operate under a hyper-rationalist managerial framework: They appear to have reasoned that Twitter was bloated and losing money on payroll, that change needed to come quickly, and that layoffs are naturally messy, so there’s no need to handle them with care. That lack of care in particular is a hallmark of bad, shortsighted management, the Nightingales told me.

“When we say ‘care,’ we mean it both in an empathetic sense, but also in a professional, attention-to-detail sense,” Melissa Nightingale said. The pair argued that Musk’s haphazard cuts and alienation of his employees may work in the short term by balancing the company’s budget, but disaster might soon follow. “If you start looking long term and evaluating his decisions by metrics like How many labor-discrimination suits will he face? or How many people will work for him again?, it looks different.”

The Nightingales argued that Musk’s managerial decisions show a lack of human understanding that is key to running any business—and especially a business like Twitter. “He may really understand things from an engineering perspective,” Johnathan Nightingale said. “But humans are different. And care is a major input in creating a human system.”

 

Unfortunately for Musk, Twitter is less of an engineered machine and more of a chaotic collection of humans. “He loves to talk about Twitter as a great public square,” Johnathan Nightingale told me.* “But public squares are built with care. They are not machines … Public squares are for humans and designed by humans. And Musk has just fired half of them.”

There is always a chance that this somehow all works out for Musk (The Verge reported Monday afternoon that user growth is currently at an all time high) and an even greater chance that his confident, unapologetic, and wrongheaded style will only endear him to his fans. But even if he does manage to salvage part of his $44 billion investment, what we are seeing is the opposite of a business mastermind at work. Musk is not leading Twitter with careful vision, and he is certainly not dragging us all into the future with him. He’s bumbling his way through a job he’s unqualified for. He’s treating a human problem like an engineering problem, torching bridges and embarrassing himself in the process. As Melissa Nightingale put it, “The entire history of capitalism is a lesson that you can be very successful and also very terrible.” In this sense, Musk is an excellent teacher.

 

 

[Bookman 4603]

11 hours ago, chainsaw said:

businesspeople aren't capable of being bitchasses and losing billions in the process.

Being a losing businessman is actually celebrated in America.

[Nivek 16771]

No Hoffs on that island for you to tell stories about so doesn't seem like a perfect match.

what would he talk about if Hoffs is there? It would be like that Chris Farley sketch…..

[Jkwellborn 6616]

If I had billions to spend, I’m not doing it on a social media platform that will see me spending my weekends and nights figuring out how to own some dude I don’t know on the internet, and coming up with stupid shit that my underlings are afraid to tell me will cost me hundreds of millions in advertising revenue  
I’m  going to have a private island or three somewhere in the Caribbean, hanging out with Sela Ward, the Prime Minister of Finland, Gale Gadot, Hayley Atwell, Jennifer Connelly, Victoria Justice, the actress who plays Bix on Andor, and Danny DeVito.   I think with billions of dollars, I can make at least part of that happen.
And any tweets from me are actually going to be from my PR person, who sends a few out every day making it look like I give a shit about something other than spending my days and nights on a Caribbean island with Sela Ward, the Prime Minister of Finland, Gale Gadot, Hayley Atwell, Jennifer Connelly, Victoria Justice, the actress who plays Bix on Andor, and Danny DeVito.

The chick that plays Bix is also in Red Notice. Absolute smoke. Good choice, can I come visit said island?

[Cheeseweasel 26437]

5 hours ago, Bama Chick said:

lol he’s such a little bitchmade shitlord

Rent free?

[Cornpop 230]

12 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

And before anybody says “haha, he’s just trolling the haters” he’s the fucking owner and CEO and should be hanging out in a James Bond villain-inspired lair on a private island, surrounded by people he’s attracted to, not getting in flame wars at night with randos on Twitter and making advertisers think “yeah, I’m going to need to move those ad buys to Facebook or twitch or Amazon or YouTube.”

 

It seems to be working on you 

[956 Worldwide 34241]

12 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Yeah, put all of Twitter behind a paywall.  I'm sure that will work.  Lots of details:

 

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/7/23446262/elon-musk-twitter-paywall-possible

 

 

 

 

 

 

  Hide contents

I. The botch

Friday’s layoffs had been brutal for all involved, including those involved in planning them — many of whom themselves lost their jobs. While the process varied by team, some managers were asked to submit to Musk’s team two sentences about all of their direct reports: one sentence explaining what the employee did, and one sentence justifying their continued employment at Twitter.

