THe issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion.
Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive". Musk is not a proponent of that. He is a micromanaging, capricious, easily distracted, arrogant and vindictive CEO.
If twitter thrives then we can expect copycats to try and spread his shitty work philosophy (like everyone idolises Jobs.)
Jobs wasn't like Musk or Bezos, cared deeply about employees, despite the famous youthful tantrum stories (probably also true, but salacious so more famous): my friend's wife had a hard to diagnose condition (autoimmune it turned out, I believe) and Jobs offered unlimited use of his private jet to get her to any doctor anywhere.
I was similarly told to be with my very sick parent, no time constraints, and I was part of an inner sanctum engineering team, and later similar when I had a pet get ill, in all cases because we all had one another's backs, and we all were NOT fungible assets, but, rather, harmoniously integrated by years of working together and a strict hiring filter in the first place.
Yep. I had a stand-up row with Steve in the elevator in IL1. We stepped out to continue it, so others could use the elevator.
At no time did I think there'd be any retribution or problems because of this. We both had strong (and in this case, contrary) opinions, and Steve respected you a lot more if you voiced those opinions rather than just accept whatever he told you. He was also perfectly happy to over-rule you if you didn't persuade him, but he didn't want Yes-(wo)men around him.
I don't get that vibe from Musk. It's like he read some stories about how a maverick CEO can be an asshole and get away with it in some trashy red-top newspaper, and modeled his entire character around that.
The outliers compared to the famous stories, I think you mean.
I think you're right. Thing is what I wrote is factual as can be.
Your comment made me wonder, how much of Bezos and Musk sociopathy is innate, versus imitation of some excerpt popularly known of earlier successful albeit at times abrasive characters. And how might they be different if the decent stories were so well known, because they do exist.
I've been at Apple for 20 years now, and I've received stock every single year. A fair amount of it, actually.
If you don't accept that people new to something will make mistakes, then you're not going to get very far. Steve changed as much as Apple did over the years, and mostly for the better.
Can you please fix CoreBluetooth? It desperately needs async-await APIs :)
Also a non-location-permissions-based bluetooth background wakeup mode would be amazing
While we're at it, not locking new Swift features behind iOS X would be incredible. WWDC each year is basically "here's all the stuff you can use in 3-4 years when you can up the min-spec iOS"
>Jobs wasn't like Musk or Bezos, cared deeply about employees
I doubt if any CEO can pull it off for the long run without being caring enough about his/her inner circle. Even ruthless dictators have to be 'mostly' nice to their inner circle ( guards, butlers etc.).
The larger point being that often they can be ruthless with people who are not in the 'inner circle', sometime justifiably so and sometime not so justified. I'm basing all of this on typical human behavior, not specifically on Jobs/Musk/Bezos, of whom I know nothing. You will see this trait even in families, the stereotype of the current ruthless man being a gentle and loving father to his kids.
> THe issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion.
How bold, to speak for everyone ;-)
I really don't see this as a "treat employees nicely" issue. I'm open to being convinced otherwise. But... Elon's premise from day 0 was that Twitter was mismanaged -- bloated, misguided, bad as a business and broken as product. This echoes the sentiment even by many here on HN over the years. Now Elon owns it, and is undoing the hiring decisions of previous management, to start with a clean slate. Seems to me this was simply an inexorable part of his takeover, and so you may as well be saying it "wasn't nice" of Elon to buy the company.
Also, a completely different counterpoint: If an employee's layoff is inevitable, it is much nicer for that is be part of a mass layoff like this, rather than a surgical one later. Because these people have a perfect explanation for their dismissal when they apply at their next job.
I don’t think the point is that the layoffs themselves are “not nice”—I think most people are in agreement that Twitter was not particularly well-run. But there’s a difference between e.g. the layoffs we saw at Stripe yesterday and what’s happening at Twitter today.
The Stripe layoffs came with a clear message from the top brass, solid severance and benefits continuation options, etc., while Twitter staff have received no communication from new management (until the unsigned and rather robotic letter last night), arbitrarily implemented deadlines that require extreme hours, and what appear to me at least to be attempts by Twitter to construct cause in order to weasel out of severance and notification requirements.
Nobody is owed a job, layoffs are sometimes necessary, and Musk bought the company and can do whatever he wants within the bounds of the law, sure. But I think we’re all better off when we treat each other with respect, and that doesn’t seem to be happening here.
Even if we assume the changes are for good and will "fix" the company, asking people to work nights and week-ends while conducting mass layoffs in less than a week is a "treat employees nicely" issue.
Actually, I think we're more on the level of "threat employees with basic decency".
We don't actually know the situation. If he wants people to work 84 hour work weeks regularly - yeah that's a problem. I looked at it charitably. Twitter is in such bad shape the only choice is to burn out engineers in order to fix it. This points to terrible product management, which points to terrible engineering leadership, which points to a terrible C-suite. It sucks, but once you pass the point of no return you can't hire more people (they take months to ramp up), and you're gutting the low performers (they will slow you down), so unfortunately the work has to be foisted onto the rest. It's not a fun time, it will cause more people to quit, but it's also the only solution to fix a trainwreck if you notice the speeding freight train too late.
> If he wants people to work 84 hour work weeks regularly - yeah that's a problem.
No. The fact that it even crosses his mind as an acceptable demand at any time is a problem. No one, under any circumstance, should ever be asked to work that much in a week. It should be a criminal offense for an executive to even allow employees to work that much.
> Twitter is in such bad shape the only choice is to burn out engineers in order to fix it.
Nope. Even if it would otherwise go bankrupt that choice shouldn't legally be available.
And through a set of misguided decisions initially he caused advertisers to depart Twitter and revenue collapse.
I imagine the last man is dying 500 years from now and thinking "... now we just could have gotten to Mars if Elon Musk hadn't posted that tweet"
Selling advertising is all about the emotions of the buyer: you'd better believe that half the price of ads on the radio has to do with how the business owner feels when they hear their name on the radio and that the first, second and third tactic of the person who sells ads for your local newspaper is "I know this tiny ad in our paper costs about as much as an employee and it might not seem to pay for itself, but if you stop advertising your customers will think you went out of business."
> If an employee's layoff is inevitable, it is much nicer for that is be part of a mass layoff like this,
you mean an illegal one?
I suggest you try it.
Look the issue is this, Musk is creating a climate where it is expected that people effectively sleep at the office. Do you have a family? well you don't anymore.
and through all of this pain, shit stirring and general "disruption", there is no strategic leadership, or clear headed product leadership. Unless you count "pay to spam/harass" & scaring away your advertising partners as a product strategy.
Layoffs are not a strategy, they are a side effect.
* Not treating employees "nicely" (original comment above)
* Legality of layoffs (should be straightforward to determine)
* Environment where people are asked to work unreasonably-long hours --> Irrelevant to layoffs.
I would argue there is very clear leadership happening: Musk made the unambiguous (and by definition, clear) determination that Twitter's staff is bloated by 50%. Cut the fat, take the short-term hit in ads and usage, rebuild it stronger. Whether I agree with how he determined the "fat" isn't important.
While the idea that Twitter was mismanaged is certainly part of his motivation, it doesn’t explain Musk’s behavior at Tesla or “SlaveX”. In fact, flipping the table over the first week belies more than a little arrogance and little motivation to understand what he bought. (There’s reports that he wants to cut half of infrastructure costs. Fail whale anyone?)
He’s a billionaire that treats employees like shit.
> flipping the table over the first week belies more than a little arrogance and little motivation to understand what he bought
Typically you want to make major changes as soon as possible after a transition of power. It sets a new baseline to work from and avoids an overhang of fear that more drastic changes may be coming. You change regime and set a calm new normal.
It's also crucial to not then continue making drastic changes. Tbd on that.
I say that both for the weekend work crunch and the layoffs. The long hours and removal of benefits should be harsher on day one than going forward. You want to set the tone upfront and shake out people who aren't willing to go along, but you don't want to make unsustainable practices a constant. And you especially do not want the overhang of fear of additional layoffs coming.
So important to make harsh decisions day one and then back off a bit going forward.
That's not obviously unreasonable to me. "Half" is a suspiciously round number, but coming out of an era of very easy money, it'd surprise me if any large company doesn't have some double digit percentage of infra spending that's not really necessary.
> Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive".
I can't verify the veracity of this claim. Tech spans a wide spectrum of job conditions. I have worked in traditional suit and tie places, and show up with pizza stained sweat pants places.
