Elon Musk goes Off the Rails

[Papageno]

So, will Twitter last through this month, let alone the year? It’s not looking good. The site and apps will just stop working soon, right?

[Calelari]

It probably won’t all fail at once. Bits and pieces will start falling off, like an old Chevy.

[Thrag]

Has anyone checked on the lettuce?

[Telefrog]

Wu-Tang is for the Children

[Telefrog]

Hahahaha shitshow.

Alex Cohen

Edit: Aw! It’s a parody account.

[Papageno]

Perfect!

And nice one, @Calelari! (although the guy misspelled “Tannhäuser”, and where’s the “shoulder of Orion” mention?)

(RIP Rutger Hauer)

[Houngan]

I’m honestly having trouble believing the last couple of beats in this story, if it were an episode of Silicon Valley I’d be annoyed because it had gotten so slapstick.

[jsnell]

@Timex

This new “vision” doesn’t seem to be clear at all, beyond “do whatever this new dude says, even though he has no idea how our business works.”

I think we know a bit more to it than that. E.g. he clearly wants to launch and iterate quickly with much less process, have engineers rather than product managers making the decisions, have engineers focus more on core coding and less on e.g. communication/glue work, and have people work {longer days, more intensely}.

Now, there are situations where you can imagine engineers to sign up for that kind of culture. A great team where everyone is firing on all cylinders, to quickly create and ship something revolutionary, and hopefully get rich doing it. The problem is that Musk’s Twitter will not have any of that. The teams of great people have been fired or left, the remaining people will be mostly firefrighting to keeping the legacy systems working, his vision is either stuff he thought of while being high or laughably iterative not revolutionary engineering, and it sounds like compensation going forward is going to be lower than at old Twitter.

So yes, it really isn’t a surprise that nobody is signing up. But it’s also easy to see how Musk - having been surrounded by sycophants by a decade - was not capable of understanding how unappealing his deal would be in this context vs. starting from scratch with much more ambitious agendas with SpaceX and Tesla.

@Menzo

Never underestimate the ability for engineers to be completely oblivious about anything unrelated to code.

@strategy

You’d be surprised.

I can’t exaggerate how many times I’ve had to ride shotgun on people to “click the goddamn invite” despite them being told over and over and over again to do so (on chat, email, and in person).

Oh, I know that people will not act immediately on most emails, and then will forget about them unless reminded multiple times over different channels.

But this is not asking them to fill the form for their food preference at the team Christmas party. This is a huge and controversial thing affecting literally everyone left in a company. This will have been discussed over every communication channel available (slacks, mailing lists, 1:1 meetings, team meetings, chatting with people over lunch or coffee). That is, not automated reminders to fill in the form, but your coworkers talking about what is happening. I’ve worked in places that Twitter’s cultural DNA got derived from; even much smaller controversies than this would become ambient knowledge almost instantly.

Literally the only way you’d avoid knowing the details is if you worked and talked with nobody, and also unsubscribed or muted all kinds of larger communication channels. It’s pretty hard to be a successful engineer in this kind of company with that attitude though. (Well, I guess in this special case it’s possible there are people who had all their coworkers fired.)

[Papageno]

I could sure think of more fun ways to blow 44 BILLION with a B dollars.

[triggercut]

Elon Musk

[Telefrog]

@Papageno

I could sure think of more fun ways to blow 44 BILLION with a B dollars.

Hey, it’s been fun for some of us!

[Thrag]

@jsnell

I think we know a bit more to it than that. E.g. he clearly wants to launch and iterate quickly with much less process, have engineers rather than product managers making the decisions, have engineers focus more on core coding and less on e.g. communication/glue work, and have people work {longer days, more intensely}.

Yup, he wants to run the company like an ambitious tech startup. The only problems being they are a huge company with not just a massive codebase but a vast proprietary infrastructure and that he’s not offering the “hardcore” employees a chance at equity in something that could blow up and make them all rich like an actual startup.

[HumanTon]

Bloomberg:

Musk’s Twitter Deal Remains in Focus for US Data-Security Review
Takeover still vulnerable to American national security review
Business exposure to Saudi, Qatar, China said to be concern
… The US government continues to seek information on confidential agreements that Musk made with foreign investors who hold stakes in Twitter after he bought it, and whether those deals allow them to access users’ personal data …

… But you can’t have a government investigation into your company if it no longer exists. Checkmate! #ElonIsAGenius #5DChess

[CLWheeljack]

@Houngan

If they’re worried about sabotage, I would think they would have to shut down remote access for most as well.

I would joke that they’ve fired all the people who knew how to revoke remote access…but I’m not sure if it would be a joke at this point.

[vinraith]

I assume they can’t verify who clicked on the survey because the guy in charge of the survey didn’t click on the survey?

[Houngan]

And thus we are firmly in the moose captions from Holy Grail.

[Papageno]

We apologize for the problem with the subtitles. The people responsible have been sacked.

But seriously (and I posted this elsewhere): It’s almost as if he planned to destroy the company in a couple to three weeks in some arcane way that leaves him financially unharmed (I don’t know how that would be because I’m not an überrich dude), just to get out of having to run it and be able to blame the people who worked there.

[triggercut]

Elon Musk exceptionalism is kinda taking a hit.

[HumanTon]

Before anyone asks: it has been 1.9 Scaramuccis since Musk took over Twitter.

[Houngan]

Is such an out exists, I find the idea far more believable than this clown car.