“You were like, this better be a fucking good sentence,” one person asked to write such a list told me.

Managers agonized over the decisions and jockeyed with their peers in an effort to preserve employment for the most vulnerable among them: pregnant women, employees who have cancer, and workers on visas among them, a former employee told me.

Some teams were cut more than others; several were wiped out entirely. As it turned out, though, the company went too far. As I was the first to report on Saturday, within hours of the layoffs, some managers were already being told to ask select laid-off employees if they wanted their old jobs back.

It began as a rumor on Blind, the app where employees of various companies can chat anonymously with their coworkers. But within a day it was being posted in public Slack channels.

“Sorry to @- everybody on the weekend but I wanted to pass along that we have the opportunity to ask folks that were left off if they will come back. I need to put together names and rationales by 4 PM PST on Sunday,” one such message from a manager to employees read. “I’ll do some research but if any of you have been in contact with folks who might come back and who we think will help us, please nominate before 4.”

“I think we might use some Android and iOS help,” the manager added. The company has been reaching out to both engineers and designers over the past day in an effort to get them back, Platformer is told.

Some employees are nervous that if Twitter can’t get them to return voluntarily, the company will formally rescind the notice they received Friday laying them off. Under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, businesses with more than 100 full-time employees are required to give 60 days notice if they lay off 33 percent or more of the staff. At Twitter, that notice included a promise to pay people for the next 60 days and give them a month of severance.

Now workers fear that if they refuse to return voluntarily, Twitter will fire them for abandoning their jobs, depriving them of what otherwise would have been three months’ pay. 

Some workers have begun to consult with lawyers over their options in the event that they are recalled. Others are in open revolt, tweeting public threads about various aspects of the organization that have been broken after the ready-fire-aim disaster of Musk’s layoffs process.

Meanwhile, remaining managers are bracing themselves for a much higher workload than they were previously used to. One person I spoke with was told that any technical manager should expect to manage at least 20 individual contributors, while also spending at least half their time writing code. Others have been given much higher numbers of direct reports.

II. The two Twitters

As today began at Twitter, there were essentially two groups at the company, one employee told me: those working on projects that Musk has been deeply involved in, such as the revamped Twitter Blue subscription, and everyone else.

“The couple of teams that are on his pet projects are doing 20-hour days,” one employee told me. “But the majority of the company is kind of just sitting around. No chain of command, no priorities, no organization chart, and in many cases, no idea who your manager or team is.”

To learn what they are supposed to do, employees looked to some unusual sources. After a number of celebrities and high-profile accounts began to impersonate him, Musk announced a new policy, via a tweet, that anyone found impersonating someone else would be permanently banned without warning. That was news to what remains of Twitter’s policy team, I’m told, and afterward some employees began discussing how to implement Musk’s edict.

Meanwhile, the health team was told to listen to Musk adviser David Sacks’ podcast for insights into why they had just lost half their colleagues, according to a former employee. Sacks, a venture capitalist who has been helping to manage the Musk transition, co-hosts the “All-In” podcast with fellow Twitter adviser Jason Calacanis and VC Chamath Palihapitiya.

“The most recent podcast covers the current layoffs happening across tech and provides some insight into why this is happening/necessary,” a vice president told employees. “I think it is worth listening to in order to understand the macro environment we are operating in.”

Most employees were more interested in their health benefits, which had suddenly become a question mark. The company’s open-enrollment period was supposed to begin today, according to its global calendar, but no information was available in the company’s human-resources system. Employees posted several questions about benefits inside Slack today, but all went unanswered by management.

III. The Blue disaster

By the day’s end, I’m told, at least some teams had begun to hold meetings in which employees were informed who their managers are, what their organization charts look like, and what their priorities will be.

But several employees I spoke with were still wrestling with one overarching question: do Musk and his team have any idea what they’re doing?

On one hand, the company is telling advertisers that it is thriving, The Verge’s Alex Heath reported, adding 15 million daily users since the end of the second quarter.