Tech is a bastion of one thing in my opinion. It's a place where employees hold disproportionate power over the company. It's the one place where there is such a labor shortage, and enough smart people, that the companies will do what the employee wants in order to keep them happy. Make no mistake, no company tech or not wants to bend over backwards like tech companies have. Hence, all of the effort in outsourcing and getting code camps running.
Don't make the mistake of thinking tech is charitable. A lot of engineers I know are very soft because they think like this. Tech CEOs have a problem no other CEO has. A legion of smart, hard to replace, highly paid people that have enough power to demand more or less what they want.
The whining about Musk has to stop. He's being a dick about this because he has a personal vendetta against the old guard. When you look past the personal vendetta he is doing what anyone would do when a billion dollar turd is dropped on their desk. Dramatic, fast, often negatively viewed change.
Ask yourself, if Twitter was such an incredible company would the CEO have taken the offer? Probably not. The C-levels saw the ship sinking and rightfully jumped at the opportunity. Who is responsible for this lack of profitability? The old guard. So, task #1 is to get rid of them.
>Tech is a bastion of one thing in my opinion. It's a place where employees hold disproportionate power over the company. It's the one place where there is such a labor shortage, and enough smart people, that the companies will do what the employee wants in order to keep them happy.
On the other hand employees hold the power to also enable the company. I'm not accusing you of personally holding the "the company must do what I want" mindset, but at least for me what motivates is the idea of solving problems and helping people rather than lording some kind of power of them. IT has always felt powerful to me (and I'll be honest made me feel powerful in some small way) because it let me automate away things or make them measurably better. Hopefully I'm not alone in that.
Investment banks also face the problem of employees holding disproportionate power but they have a somewhat different solution than tech companies - keep the harsh working conditions and pay top performers huge bonuses.
If you're a fan of Matt Levine, "the modern investment bank is a socialist paradise run for the benefit of its workers."
It's common for a top trader to make more than the CEO at major banks. You'll see this on occasion at tech companies but generally pay is far flatter and so they come up with other ways to entice staff.
What's sad to me is, OK, if being a real hard-driving exploitative ass really is what it takes to organize people to make amazing products (mostly Jobs, a little of Musk), why aren't there any good people who do that to make their employees do great things for the world, and then put the profits to good use? (better use than Musk's "buy a $1M car and crash it immediately" style
.)
I think a lot of people would be OK with being pushed hard to really do something great, if they were paid fairly and the economic profits spent on good areas of society/customers, but not to enable a man-child's ego and waste.
(It related to the philosophical idea (not the implementation details) of Gates's "tax my consumption, not my income".)
Look up Bosch. It's a very large family-controlled company, and their dividends are 92% allocated to a foundation. I think in time we'll see similar examples in tech.
EDIT: Bosch is a tech company too, just an earlier generation.
To be fair, foundation ownership is used more as a way to bypass estate taxes in German businesses [0] as a charitable foundation can continue to give 30% of it’s income to the family who founded the foundation. This is a common corporate structure for a number of other family run German companies (ThyssenKrupp, Aldi, Lidl, Bertelsmann, etc) to bypass estate taxes.
In American terms, it would be the equivalent of the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation owning 60-70% of Meta’s stock, and Zuckerburg’s children continuing to get dividends and a significant ownership stake in FB while also bypassing estate taxes.
I think what would help with that is that we start not contrasting Bosch with tech, given that Bosch is a technology company in the most literal sense of that term. A lot of tolerance for these mistreatments comes from the mistaken illusion that 'tech' somehow requires people to act like megalomaniacs. A fair amount of car parts in Musk's very own car company come from Bosch
Absolutely agreed. But they're also an old school manufacturer as opposed to the more modern form of IP-focused tech company that tries as hard as possible not to be in the manufacturing game.
> I think what would help with that is that we start not contrasting Bosch with tech, given that Bosch is a technology company in the most literal sense of that term
The question I would ask - is that foundation just a tax haven for the family profits, or is it actually doing positive things (could also be both)? Same with Patagonia listed in a child comment - a lot of positive press came from the recent moves, but they were also incredibly self-serving for the family from a monetary point of view.
Both. Foundations allow HNW individuals to pass on large portfolios to descendants while also providing PR, Comms, and Political benefits to the family. (Note to Self - flesh out w/ source).
It doesn’t take being horrible and exploitative to build amazing things - it takes that kind of to make insane amounts of money building amazing things.
Because no one has the same definition of what "great" is, and right when you start making money others will hate you and consider your vision bad (cf. Other comments replying to you)
Musk indeed appears to see himself as an agent of humanity's salvation, including in its treatment of Twitter employees. And to be honest, while I and likely many people would see it as self-serving delusion of grandeur, it's hard to believe he's not at least genuine in his belief: you can't really suspect him of wanting to take over Twitter (and all of its headaches) for money.
Sadly his whole save humanity thing is a schtick..
If you investigate his back story, who he works with, it becomes clear it's not about Mars.
His real enterprise is a massive DoD program, built off the Strategic Defense Initiative (the "real" Star Wars). Republicans have been trying to resurrect it for decades and Elon was part of it since at least 2001. The idea is to intercept ballistic missiles from space and end the threat of nuclear armegeddon. In that sense he is trying to "save humanity", but it's misguided because the project is already aggrevating China and Russia and is fundamentally destablizing to the nuclear stalemate/M.A.D.
This project, operating under the Space Development Agency and working with the Missile Defense Agency, requires Republicans to fund--Biden and most Democrats been trying to stop it. Twitter helps Musk with the elections and boosting Republican power, while currying favor from them when it comes to these contracts.
If you're interested to know more, Mike Griffin is the ringleader.. he goes way back with Elon. Read his career history:
Starlink is building up the basic tech for these constellations--currently just sensing ballistic missiles and hypersonics--but with Starship, putting kinetic weapons in orbit become feasible. Some good references here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Military_capabilities
From your past comments (i was curiois and checked) i see that you cant pass the oportunity to mention Griffin and Starlink and this somehow indicates that sole purpose and motivation for musk is DoD contracts, and hes in the game only for military purpose.
Yes military will use thing they can to theyr advantage, but acording to your logic all industries that manufacture anything of use for military is doing everything they do ONLY becaus of DoD.
Should clarify, this isn't the _only_ motivation for Musk, but building what is basically SkyNet is one of his main considerations and ties in with his AI threat commentary.
> why aren't there any good people who do that to make their employees do great things for the world, and then put the profits to good use? (better use than Musk's "buy a $1M car and crash it immediately" style .)
You mean like the guy who's trying to address the main existential risks facing humanity right now? Last I checked, Musk created Tesla to counteract the existential risk of climate change, Neuralink to counteract the existential risk of AI, and SpaceX to counteract the existential risk of asteroids and other planet-killing catastrophes. Maybe that's why the people at his companies stay despite being pushed so hard?
He could definitely stand to be less of an ass, but I can at least recognize that Musk is actually doing the kind of good work that you're talking about.
Buddy you’ve drunk too much of the kookaide. Musk is telling stories. Look at what he did to the ca bullet train. Don’t believe his “vision”
Is for good.
My claim was not that Musk was "good" in whatever way you conceptualize that. My claim was that Musk's main focuses are commercial ventures that are very targeted at combating the main existential risks facing humanity. This is exactly the kind of good that the OP was talking about.
That's your claim, but it's simply and obviously false. SpaceX is not about "making humanity interplanetary", it is about selling cheap rockets for commercial exploitation of space (and/or it is a DoD weapons "defense" program). Tesla is a car company, aimed at making and selling cars.
Stopping global warming requires more mass transit, and Musk is actively opposed to that. "Making humanity interplanetary" is simply impossible with current or forseeable technology, so there is no sense in attempting yet (especially since we can develop this technology on Earth, by creating self-sustaining habitats in the Arctic desert, if we really want to).
> SpaceX is not about "making humanity interplanetary", it is about selling cheap rockets for commercial exploitation of space (and/or it is a DoD weapons "defense" program).
Sure, as an interim step to making humanity interplanetary. Are you suggesting that he could find commercial success without taking those intermediate steps?
> Tesla is a car company, aimed at making and selling cars.
Tesla make solar roofs and grid level energy storage. Like I said, it's portfolio is very clearly geared at climate change solutions.
> Stopping global warming requires more mass transit, and Musk is actively opposed to that.
Maybe he is (I've heard he's a bit of a germaphobe). I suspect he also recognizes that America is a car culture and that that won't change anytime soon.