But the rollout of Musk’s first signature project, a new version of the Twitter Blue subscription that will allow anyone to get a verification badge, has been a disaster.

The company rolled out a new version of the app on Saturday with release notes that said the new Blue was now available. (The copy, written by Calacanis, was widely derided for sounding like a phishing email.) The problem is that Blue was not available, and so those who did subscribe found that they had merely gotten access to the current version of Blue.

Then, after a debate about the potential effects of unleashing thousands of new verified accounts onto the platforms in the middle of the US midterm elections, the company postponed the launch.

But the new Blue likely faces larger problems. The existing version only had a little more than 100,000 active subscribers, Platformer has learned. The new version will be 37.5 percent more expensive, and its value seems murky for most regular users of the platform. It’s unclear how the company will persuade enough people to subscribe to justify the effort.

Twitter employees tried to sell Musk and Sacks on the idea of asking business accounts to pay for extra features since many of them use Twitter to reach large audiences. But they were dismissed in favor of offering wide-scale verification first, I’m told.

Other employees have warned about a secondary feature of the new Blue that Musk added at the last minute: reducing ad load in the Twitter app by half. Estimates showed that Twitter will lose about $6 in ad revenue per user in the United States by making that change, sources said. Factoring in Apple and Google’s share of the $8 monthly subscription, Twitter would likely lose money on Blue if the ad-light plan is enacted.

“The business fundamentals are just not there,” said one former employee who worked on the plans.

Musk has been heavily involved in the chaotic launch of Blue, participating in standup meetings and exchanging regular emails with Esther Crawford, a director of product management at the company. “There is one decision-maker and that is me,” Musk told workers, according to meeting notes shared with employees in Slack.

“Any detail of Twitter Blue must be clear w/ him down to the last detail,” the message added.

But all of that could be a prelude to the biggest change of all: charging most or all users a subscription fee to use Twitter.

Both Musk and Sacks have discussed the idea in recent meetings, according to a person familiar with the matter. One such plan might allow everyone to use Twitter for a limited amount of time each month but require a subscription to continue browsing, the person said.

It could not be learned how serious Musk and Sacks are about the paywall; Twitter did not respond to a request for comment. It also does not appear imminent, as the Blue team is wholly occupied with the launch of expanded verification.

Still, given Twitter’s huge debt burden, the backward economics of Blue, and the recent pause in spending by major advertisers, it’s clear that Musk and his brain trust will have to do something to significantly increase revenue. And whatever they choose, it seems increasingly clear that Twitter will never be the same.

 

 

Quote

To learn what they are supposed to do, employees looked to some unusual sources. After a number of celebrities and high-profile accounts began to impersonate him, Musk announced a new policy, via a tweet, that anyone found impersonating someone else would be permanently banned without warning. That was news to what remains of Twitter’s policy team, I’m told, and afterward some employees began discussing how to implement Musk’s edict.

Meanwhile, the health team was told to listen to Musk adviser David Sacks’ podcast for insights into why they had just lost half their colleagues, according to a former employee. Sacks, a venture capitalist who has been helping to manage the Musk transition, co-hosts the “All-In” podcast with fellow Twitter adviser Jason Calacanis and VC Chamath Palihapitiya.

Doesn’t at all remind me of how the NKVD implemented Stalin’s decrees or North Koreans getting juche handbooks as guides on how to make decisions at the tractor factory. 

[DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt 12301]

This dude is going to end up in a psych ward. He’s off his fucking rocker. 
 

Watching him spend $44 billion dollars on Twitter and then destroy it is really fun to watch.

[Pig Bellmont 8664]

3 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

He’s bumbling his way through a job he’s unqualified for. He’s treating a human problem like an engineering problem, torching bridges and embarrassing himself in the process.

This is an excellent summary of the last two weeks 

[Brisketexan 104226]

Great.  Now, the main thing I'm getting out of this thread is that atomheart and I both think it would be freaking awesome to party with Danny Devito, and I'm trying to figure out why/how he left Susanna Hoffs off his list of island companions.  I'm chalking it up to a simple oversight.

[atomheartbevo 89304]

22 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Great.  Now, the main thing I'm getting out of this thread is that atomheart and I both think it would be freaking awesome to party with Danny Devito, and I'm trying to figure out why/how he left Susanna Hoffs off his list of island companions.  I'm chalking it up to a simple oversight.

[Chopper 17055]

18 hours ago, wildcat09 said:

Why am I not surprised to learn that Elon learned to do magic tricks? Dude almost certainly read The Game and thought it was actually a useful manual on how to pick up women.

Precisely. The next woman I hear who's not financially reliant on Elo will be the first.

Quote

“You become a hero to fringe people, and then they embrace you,” Moore told me. “If you have that psychological need for some kind of affirmation from people you’re interacting with, it must be very seductive.”

The way even obscenely wealthy tech bros consistently kiss his ass before offering the mildest criticism or suggestion is really something to behold. But those not in that sphere don't gaf about offending him, as evidenced by all the dunking on Elo on twitter. Unfortunately for tesla the small volume auto manufacturer, their corporate goodwill is highly correlated to Elo's name and reputation. It will take a lot of work for them to overcome that, especially because their target customer, particularly for the model they hope to produce and sell the most of, is not exactly the extreme far right.

It must be very depressing for Elo that he became the world's richest man and yet his balls belong to the Saudis and the Chinese. Besides plebe twitter users, they seem to be just about the only people who don't go out of their way to kiss his ass.

[dcbc 14367]

You guys and Devito are going to be too blitzed on rum ham to be of any use to Ms. Hoffs.

[Brisketexan 104226]

11 minutes ago, dcbc said:

You guys and Devito are going to be too blitzed on rum ham to be of any use to Ms. Hoffs.

[chainsaw 9810]

21 minutes ago, dcbc said:

You guys and Devito are going to be too blitzed on rum ham to be of any use to Ms. Hoffs.

Yeah but worst case you'll still have dinner and a show at Jersey Mike's

[Nice Guy Eddie 13388]

Sounds like a nightmare if you were chosen to remain at Twitter. The winners are those who were let go.

mass layoffs should take into account who wants to remain. Managers and directors frequently want to keep someone who wants to leave. If you keep them and triple their workload, they’re not staying.

[Francisco 2.0 32290]

Sobering read.  Also, a bit nerdy, but it's easy enough to follow.  Also, Elon related:  you can bet your ass he would have greenlighted this (if it hasn't been in place already).

 

 

 

And here's the entire Tweet thread rolled up:

 

Spoiler

To set the stage, this was the 2015-2016 era. @dickc was just ousted, though he was wonderful and made us feel like family. @jack came in as part-time CEO. Twitter had been near death for a while and was desperately trying to find a buyer. Facebook and Google both refused. 

Most people don't really appreciate how close Twitter was to shutting down. The 2016 election was the only thing that saved them and made them relevant again (to the detriment of us all). But I digress... 

I worked as a software engineer on a team with a charter to make Twitter work better for people in emerging markets (Brazil, India, Nigeria, etc...). This meant a lot of mobile work. And was mostly non-visual stuff - reducing bandwidth, memory usage, battery consumption. 

Oh and app size... we fought tooth and nail to keep the app under 10MB. FB had the money to zero-rate for people in India to d/l a 100MB app, but we did not. We finally lost the 10MB battle when Twitter Video launched (iirc). After that, all discipline around app size was lost. 

One of the first areas I worked on was improving the way our mobile apps uploaded logs. Twitter, like most mobile apps, logs *everything* users do – every swipe, tap, edit, delay, etc… – for debugging, metrics, and experiments.

The size of logs adds up quickly. 
In the app, HTTP responses were compressed, but requests weren't. Logs are highly compressible, so I wired up support to gzip HTTP requests, and tweaked our log ingestion server to handle these.

(That reduced mobile bandwidth consumption by ~40% iirc. It was absurd.) 

So I became known as the mobile logs guy. And that sets the stage for why I was pulled into a Sales conversation. Twitter was on its death bed and was desperate for money. A large telco wanted to pay us to log signal strength data in N. America and send it to them. 

My plan was to aggregate signal strength by carrier / by location. I worked with Data Science to find a granularity – minimum area size and minimum distinct users per area – that would preserve anonymity even when combined with other sources of data (differential privacy). 