> Sure, as an interim step to making humanity interplanetary. Are you suggesting that he could find commercial success without taking those intermediate steps?
My point is that the rockets are the easiest part of settling Mars. We already had rockets, and scaling that up was never a huge unknown. The real problems with settling Mars are the things that Musk is spending nothing on - building safe self-sustaining habitats in extreme conditions. Until we have a 10000+ self-sustaining city underground in the Arctic, there is 0 reason to send more than a handful of people to Mars (like we did to the Moon). So, if you actually care about that, you should be investing in the Arctic city, not Mars.
> I suspect he also recognizes that America is a car culture and that that won't change anytime soon.
We can try to guess what he believes, or we can look at his actions and their results - and in the latter case, he has repeatedly spoken and acted against public transport (in most hyper-loop and Boring Company presentations at least).
> We already had rockets, and scaling that up was never a huge unknown.
Then why did NASA never create cost-effective reusable launch vehicles?
> The real problems with settling Mars are the things that Musk is spending nothing on - building safe self-sustaining habitats in extreme conditions.
I'm not sure how this refutes the claim that this is one of his ultimate goals. He's not going to invest in the kind of research you describe until it's necessary or will plausibly create a return. He has to keep a business focus to continue funding these efforts because governments have been seriously falling short.
> We can try to guess what he believes, or we can look at his actions and their results - and in the latter case, he has repeatedly spoken and acted against public transport (in most hyper-loop and Boring Company presentations at least).
OK, I still don't see why that's problem. Public mass transit is not going to save the planet on its own. Personal transport is something like only 20% of global emissions. EVs can get that down to below 5%, and public transit might make another single digit difference over that. It's just not a big change.
> Then why did NASA never create cost-effective reusable launch vehicles?
Because NASA was usually about pushing the limits of science and engineering, not making money on space launches. Also, it has often been severely mismanaged.
> I'm not sure how this refutes the claim that this is one of his ultimate goals. He's not going to invest in the kind of research you describe until it's necessary or will plausibly create a return. He has to keep a business focus to continue funding these efforts because governments have been seriously falling short.
You're the one claiming SpaceX was created to address an existential crisis. I'm telling you SpaceX is not bringing us any closer to being an interplanetary species, and if Musk cared about this goal, he wouldn't have invested in SpaceX to begin with.
>OK, I still don't see why that's problem. Public mass transit is not going to save the planet on its own. Personal transport is something like only 20% of global emissions. EVs can get that down to below 5%, and public transit might make another single digit difference over that. It's just not a big change.
No, they can't. Replacing all ICEs with EVs would basically require doubling the electricity grid in the USA for example, and that is simply not a realistic possibility - especially given that the grid is already far too dirty and we need to replace a huge amount of it with green tech to reach CO2 emissions goals even without the extra pressure from EVs.
So, the realistic goal is to significantly expand the much much more efficient public transport (trains, buses, trams, metro) to significantly reduce the amount of cars (which will also do wonders for reducing congestion), and convert just the remaining cars to EVs, at a rate that can be supported by the grid while also shutting down existing coal, oil and gas power production.
> Because NASA was usually about pushing the limits of science and engineering, not making money on space launches.
Pushing science and engineering requires using money wisely, and creating a reusable launch vehicle is an obvious way to do that. In fact NASA did have multiple efforts that ultimately stalled, and literally none of them looked like what SpaceX did. You simply have no basis upon which to claim that SpaceX's reusable launch vehicles were not innovative.
> You're the one claiming SpaceX was created to address an existential crisis. I'm telling you SpaceX is not bringing us any closer to being an interplanetary species, and if Musk cared about this goal, he wouldn't have invested in SpaceX to begin with.
I honestly have no idea how you can conclude this. We're taking our first baby steps into space and you're saying baby steps are meaningless because they're far from running marathons. This argument is incredibly unconvincing.
> No, they can't. Replacing all ICEs with EVs would basically require doubling the electricity grid in the USA for example, and that is simply not a realistic possibility
The grid needs to expand anyway to handle renewable intermittency. You're also assuming that EVs would be powered from the grid. Tesla has the powerwall and solar roof tiles to address distributed power generation rather than reliance on the grid for everything.
> So, the realistic goal is to significantly expand the much much more efficient public transport (trains, buses, trams, metro) to significantly reduce the amount of cars (which will also do wonders for reducing congestion), and convert just the remaining cars to EVs, at a rate that can be supported by the grid while also shutting down existing coal, oil and gas power production.
What I'm reading here is that Musk's Tesla is addressing the existential risk of climate change, just not in the way you personally think it should be addressed. Seems beside the point frankly.
> You simply have no basis upon which to claim that SpaceX's reusable launch vehicles were not innovative.
I didn't claim that they were not innovative, I claimed that they were not revolutionary - that is a big difference.
> We're taking our first baby steps into space and you're saying baby steps are meaningless because they're far from running marathons. This argument is incredibly unconvincing.
We have taken our first baby steps into space a few decades ago, and none of what SpaceX is currently doing is bringing us to any place new - we've already been to the Moon and to Mars, and we've been to plenty more exotic places.
The problem of space colonization is just not the rockets.
> The grid needs to expand anyway to handle renewable intermittency.
The grid needs to expand, but the fewer consumers there are, the less it needs to expand, so the easier it is to close down the big polluters.
> What I'm reading here is that Musk's Tesla is addressing the existential risk of climate change
I am saying that overall EVs are at best close to neutral - they obviously pollute less than ICEs if the grid is green enough, but they will also delay the green-ification of the grid if adopted in enough numbers to matter. Not to mention, Teslas are typically pretty big cars. If Musk cared about climate change and it weren't just an afterthought, there are more important businesses he could have gotten into (such as green power generation directly).
> I didn't claim that they were not innovative, I claimed that they were not revolutionary - that is a big difference.
Sure, but I'm not sure why SpaceX has to be revolutionary in that sense. It was revolutionary in the sense of taking space launches private. Or am I wrong in thinking SpaceX was the first company to successfully commercialize space launch, and the first company to successfully dock a commercially financed and owned vehicle with the ISS?
> We have taken our first baby steps into space a few decades ago, and none of what SpaceX is currently doing is bringing us to any place new
So what? You can't build a skyscraper without the right foundation. SpaceX is still building the foundations for routine space flight. Again, this seems like you complaining that you don't yet have a penthouse when they're still pouring the concrete foundation.
> If Musk cared about climate change and it weren't just an afterthought, there are more important businesses he could have gotten into (such as green power generation directly).
Firstly, the incumbents are too large in that industry to compete with. He was a millionaire when he started Tesla, and you wanted him to focus on building wind turbines or solar cells to compete with huge multinationals like Siemens? Come on. Electric vehicles was completely underserved market by contrast, a clear business opportunity that also serves similar ends.
Secondly, nobody is so altruistic that they'd work as hard as Musk does on something that they weren't passionate about, even if it were good for humanity. Musk clearly likes cars. Humanity arguably needs electric cars. Musk combined a passion for cars with humanity's need. This is what progress under capitalism looks like.
To say he should work slavishly on something he's not passionate about for the betterment of humanity is setting up an ethical bar that nobody would clear. The people who do work on non-profits are passionate about that.
> It was revolutionary in the sense of taking space launches private.
Good for him? I'm not sure why that is something to praise.
> Again, this seems like you complaining that you don't yet have a penthouse when they're still pouring the concrete foundation.
It's the other way around: cheap space flight is the penthouse of planetary colonization. The foundation is the ability to build a self-sufficient colony. Once we were able to colonize the least hospitable places on Earth, only then would it make sense to think about how we move this technology to Mars - 50 or 100 years from now, most likely.
It's also worth noting that we have no reason to assume that a human population can even survive on Mars, as we have no idea if humans can live long term or even reproduce in Martian conditions (especially the very low gravity). Before even thinking about this colonization, we would actually have to establish whether it's possible for mammals to live long term and reproduce in low-G conditions. If it's not, there's a whole new world of technology we would have to discover before attempting it.
SpaceX is to Mars colonization like buying your dream wedding dress not just before finding a boyfriend, but before even knowing if you're gay or straight.
> Firstly, the incumbents are too large in that industry to compete with.
You could say the same for the car industry itself.
> Musk clearly likes cars. Humanity arguably needs electric cars. Musk combined a passion for cars with humanity's need.