When we sent this data to the telco they said the data was useless. They switched their request and said they want to be able to tell how many of our users are entering their competitors’ stores.

A bit sketchier, but maybe workable in a privacy respecting way? 
We ran an alternative by the telco. They didn’t like it and were frustrated. So was Sales. I was asked to go to telco’s HQ and figure out exactly what they want.

The subsequent request was absurd. 
I wound up meeting with a Director who came in huffing and puffing.

The Director said “We should know when users leave their house, their commute to work, and everywhere they go throughout the day. Anything less is useless. We get a lot more than that from other tech companies.” 
I responded with some variant of “No fucking way”.

There was no universe where I was going to help sell granular identifiable user location data.

This led to more internal meetings. Legal said the request was fine – none of it violated the user ToS. 
Normally they might find another engineer to do this work, but my whole team was aligned with the privacy concerns. Twitter had also just done layoffs (aside: time is a flat circle), so there were no spare engineers around. 

My team wasn’t touched by layoffs, but half of them had quit anyway. Twitter was having a mass exodus.

I had done what I could, but Twitter was no longer a place to do good work. I decided to join the exodus and would pull any levers to kill this on my way out. 
One random anecdote:

In the middle of this, I had gotten a new manager who, in a retention attempt I’ll never forget, said “If we filled a dump truck with money and dumped it on you, would you stay and build this?”

I wasn’t really sure how to respond to that… but no dice. 

My last email written at Twitter was to Jack. To his credit, he responded quickly with something to the effect of “Let me look into that and make sure there isn’t a misunderstanding. It doesn’t seem right. We wouldn’t want to do that.”

It was in his hands now. 

As far as I know, the project actually got canned. Jack genuinely didn’t like it.

I don’t know if this mindset will hold true with the new owner of Twitter though. I would assume Elon will do far worse things with the data. 

And, for the any employees still at Twitter, don’t underestimate the power of a pocket veto.

Sometimes it doesn’t work out, or you have to escalate and risk it back firing, but a good pocket veto is a tool to learn to wield well. 

 

Edited November 8, 2022 by Francisco 2.0

[RDCanecutter 26198]

15 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

And before anybody says “haha, he’s just trolling the haters” he’s the fucking owner and CEO and should be hanging out in a James Bond villain-inspired lair on a private island, surrounded by people he’s attracted to, not getting in flame wars at night with randos on Twitter and making advertisers think “yeah, I’m going to need to move those ad buys to Facebook or twitch or Amazon or YouTube.”

 

You assume he's like us if we were evil villains. Perhaps the bolded sentence is how the creature feeds itself, and reproduces.

[Chopper 17055]

2 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

And here's the entire Tweet thread rolled up:

 

  Reveal hidden contents

To set the stage, this was the 2015-2016 era. @dickc was just ousted, though he was wonderful and made us feel like family. @jack came in as part-time CEO. Twitter had been near death for a while and was desperately trying to find a buyer. Facebook and Google both refused. 

Most people don't really appreciate how close Twitter was to shutting down. The 2016 election was the only thing that saved them and made them relevant again (to the detriment of us all). But I digress... 

I worked as a software engineer on a team with a charter to make Twitter work better for people in emerging markets (Brazil, India, Nigeria, etc...). This meant a lot of mobile work. And was mostly non-visual stuff - reducing bandwidth, memory usage, battery consumption. 

Oh and app size... we fought tooth and nail to keep the app under 10MB. FB had the money to zero-rate for people in India to d/l a 100MB app, but we did not. We finally lost the 10MB battle when Twitter Video launched (iirc). After that, all discipline around app size was lost. 

One of the first areas I worked on was improving the way our mobile apps uploaded logs. Twitter, like most mobile apps, logs *everything* users do – every swipe, tap, edit, delay, etc… – for debugging, metrics, and experiments.

The size of logs adds up quickly. 
In the app, HTTP responses were compressed, but requests weren't. Logs are highly compressible, so I wired up support to gzip HTTP requests, and tweaked our log ingestion server to handle these.

(That reduced mobile bandwidth consumption by ~40% iirc. It was absurd.) 

So I became known as the mobile logs guy. And that sets the stage for why I was pulled into a Sales conversation. Twitter was on its death bed and was desperate for money. A large telco wanted to pay us to log signal strength data in N. America and send it to them. 

My plan was to aggregate signal strength by carrier / by location. I worked with Data Science to find a granularity – minimum area size and minimum distinct users per area – that would preserve anonymity even when combined with other sources of data (differential privacy). 

When we sent this data to the telco they said the data was useless. They switched their request and said they want to be able to tell how many of our users are entering their competitors’ stores.

A bit sketchier, but maybe workable in a privacy respecting way? 
We ran an alternative by the telco. They didn’t like it and were frustrated. So was Sales. I was asked to go to telco’s HQ and figure out exactly what they want.

The subsequent request was absurd. 
I wound up meeting with a Director who came in huffing and puffing.

The Director said “We should know when users leave their house, their commute to work, and everywhere they go throughout the day. Anything less is useless. We get a lot more than that from other tech companies.” 
I responded with some variant of “No fucking way”.

There was no universe where I was going to help sell granular identifiable user location data.

This led to more internal meetings. Legal said the request was fine – none of it violated the user ToS. 
Normally they might find another engineer to do this work, but my whole team was aligned with the privacy concerns. Twitter had also just done layoffs (aside: time is a flat circle), so there were no spare engineers around. 

My team wasn’t touched by layoffs, but half of them had quit anyway. Twitter was having a mass exodus.

I had done what I could, but Twitter was no longer a place to do good work. I decided to join the exodus and would pull any levers to kill this on my way out. 
One random anecdote:

In the middle of this, I had gotten a new manager who, in a retention attempt I’ll never forget, said “If we filled a dump truck with money and dumped it on you, would you stay and build this?”

I wasn’t really sure how to respond to that… but no dice. 

My last email written at Twitter was to Jack. To his credit, he responded quickly with something to the effect of “Let me look into that and make sure there isn’t a misunderstanding. It doesn’t seem right. We wouldn’t want to do that.”

It was in his hands now. 

As far as I know, the project actually got canned. Jack genuinely didn’t like it.

I don’t know if this mindset will hold true with the new owner of Twitter though. I would assume Elon will do far worse things with the data. 

And, for the any employees still at Twitter, don’t underestimate the power of a pocket veto.

Sometimes it doesn’t work out, or you have to escalate and risk it back firing, but a good pocket veto is a tool to learn to wield well. 

 

When I read that I wondered about every app I have on my phone. I keep it to a minimum but still...deezer, sonos, food delivery apps.

Also a worthless story related a bit to twitter, but with no point or redeeming value, but always a bit humorous to me so I want to tell it somewhere.

Spoiler

Back in the 80s I played tennis with a Saudi guy. He invited me to a party his friend (who was roughly 10 years older than us) was having. Friend lived in, at least part time, a very nice house. Tasteful. Good size but not huge. Fringe location right on El Camino in Menlo Park/Atherton. Party was off the hook esp for me, still like 19 y.o. Lavish food, huge ice sculptures, piles of cocaine in strategic places, gorgeous, elegant women. The party host was a guy who went by Waleed or even Wally. Small, quiet, wiry guy, but nice. Very much a nerd. In fact, they were all very nice and gracious to me and I'm jewish so I found that interesting. I saw Waleed a few more times in passing, he was always very nice. Next time I thought about him was 20 yrs later when I read his company was the largest shareholder in Fox and realized it was the same Waleed, and then again years later when the current kingdom leader/murderer MBS locked him and others in the Riyadh Ritz Carlton until they swore allegiance and pledged their assets to him. Now that very same motherfucker is by far elon's largest twitter shareholder.

 

[GopherRock 1765]

17 hours ago, chainsaw said:

this is also why i laugh whenever a politician claims he would run the government "like a business" as if businesspeople aren't capable of being bitchasses and losing billions in the process.

There's also the matter of a fundamental difference between government and business. Once you boil away all the altruistic bullshit, the sole purpose of a business is to make money for the owners. Government doesn't do that.

[Cornpop 230]

5 hours ago, Cheeseweasel said:

Rent free?

$8/mo

[Cornpop 230]

23 minutes ago, GopherRock said:

There's also the matter of a fundamental difference between government and business. Once you boil away all the altruistic bullshit, the sole purpose of a business is to make money for the owners. Government doesn't do that.