You mean Antarctica, not the Artic. The Arctic refers to regions/countries along the Artic Ocean which includes Canada, USA, and Scandinavia. The reason Antarctica is not developed is because of an series of treaties known as the Antarctic Treaty System [1]. It's an agreed upon 'pristine environment' for research. Development is prohibited and there are extreme measures to maintain its relatively pureness. For one fun example - poop cannot be disposed of on premises. It needs to be bagged up and shipped back home to be disposed of.
Rocketry is a similar story. Rockets, since the 60s, have gradually become less capable and more expensive. For instance Boeing/Lockheed have been granted defacto unlimited taxpayer money to develop a basic functional 'homegrown' rocket system - the SLS. The goal was achieve little more than we did in the 60s. They started work 11 years ago, have received more than $30 billion, and and have yet to manage to get off the ground. Stay tuned for their latest failure - they will [fail to] launch on November 14th! For reference, we went from nothing to putting a man on the moon in 9 years in the 60s.
If it ever manages to be fit for duty, the SLS is estimated to cost an average of $2 billion per flight, and is completely incapable of landing massive-load cargo on Mars, let alone transiting things back. It's completely and absolutely unfit for duty. Most of everything Musk has done with SpaceX was being mocked as literally impossible by Boeing et al (by Tory Bruno) while he was struggling to achieve rapid reuse among various other technologies which have completely revolutionized the industry.
We would not be getting to Mars had SpaceX (or a similar company) not emerged.
I was actually referring to the Arctic (North Pole), though I did forget how little land is actually there.
Regardless, a self-sustaining habitat is a research project, and it will not be successful without political/diplomatic agreement.
Note that outer space is anyway in the same situation - you can't just settle outer space and claim it's your own - especially Mars, which is still a pristine environment that could even possibly harbor signs of life.
If Musk did have anything to do with slowing or stopping that colossal waste of taxpayer funds I would say his “vision” is superior to any of the politicians who supported it.
Yeah, a what a "waste" to build high-speed trains... I don't even understand how such a gigantic country can even exist without a safe, quick and inexpensive way to transport its citizens (so not by plane or by car).
Safe? Shall we use BART as an existing example of that?
Quick? No. Fast maybe. It’s hard to replicate the quickness of jumping into your car and hopping onto the freeway to get somewhere. Little or no planning required. Yeah the train if it is deployed as envisioned would be faster.
Inexpensive? The latest estimate is 107 Billion. Hardly inexpensive.
"Musk killed the California bullet train" is basically a pizzagate-level conspiracy theory. The NYT reporting among many others makes clear the tragicomic level of shambolic mismanagement from the CA gov't.
The state was warned repeatedly that its plans were too complex. SNCF, the French national railroad, was among bullet train operators from Europe and Japan that came to California in the early 2000s with hopes of getting a contract to help develop the system.
The company’s recommendations for a direct route out of Los Angeles and a focus on moving people between Los Angeles and San Francisco were cast aside, said Dan McNamara, a career project manager for SNCF.
The company pulled out in 2011.
“There were so many things that went wrong,” Mr. McNamara said. “SNCF was very angry. They told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and helped them build a rail system.”
Morocco’s bullet train started service in 2018.
But sure, blame Elon for California setting tens of billions of dollars on fire with nothing to show for it. Also Florida just built a high speed rail in under a decade for about 1/30th the per-mile cost of the CA project and it'll be open early next year.
Separately the Florida "HSR" isn't all that comparable because it only goes 80mph with a planned max of 125mph for future routes, and afaict a lot of it was built on an existing corridor. Again, not to say California HSR has been well managed, but imo it's not a particularly useful datapoint to compare against.
No, the allegation is that he released a white paper to hype people about a nonviable technology he had no actual interest in building in an attempt to derail HSR, presumably because it will hurt his car sales.
That seems so wrong to me that it's hard to take in that people would believe it.
There is - to me - obviously no chance that that would derail HSR, and Musk is definitely smart enough to understand that.
Also, the effect on car sales 15 years in the future in a small corner of the global market is such a tiny thing. I'd easily believe that, as a California tax payer, he was annoyed at $100B being spent on something that probably won't work.
> There is - to me - obviously no chance that that would derail HSR, and Musk is definitely smart enough to understand that.
Well he seems to be that dumb then. That or Ashley Vance is a complete and total liar. fwiw I think it was a long shot but not as absurd as you see it. There was already a lot of opposition to it with decades of no progress and money spent without a single mile of track being built, meanwhile Elon was quite the rising star of green technology. He had a vision for transportation of personal automobiles + tunnels and hyperloop and all he had to do was get legislators to buy into it compared to an unpopular embarrassment of a project.
But either way, you're right I probably shouldn't have included speculation as to why he did it.
> annoyed at $100B being spent on something that probably won't work.
So instead he proposed something that definitely won't work?
Also I'm not aware of anyone at any point that thought it "probably won't work". A waste of money, mismanaged, is gonna get cancelled, etc? Sure, but it was proven technology 30 years ago.
The HSR was boondoggle from the start. It's like designing a downtown to airport subway but then in the political process all political entities in between make it required it serve their community before approving the plan so you end us with a snaking line that takes 60 minutes to get to the airport instead of a straight line taking 15 minutes.
You're a bit off on your points, but that's okay. He really talks a lot, doesn't he?
> Musk created Tesla to counteract the existential risk of climate change,
He created Tesla for the money that's in the growing electric car market
> Neuralink to counteract the existential risk of AI,
Neuralink exists for the possible future where neural computer interfaces are successful and popular so he can make lots of money
> and SpaceX to counteract the existential risk of asteroids and other planet-killing catastrophes.
Actually, SpaceX exists because there's tons of money to be made with government and commercial contracts.
> Maybe that's why the people at his companies stay despite being pushed so hard?
It's probably more because they like getting paid so they can afford nice things while they're not working. It might also be because Musk enterprises are in "interesting" areas of the job spectrum and thus workers might be more tolerant to bullshit because they get to tell themselves they launched a rocket into space.
> He created Tesla for the money that's in the growing electric car market
He arguably created that market. The same applies to your other points. Musk created the markets that didn't exist before. Others had tried and failed, so I'm sorry, but you just can't deny that. It could be luck, so I suppose we'll see.
I have no doubt that Musk is interested in making money. I also have no doubt he enjoys that money from time to time. However, I think it's indisputable that no other billionaire works as hard as he does at his ventures, and I think a lot of his interest in that money is so that he can continue funding work to combat those existential risks.
> It's probably more because they like getting paid so they can afford nice things while they're not working.
Maybe you should read up on the working environment at these companies. There's not as much downtime as you imply. I personally wouldn't want to work for him given his management style, even on these existential problems.
He didn't, he started the company at a time where governments all over the word started to really (depending on the country, obviously) kick companies butts for not innovating. There where electric cars before he started his company. Now, you could argue that he made it popular with the people, but I argue that the market penetration, especially during the early years, hasn't been sufficient for that.
Musk also didn't invent space travel. You may have a point with neuralink, but I have yet to see a successful product come from that so if he is to create that market I'll give him that.
He's really good at making his opinions heard though. Other companies don't have a relatively unfiltered channel like this, so it's easy to see how his viewpoints stick out.
> He didn't, he started the company at a time where governments all over the word started to really (depending on the country, obviously) kick companies butts for not innovating. There where electric cars before he started his company.
Yes, and they all failed commercially. I'm not sure what point you think I'm making. It's undeniable that Musk was instrumental in creating the first commercially successful electric car. If he took advantage of government incentives to do so, that doesn't seem relevant, that's just good business sense.
If your argument is that anyone could have succeeded in that environment, then why was Tesla the only successful electric car manufacturer for literally years? Do you disagree that the roadster made electric cars cool, and changed public perception on electric vehicles?
> Musk also didn't invent space travel.
Again, I'm not sure why this is relevant. Musk created the first commercially successful private launch company. Do you agree or disagree?
I'm not disputing that Musk is also after money and fame and probably a few other things. I'm not sure why that's relevant to my point either. Even if it's enlightened self-interest driving him, it remains the case that Musk either founded or took over and pushed successful commercial ventures that are tackling existential risks to humanity.
> then why was Tesla the only successful electric car manufacturer for literally years
Because every other car manufacturer had no incentives to invest in that space when their ICE technology was working well for them. Musk made the bet that he could go big and make lots of money with that missed opportunity, and he arguably did.
Other electric car companies weren't competing because it takes absurd amounts of money or people willing to give you that money, which Musk has.