Well, our government anyway

[Chooky 13292]

By 2032 Elon will put twitter on the sun. 

[DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt 12301]

@Cornpop what was your most recent handle?

[wildcat09 29146]

2 minutes ago, DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt said:

@Cornpop what was your most recent handle?

4DoorsMoreWhores, and before that immortal13.

[Cheeseweasel 26437]

6 minutes ago, DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt said:

@Cornpop what was your most recent handle?

HollywoodColt.

[DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt 12301]

3 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

4DoorsMoreWhores, and before that immortal13.

makes sense...remind me again, he had a horrible life event and went completely off the reservation, right?

or am I thinking of another poster?

Just now, Cheeseweasel said:

HollywoodColt.

it's WestHollywoodCunt to you, sir.

[wildcat09 29146]

Just now, DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt said:

makes sense...remind me again, he had a horrible life event and went completely off the reservation, right?

or am I thinking of another poster?

He was a shitty person before that, but yeah that's him.

[Cornpop 230]

8 minutes ago, DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt said:

@Cornpop what was your most recent handle?

I'm a newbie...just here to make friends 😊

[SizzleChest 8275]

1 hour ago, Cornpop said:

I'm a newbie cunty little dipshit...on my fourth sock because I'm a loser. just here to make friends 😊

FIFY.

[Reagan1k 3005]

His style reminds me of someone who buys a car and then decides to do their own NTSB crash test on it.

Just because he's an engineer doesn't mean he can re-assemble or rebuild something that's intangible after he tears it up.

And I don't really use twitter - I'm no conductor, but I know a trainwreck when I see one.  

[F250 28623]

2 hours ago, DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt said:

makes sense...remind me again, he had a horrible life event and went completely off the reservation, right?

Yeah, his Whataburger was stolen from his truck in the parking lot of a Dollar Tree.

[crash_davis 23076]

Just now, F250 said:

Yeah, his Whataburger was stolen from his truck in the parking lot of a Dollar Tree.

well, life is about all the friends you meet along the way.

[Cornpop 230]

30 minutes ago, SizzleChest said:

FIFY.

Does this mean we can't be friends?

Edited November 8, 2022 by Cornpop
*asking for a friend

[chainsaw 9810]

16 minutes ago, Reagan1k said:

His style reminds me of someone who buys a car and then decides to do their own NTSB crash test on it.

Just because he's an engineer doesn't mean he can re-assemble or rebuild something that's intangible after he tears it up.

And I don't really use twitter - I'm no conductor, but I know a trainwreck when I see one.  

The main problem is the precedent represented by taking something people loved and ruining it, pretty much on purpose.

[atomheartbevo 89304]

5 minutes ago, chainsaw said:

The main problem is the precedent represented by taking something people loved and ruining it, pretty much on purpose.

I don’t even think it’s on purpose - he’s spending a lot of late nights replying to people, floating out ideas, etc. - I think he genuinely believes he can actually “fix” Twitter, but he clearly can’t read a room, and he clearly is not used to a company where the products/users take delight in trolling him,

There is some self-awareness that he’s in way over his head - witness his attempts to back out, and that he is aware that he paid far too much for Twitter.   And I think he definitely wants to “fix” the revenue stream, because since he borrowed against stock that has dropped a lot in value, that complicates things and he’s got some hefty payments coming up.  His ego would suffer massively if he loses control of Twitter because of financial problems.

He’s  got three main problems

1. He hates advertising, but advertising is %85-90 of the revenue.  I still don’t think he understands that advertisers are the customers and the users are the product.
2. He doesn’t actually understand what free speech means in the US.  It’s not because he’s from South Africa, because plenty of people born and raised here don’t understand free speech and the Constitution.  He could take 15 minutes and figure it out, but he’s made up his mind.
3. Combining #1 and #2, he wants to please a bunch of people who worship him or heap praise on him, but he does so at the risk of running off advertisers and their revenue,

There is another problem - China (supplier for Tesla) and Saudi Arabia (financial stake in Twitter) will lean on him at some point, and he’s shown that he is clearly in over his head when it comes to geopolitical stuff.  They will play him like a fool with a little bit of flattery.