> Do you disagree that the roadster made electric cars cool, and changed public perception on electric vehicles
I don't live in the US and honestly, while I saw some tesla cars rolling around here, their popularity correlated very strong with the rise of other brands. It's almost like consumers aren't opposed to the idea of electric vehicles, it's just that until that point all options where shit and tesla finally put some pressure on that market, so the other companies reacted.
> Musk created the first commercially successful private launch company. Do you agree or disagree?
He did, and I argue that it's just like the first point, it was inevitable and Musk made the right call to invest his money in commercial launch operations because there where tons of money to be made.
This wasn't about if he started those companies, it's about the why. And the why is: There's tons of money to be made.
> This wasn't about if he started those companies, it's about the why. And the why is: There's tons of money to be made.
Yes, the question is indeed why: so why did he just so happen to invest in the only ventures where humanity is facing existential risk, when there are so many other ventures that could also have yielded great returns with less risk? Are you suggesting it's merely coincidence? Or is it simply more plausible that Musk recognized the problems that needed solving and found a way to make lots of money from them?
I disagree that those ventures, besides tesla, are things where humanity faces existential risks. We don't need commercial space travel to counteract asteroids. If there is an asteroid that will become a problem for humanity, the whole world will scramble to address it. Those things don't appear out of thin air.
I have yet to see someone successfully explain how neuralink will protect anyone from "AI".
Electric cars may have some success shifting our oil based man-transports to electric, but the world fails to use the advantages that brings and just burns more coal.
Hyperloop doesn't address any urgent problem, it's a moonshot with potential to earn absurd amounts from public contracts.
Twitter is actively harmful for humanity.
So, besides tesla, for which there was probably the best monetary incentive, none of those companies achieve any higher function you advertise then to have.
> I disagree that those ventures, besides tesla, are things where humanity faces existential risks. We don't need commercial space travel to counteract asteroids. If there is an asteroid that will become a problem for humanity, the whole world will scramble to address it. Those things don't appear out of thin air.
Firstly, you seriously underestimate the asteroid risk. They literally do appear out of the void and we do not have the resources to track them all, and existing efforts are seriously underfunded. Having a commercial entity that regularly performs multiple launches per year is invaluable as it means we can react more swiftly in case of a late detection, or have multiple attempts at deflecting it. NASA previously had very few launches by comparison, and the fact that their launch systems were not reusable without significant refits makes it ridiculous to claim that we would be just as safe without SpaceX.
Secondly, asteroid risk is only one risk to planet Earth. Another is nuclear war, or climate change, or an even more deadly pandemic, or any number of other things. Making humanity interplanetary requires reliable and frequent launch capability.
> I have yet to see someone successfully explain how neuralink will protect anyone from "AI".
If you agree that artificial general intelligence is an existential risk to humanity, then why is it a risk, exactly? presumably because it has computational abilities that we cannot match with biology. Does it not then follow that augmenting biology with those same abilities would somewhat mitigate those risks? Whether that pans out remains to be seen, but AI performance is accelerating so this is going to become a serious problem within 20 years.
> Hyperloop doesn't address any urgent problem, it's a moonshot with potential to earn absurd amounts from public contracts.
The boring company is not one of his ventures to combat existential risk, and so is not something Musk cares about too much. Why do you think he called it the boring company? Because its products are boring by comparison.
> Twitter is actively harmful for humanity.
He literally just bought it, and he has explicitly stated that he thinks Twitter is important for a functioning democracy. How about you give him a chance to actually prove it out.
Furthermore he didn’t start Tesla anyway - it was founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Musk didn’t invest in it until 2004 and didn’t become CEO until 2008.
The guy is a loon, and while I think he’s done some good for the world (mostly via Tesla), he’s a walking, talking clusterfsck of Dunning-Kruger, narcissism, and unchecked ego.
I don't know enough about the statistics to really give an opinion on that, but I'm usually in the "progress in technology is good fit humanity" camp, so I think I'll agree here until proven otherwise.
Might want to check again. He didn't create Tesla, he invested in it. ~Musk didn't create SpaceX, he invested in it.~ EDIT: the SpaceX one is wrong.
And IMHO, if he was really concerned about the existential risk for AI, perhaps he shouldn't have let the Ethical AI research team go from Twitter.
To be clear, Ethical AI - being able to trace an AI's decisions and vet that those decisions aren't being biased by improper input data - is a big topic in research groups right now. It's actually quite fascinating.
> He didn't create Tesla, he invested in it. Musk didn't create SpaceX, he invested in it.
Even if true (Wikipedia disagrees), it's a distinction without a difference. Arguably, neither SpaceX nor Tesla would be where they are now without him.
> And IMHO, if he was really concerned about the existential risk for AI, perhaps he shouldn't have let the Ethical AI research team go from Twitter.
Arguably the kind of AI Twitter needs doesn't pose an existential risk. He's trying to make Twitter profitable so that's obviously a waste of money.
AI (let's be real, we're actually talking about ML here) doesn't need to pose an existential risk to harm people in the real world. And given that tweets are displayed and promoted using ML algorithms, the ethicalness of the ML algorithms matters to Twitter's userbase.
Sure, but is that what the Ethical AI research team was actually working on? Because that's not what AI ethics typically means, which is a broader focus on AI alignment problems. Even if so, that may not be the most effective or efficient way to do it. We'll just have to see how it turns out, it's all speculation now, and impugning is character based on such moves is premature.
This is pure speculation, but I'm guessing they were working on ensuring that the ML models built by Twitter to do things like content moderation, tweet promotion, identifying trending hash tags, customer service help, and more were behaving in an ethical manner.
More concretely: Helping the teams who actually build and maintain these models ensure that the behavior isn't biased, that the model isn't being exploited by adversarial data, that the decisions made by the model are explainable, that the decisions are fair, coming up with corporate-standard-definitions for those various mutable terms (like fair), etc.
The usual things handled by a team that is tasked with AI Assurance/Ethics.
Now for my opinion: When it comes to impugning Elon Musk's character, he's done enough of that himself. He doesn't need my help. Additionally, firing an AI Ethics team in a company which requires AI(ML) to even operate speaks for itself.
> This is pure speculation, but I'm guessing they were working on ensuring that the ML models built by Twitter to do things like content moderation, tweet promotion, identifying trending hash tags, customer service help, and more were behaving in an ethical manner.
Sure, but this is just a feature of the product in question, so if you have some metrics to measure such outcomes then the product developers themselves can do this checking as part of their development process. I'm not sure why this would need to be a separate division. Presumably Tesla's autonomous driving developers are also creating metrics to ensure they don't run over dogs and children, they don't need a separate ethics division to tell them this is important.
Literally from the second paragraph from Wikipedia: "Tesla was incorporated in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning as Tesla Motors. The company's name is a tribute to inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla. In February 2004, via a $6.5 million investment, Elon Musk became the largest shareholder of the company."
Also you weren't wrong about Tesla. Elon did basically create Tesla (as well as Straubel). Quick summary:
Originally "Tesla" the brand, was started by Martin and Marc, but all they had was a brand and a vision but no physical product nor prototype.
At around the same time, Elon wanted to build an electric car based off the tzero by AC Propulsion. He was introduced to Martin and Marc who had a similar vision, and basically Elon invested money into Tesla Motors.
It wasn't until Elon put in money, that the first prototype was built (the tesla roadster). Arguably, if Elon didn't join the team and bring on Straubel, Tesla wouldn't be what it is today. Likely wouldn't even have a launched consumer product. Even Elon was the one that managed to get the trademark "Tesla Motors" which wasn't even owned by Martin or Marc originally.
On SpaceX this is false as it was entirely his vision alone from the get-go. There was (is) a joke in aerospace. How do you become a millionaire? Be a billionaire and start an aerospace company. Until SpaceX it was just a blackhole of money in spite of plenty of very clever individuals, including John Carmack, trying to their hand at it.
On Tesla this your statement is technically true, but misleading. 7 months after the company was founded, and made up of just a handful of people, Musk invested and became the majority shareholder and chairman of the board. He would go on to eventually remove the original founders of the company (over disagreements that were never publicly revealed) before production began on their first product. The original founders played no meaningful role in the company we now know as Tesla.
The problem is that improper input data can come from data scientists, or it can be a result of the same issues that cause society's bias. In that later case it isn't improper data so much as data properly collected from an improper society. That is super complicated to adjust for even if you decide to do so. Children of poverty that are malnourished grow up with deficits that might make them less valuable employees, extending the cycle. But the data and AI were not wrong to correlate childhood poverty with performance levels.
Then there is the far trickier case of the AI picking up on real things that we choose not to accept or talk about. Perhaps it is safe to give an example using white men? When they go bald very early in life(prince William for instance), it generally is due to high testosterone. Which in turn leads to all sorts of predictable behaviors and health issues, good and bad. AI would spot all that from a simple picture, judging people on their appearance can occasionally work really well. But that doesn't mean we should do it. And again, it isn't improper data, just data we choose not to act on.
Musk was the primary initial investor in Tesla when it was company with 3 "employees", was chairman of the board and directly involved in the design of the Roadster. He didn't take on an operational role until he forced out the first CEO for allegedly lying about the financials. Musk is certainly more than just an investor in Tesla, it seems pretty nitpicky to argue he is not one of it's creators.
Musk has been the only CEO of SpaceX since he founded the company. Gwynne Shotwell often doesn't get enough credit for her huge role in making SpaceX what it is today, but to say Musk isn't one of the creators of SpaceX is absurd.
Musk has made plenty of bad choices and done unethical things that deserve to be criticized, but that is no excuse for the level of ignorant, misinformed hatred that is directed at him.
Building more cars (basically racing cars that rub tires to dust 2-4x as fast) to save the planet? Sounds like quite the roundabout way to do so. I suspect he just likes driving fast cars?
Digging tunnels and conceptualizing hyperloops instead of improving public transport and bikes? IMO he‘s just afraid of public transport and hates traffic jams.
Ok, so maybe he needed to become the richest person in the world before tackling the really big issues? Yeah, not sure whether distracting himself with the Twitter acquisition is the best way of addressing climate change or even preserving survival of the human race long term.
I think that, like Jobs, he’s mainly scratching his own itches. And paints himself as the world‘s savior in the process.
I also have my doubts about the wisdom of the Twitter move, but it isn't hard to see a line of reasoning that puts fixing twitter as a key part of the path to addressing climate change.
If you view the massive endemic corruption and polarization of our political system as one of the key reasons we are failing to solve climate change, and you also view Twitter as the core public square through which our political system can be fixed, then Twitter is not a distraction at all.
I don't personally think that twitter has a major role to play in fixing our political system, but maybe I'm wrong.
Dude. If he wanted to make humanity link arms and sing Kumbaya, he’d be investing in water facilities and dropping LSD into it.
Musk got bullied into buying Twitter by a bunch of WallStreetBets folks, took a puff and tweeted out a number, and surprise surprise, the offer was accepted. And he’s been struggling to get out of the deal ever since.
I agree he's probably regretting it. I suspect he's going to try to make Twitter more profitable as fast as possible and then maybe sell it when it's on its way to being good. It's a distraction from things he cares about more, but it's not unimportant.
He didn't create Tesla. He bought it. He may have grown it, which is impressive, but he certainly wasn't the creator, or funder of the original creators. Ironically, he's more of a Thomas Edison than a Nikola Tesla, in that regard.
Starting an AI/transhumanism company as a CEO who's known for software-locking and remote-controlling his sold cars, isn't very reassuring. I'm quite certain we're going to see "pay $80 a month to unlock your now-societally-vital brain-to-brain communications!" Or a tiered model to his probably inevitable digital eyeballs replacements. "$20 a month for 720p vision, $40 a month for 1080p, $60 for 4K..."
As for SpaceX... so far that's been pretty badass. Government/NASA hasn't been doing crap for exploration or transportation innovation. Nor satellite internet advancements. He's doing all of it himself. To that, I applaud his efforts (and his impressive engineers, to that extent).
He bought Tesla before it had sold its first car. People try to use the fact that he didn't technically create Tesla as some gotcha that implies he bought his way into the car market.
> Last I checked, Musk created Tesla to counteract the existential risk of climate change
Musk didn't create Tesla, he bought it. I don't claim to know why he bought it, but here are two options: maybe it was to solve climate change, and if so it was a failure. Maybe it was to make himself immensely wealthy, and if so it was a success.
I mean, if you want to quibble over the precise meaning of "created", I'm not interested in that. Replace "created" with "drove to commercial success" if you prefer, the fact remains that Tesla as a brand didn't exist in people's minds until he invested and spearheaded the design on the roadster.
As for whether it's a failure, that remains to be seen. Combating climate change is a long-term battle. All of Tesla's products are clearly geared towards this end though, from electric cars to solar roofs to grid level energy storage.
Yes. To solve global warming, we have to greatly reduce our reliance on cars, and come up with other solutions in as many places as possible - replacing all ICE cars with EVs will not be anywhere near enough.
"Needing" to reduce reliance on cars is debatable; that's certainly one way but not the only way. I doubt Musk would deny that replacing all cars with EVs would be enough. That's why Tesla also offers the solar roof (which needs more attention from Musk IMO) and grid level energy storage.
Tesla has discontinued the solar roof, as far as I know. That was basically just a stunt to use Tesla's money to bail out Musk and his brother. The solar wall is a better example of what you mean though.
People are great at finding ulterior motives for people they've already decided they dislike. I don't think Musk is an altruist, and I'm certain he has multiple motives for the ventures he cares about, but I think it's hard to deny that he's found success where others have struggled, and that his ventures will ultimately benefit humanity.
You can order it, but apparently [0] they are deploying on the order of ~20 per week overall, so it's unclear if you'll ever get one. You're right though that it's not discontinued - sorry about that.
I am very skeptical of atmospheric carbon removal as a viable path to stopping global warming - especially given the extreme systemic risks of most of the ideas I heard, such as seeding the oceans with iron; but also the extreme difficulty of others, such as re-seeding enough forest area to actually matter.
So, my temptation is to say it's just a publicity stunt. But, I am prepared to praise it if it produces some viable solution, as unlikely as I believe it is.
I responded on the assumption that the original poster was saying Musk intended counteracting an existential risk to be an audacious goal, a visionary moon shot, rather than just a "net contribution". By that measure, he's not succeeded. In any case, he's not been as successful at solving climate change as he has been at increasing his personal fortune.
There are a lot of shades between saving the world and evil.
My position is that Musk has focused largely on business that can or do make the world better, and also make a profit. The two are not mutually exclusive and I think the former is a major factor in what Musk selects. Obviously good is determined from Musk's perspective,but I have generally agreed with him with respect to Tesla, spacex, boring, neurolink, solar endeavors, and xprizes.
I don't believe that those
up thread were actually claiming Musk will or thinks any of his ventures single handedly will solve climate change. If that was your assumption, I think it was wrong.
I am curious if you agree that his work in these areas is laudable?
I agree that it seems like he is more successful at increasing his fortune than solving the world's problems. I don't hold that against him because the latter is a very tough challenge. I don't hold the fortune against him because it was made from companies that advance humanity, and most of it is tied up in other ventures that also advance humanity. I don't know about the whole Twitter thing, which could be a deviation from this, but I am open to the idea that it could be an improvement over the current state, if not particularly relevant to humanity. I am also open to the idea that he thinks it is more relevant than I do.
How does Neuralink counteract the risk of AI? If it ever works, it seems like it would exacerbate that risk.
How does SpaceX counteract the risk of asteroids? NASA has developed a successful asteroid-killing rocket, and SpaceX's work has nothing to do with that field.
> How does Neuralink counteract the risk of AI? If it ever works, it seems like it would exacerbate that risk.
AI is a threat because of human information processing limits. Neuralink's ultimate goal is ostensibly to remove eyes and hands as inherent limits to I/O, and augment human information processing in the ways in which we are weak (formal computation).
> How does SpaceX counteract the risk of asteroids? NASA has developed a successful asteroid-killing rocket, and SpaceX's work has nothing to do with that field.
Cheap launch to orbit is critical in any efforts to counteract asteroid threats. Musk has also been very vocal about colonizing Mars in case something happens to the Earth.
The idea behind neuralink- the real one, not the publicly stated mission- was to make it possible to put elon in a robot body so he could fight the AI singularity.
It would be funny if Musk's long con was to get all the liberals driving his electric cars and then change his political affiliation to get all the conservatives on electric cars all in the service of reducing co2 emissions
Elon musk is no friend of the climate. He proposed hyperloop to distract California from building its high speed rail system, a rail system that will do more to help the climate than any electric cars will.
He bought a McLaren F1 and wrecked it ~1 year later. [0] If you don't follow cars, this is an extremely special car. It was designed and built before the modern supercar era, long before computer design had the power it does not, and it still utterly destroyed anything that had come before it, and would come after it for quite some time. The engineering detail in it borders on absurd. They only made ~100 of the road-legal versions.
We don't really have a plan to stop using fossil fuels for electricity generation so this is a bit overstated. Electric cars are good but it's not a complete solution.
Lots of companies are in this space doing what they can, but they’re focused on actually doing the work and getting their hands dirty as opposed to Musk’s wide noise making. Look at immunotherapy and age research, the trying to find a cure and mechanism for Chronic Fatigue (an illness which disables millions), the people who documented the genome of humanity, and NASAs astronomy stuff. There are biologists trying to prevent further extinct amphibians. There’s linux, and git, and countless open source software we use daily.
And yet there's reason to believe that that the unloading of those 10% of Tesla shares was to cover a looming $15 billion tax bill. And he would have done so anyway.
Amazon cash sign on bonus is absolutely insane in this market. Making pure cash while all stocks are down probably makes the Amazon pay $100k more than a competitor.
> Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive". Musk is not a proponent of that. He is a micromanaging, capricious, easily distracted, arrogant and vindictive CEO.
Layoffs aren’t the same as mistreatment. It matters more how he treats the employees who stick around and the new ones he brings in
Classic free market fallacy. It's only a free market if there are other options available. Those in power control the options available and low regulation free markets enable them align at the lowest common denominator.
> Classic free market fallacy. It's only a free market if there are other options available. Those in power control the options available and low regulation free markets enable them align at the lowest common denominator.
People don't pay good developers lots of money because they want to pay lots of money, they pay because good developers are in short supply.
Hmm this poses an interesting theory. We know that part of the motivation of Obama's "Learn to Code" initiative and the coding bootcamps was to increase the supply of developers. Now that there is supposedly a recession coming it might be the case that in the end it will end up tilting the scales back in the developers court. The reason being that not 100% of the bootcampers are in it fore the love of the job but only for the money. We will see people dropping out of the market and once it recovers we might be back in a situation where there were too few devs.
Highly paid Twitter SWEs have a lot of other options, although the tightening job market is making it harder. Twitter’s competitors are also recruiting directly from it
Twitter employees are compensated better than 99% of the US population and have more employment options available to them than virtually anyone on the planet. Give me a fucking break.
At present there are other options available for Twitter workers. You make a reasonable point though; Its easy to imagine skilled engineers are doing well but equally we could say that its just the lowest common denominator terms and conditions for that kind of job are better than those for most other jobs.
Are you saying all other companies are just Musk-company clones and thus treat their employees as Musk does? I get the feeling people think Musk's management style is an outlier and that's why they are complaining --but you seem to be sayin, "they're all like that and we have no options".
This. Who kill by capitalism will be killed by capitalism. What's that noise (tik tok reference) about that "creating and Ethical A.I." and I'm a God you not you trust. Nonsense. ¿What that noise?
> Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive".
Maybe that was what the field was letting visible, but in reality that has never been the case. There is everyday news about unicorns where employees complain that the culture is toxic, and that the CEO is impossible to work with. Only need to read Glassdoor pages.
I think deep down we all knew that burning people out has a decent chance of getting you solid results in the short term. The problem comes after, when people who understand best how your systems work will quit because they’re burned out husks of their former selves.
This is obviously not sustainable, because it’s difficult to recruit after you’ve built a reputation as burnout central.
Unless the business is run by a “tech visionary” who is “making the world a better place” and has millions of fans. These millions of fans would jump at the chance of working for him.
Musk burning out Twitter employees by making them do twice as much work is fine, because he’ll have no trouble recruiting. He might be able to turn the business around.
It’s quite possible there will copycats, but they’ll have less success than Musk.
Twitter employees were treated nicely. Too nicely. And yet they were not productive. The only new features they introduced in 10 years were losses in excess of 200MM to 1bn+ and the banning/shadow banning of those who went against the group think, fun police, and thought-gestapo. Each staffer had 10 bosses and every department had a ton of waste.
Musk could never show up again after some changes, and the company would perform better than under the previous leadership.
As a German, I actually take offense to this kind of expression. You apparently have NO IDEA what Gestapo really was if you think banning gaslighting assholes for hate speech is in any way comparable or even remotely in the same neighborhood as the Gestapo.
These kind of phrases ridicule and downplay the horrific crimes and offenses against human rights committed by that organization and even the most unreasonable and idiotic ban on Twitter cannot ever be compared.
Words matter - and that's why we deal with "free speech" differently than Americans. Btw it's also pretty clear what holds on court and what doesn't - independent of how strict or unreasonable private social networks moderate their content.
Valid or not you do hit upon something I'm genuinely curious about. What do developers for something like twitter even do?
Twitter does one very specific thing, and it doesn't look like it has changed its goal much over the past 10 years, so what is it they're trying to develop so rapidly they need hundreds (thousands?) of developers.
The legacy border-radius assumptions regarding the "Set Up Profile" button may be no longer valid and need to be deeply investigated. We are therefore setting up a cross-functional taskforce to tackle this issue. MVP is due one year from now.
Not a direct answer to your question, but it reminds me of the first chapter from The Mythical Man Month
> One occasionally reads newspaper accounts of how two programmers in a remodeled garage have built an important program that surpasses the best efforts of large teams. And every programmer is prepared to believe such tales, for he knows that he could build any program much faster than the 1000 statements/year reported for industrial teams.
Why then have not all industrial programming teams been replaced by dedicated garage duos? One must look at what is being produced.
In the [attached figure] is a program. It is complete in itself, ready to be run by the author on the system on which it was developed. That is the thing commonly produced in garages…
He then goes on to describe how you can take a program and make it a programming product (by generalizing it, adding testing, documentation, maintenence) and a programming system (requiring interfaces and integration with the rest of the system)
>banning/shadow banning of those who went against the group think, fun police, and thought-gestapo.
Why would they agree to a ToS that clearly lays out things like "don't intentionally misgender people" if they fully planned on breaking their agreement
"But no one reads the ToS!" sure, but when you have your account suspended until you agree to delete a specific tweet and are given the exact area in the ToS you agreed to that you violated, then you should revoke your agreement to the ToS
When it's brought to your attention that you signed a document agreeing to Twitter being the thought Gestapo, just... cancel your agreement. Don't continue to agree to it in writing while whining about it publicly.
Some see it as their duty to fight back against unjust laws/rules. You and I might do it by breaking terms of service, Musk does it by purchasing the platform and adjusting the terms. Two sides of the same coin really, only difference being which end the agency is coming from.
That's like agreeing to take your shoes off when entering a building, leaving your shoes on, and then complaining when the employees/owner/whatever asks you to leave if you're not going to take them off. If you think a rule is stupid, then rebel against it by not agreeing to it
states “You may use the Services only in compliance with these Terms and all applicable laws, rules and regulations”, and links to the Twitter Rules and Policies:
> We prohibit targeting others with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.
In the Wayback machine, it looks like that direct language was added in an update between October 19 and October 28 of 2018, about four years ago:
Thank you, I'm surprised it's explicitly called out but not too surprised.
That said, I have trouble believing that "why would you agree to a ToS that you don't actually intend to ascribe to 100% of the time" is a question that requires serious consideration.
The key part is how you react when the ToS gets enforced. Like I said, if your account gets suspended and the specific violation is brought to your attention, then either delete the offending tweet or revoke your agreement.
It is incredible to look at these companies and see the staggering amount of losses and costs they have, plus the headcount.
There could be entire departments dedicated to figuring out whether or not the "like" and "retweet" buttons should have rounded corners or not, that sort of thing.
At some point, reality has to hit and apparently, Musk is the one who's going to bring it.
Is it being done in a shocking way to those who haven't been through this with other companies? Maybe. But how else is this company going to actually ever become profitable?
Musk paid huge money to get that thing. He paid multiple times the estimated price. The company is now in deep deep debt that was not nearly as large before - because company now owns the money Musk did not had.
He is not hand of the market. He is someone who made pretty bad business and has very little chance to fix.
And yes, there is likely someone doing UI decisions. Usually it is good idea to have special people good with visuals to make these artistic decisions.
Neither I nor person I responded to knows. However, person I responded to took issue with mere existence of such position.
I know that that comment was just pure emotion and hate. But, the fact is, there is nothing wrong with having department for visuals. Or department for marketing or department for communication with advertisers or what have you.
With this kind of mass and rapid layoffs, I will expect more losses in medium and long term since you destroy a working system. A lot of failures will emerge because no one is left for monitoring or fixing some issues.
Destroying a work system that loses 1100Mm a year is not a strategic loss. It is a gain in the direction you want to take the company (gain instead of loss)
Then stop being employees. Jesus Christ, you people take those massive salaried yet act like little children throwing tantrums because you fear your boss may not coddle you as much.
Sure, but there is an actual moral distinction between seeking the most by endangering the livelihoods of ~7K-10k(the number of employees, dependents + indirectly supported workers) and seeking the most by ensuring the worlds wealthiest human can only remain in the top 10 wealthiest humans. If the workers really push him, he might only have a hundred billion instead of hundreds. Tech workers are well paid, but their bosses have the wealth of kings.
Elon Musk isn’t going to be kicked out of the country he’s settled down in if he loses his Twitter job. Elon Musk isn’t going to lose his healthcare, his livelihood, his means of housing and feeding himself, just as the winter holidays are about to begin in the United States.
Yes I think it’s immoral to put a person with a visa in a situation where they risk deportation unless they get hired just when hiring is slow, not just because of the job market but because other hiring managers are literally spending time with their family.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I think a fair number of people think CEOs and entrepreneurs are immoral for acting in a self-serving, self-enriching manner, and a fair number of people think employees are immoral doing so.
I see the moral point pretty much exclusively brought up against CEOs, managers etc, and virtually never against employees. Your (then ex-) boss might be angry that you've leaving because you've gotten a better offer, but barely anyone else will judge you (very rare cases exist, I'm sure, but they're rare).
Everyone is optimizing their personal outcome, be it the CEO firing people, people quitting their jobs to work elsewhere, people quitting their jobs to live off of benefits, people having children early, or having children late, it's what we all do: look out for what's best for us.
I find that totally okay, but I prefer to be honest about it, and don't pretend that it's not perfectly normal, or that people aren't doing it.
I think the general take is that the higher you are up the money/power hierarchy the more strictly you should be judged for your choices, because acting in a self-enriching way becomes less and less necessary. An almost incomprehensibly rich person like Musk should be given less leeway for acting in a grasping manner.
In a sense it's the inverse of the "it's moral to steal bread to feed your family" argument.
I agree. You have more options and fewer constraints the higher up you go, but I think that also applies to (most) Twitter/BigTech employees. A good chunk of those fired will be millionaires themselves, they're far from worrying about how to feed their families.
Nobody has to be there to survive, everyone is there willingly because they saw it as the most advantageous place to work, and they'd switch to a different company tomorrow if they got the right offer. Loyalty is a term from a different era.
Oh, yeah, there's definitely a scale to it. A twitter customer service employee is paid much less than a software engineer... though even the latter isn't going to have been at "will never need more money in their life" levels, particularly given the American social safety net or lack thereof.
That said, I do find that people are fairly loyal to a company that treats them well.
Who do you think has more leverage to optimize for their personal outcome? The CEO or the average employee?
Why do you find it OK for the ones to have power to leverage it in order to get even more? Where do you think this will end up if allowed to continue longterm?
> Who do you think has more leverage to optimize for their personal outcome?
At Twitter? That's hard to say, lots of places are hiring, and getting good people is hard for all of them. Many of those that were fired will probably come out ahead financially. Twitter will probably continue to exist.
> Why do you find it OK for the ones to have power to leverage it in order to get even more?
What do you think salary negotiations are? You go in, say you want even(!) more money, and if your value is high enough, you have the power to make them do it. Again, both Twitter and the employees are playing the same game, they're just on different sides of board, but neither of them is a charity.
It's funny how the most privileged act the most spoiled. Imagine steel plant workers or car manufacturing jobs. Demand goes down? So does your job --union or not.
WallStreet is used to the ups and downs (they are somewhat comparable compensation-wise), and it's a way of life. You win big and you lose from time time. In tech you have some people who think it's their birthright to have good jobs with good pay and benefits and never have to go through a downturn.
This is the story of our industry. We are so lucky and don't even know it. I've been privileged to pull substantial salary and equity outcomes at various tech groups with "top tier" engineers who get away with murder because there are literally no stakes in the job performance. If you are approximately 'smart' and get a minimal amount of work done you can get away with murder. I've gotten junior engineers jobs in this industry, and when I check back in on some of them they are like yeah I work 1 hour a day and make well into six figures. And managers and bosses are terrified of asking for any outcomes lest they lose and have to try to rehire.
The crazy part is taking the huge salary then demanding your employer take on some social justice cause that they have been neutral on or actually already accommodating on.
They out here saying tech workers are the downtrodden proletariat... they are not. They are firmly within the bourgeoise--top < 5% of wage earners in USA, and top < 0.5% in the world.
Social justice (communism) killed upwards of 100 million last century, by famines, gulags, mass exterminations, etc. and ruined billions of more lives. Fascism killed about 50 million (WWII + Holocaust), give or take. Both are abhorrent, but social justice wins the "Worst Thing Ever" award.
Absolutely ridiculous. Social justice is not communism. Calm down: Treating women and gays and minorities and poor people equally as human beings is not going to destroy civilization. You've been brainwashed and you're parroting fascist propoganda. Take a break from Fox News or cocaine or whatever you're on, because it's making you insane.
Social justice goes far beyond treating women, gays, minorities and poor people as equals. Equal treatment is enshrined in the US constitution, for example.
Social justice means not "equality" but "equity": looking at perceived disparities between social groups and then equalizing them by taking property from perceived "oppressor" groups and transferring to "victim" groups. This is exactly what Stalin, Mao, etc. did.
Why does no one argue that Hitlerism/Mussolini-ism/Francoism wasn't real fascism? "Real" fascism would of course usher in an era of peaceful law and order, harmonious cooperation between govt and business... /s
Don't watch Fox and don't touch coke, neither cola nor powder (debatable which one is worse for you.) I took classes on social justice at Brown. When I actually understood what the profs in the space were saying, looking at what it takes to implement it in the real world, the results have been pretty horrifying every time we humans have tried it. The thing I couldn't get over is the idea of "class guilt" sometimes cast as "class privilege".
Then why are you so unhinged and out of touch with reality?
>Social justice (communism) killed upwards of 100 million
>social justice wins the "Worst Thing Ever" award
You're absolutely insane.
Social justice is NOT communism. Got it? Because I'm repeating myself, and you're not listening to me or refuting what I said.
Apparently you have convinced yourself that phrase means something totally different than it actually does, and you're histrionically obsessing and freaking out about it.
You don't get to make up your own whacky definitions of words, and expect people to think you're not crazy or just another worthless troll when you keep insisting you're right and they're wrong.
So social justice is "communism" and the "Worse Thing Ever", huh?
Please link to the professor at Brown University and the syllabus of the class you took where you were taught that social justice is equivalent to communism, and the "Worse Thing Ever". Or perhaps you're just making shit up, or completely misunderstood what they were trying to teach you.
Do you really believe that's what the original poster was referring to when they wrote "demanding your employer take on some social justice cause"?
Exactly who is demanding their employer support communism or perform the "Worse Thing Ever"? You mean stop paying their employees and insist they keep working for free, or mass murder hundreds of millions of people?
Is that what you're afraid Twitter will do? Then give me some evidence of that, or admit you're just making crazy shit up and trolling.
If you're simply against health care, and for racism and fascism, and hate to pay any taxes, and you abstain from using any government services like public roads or police or air traffic control, then just come out and say it, and stop beating around the bush.
Come back when you'r less unhinged, and can use the same language and definitions that the rest of the world does.
This is "no true scotsman". The ideas underpinning Communism, Marxism, Socialism, and Social Justice are intrinsically linked and overlapped. Castro himself supposedly said "No hay comunismo ni marxismo, pero... justicia social". At the core is the proposition that certain classes / socio-economic groups are "oppressors" while others are "oppressed", and that we in the present must right the social injustices of the past. None of this is controversial or a mischaracterization.
My professors at Brown of course advocated for socialism and social justice, and I too drank the kool-aid while I was there. I graduated 15 years ago so good luck finding links :) (As an aside, there is current a prof of econ Glenn Loury who publicly takes the anti-social justice stance, he has a YouTube channel. Other profs I knew such as one who escaped the Cultural Revolution in China are surely opposed to it as well, but they keep it on the DL.)
Back to the original post, employers who play the SJ game find their employees dividing themselves into oppressor and oppressed groups, and starting grievance wars which ultimately distract from the mission of the company. It's a silly exercise at companies like Twitter where most employees would be within the top 0.5% of wealth worldwide.
Capitalism, free markets, and democracy a.k.a. "liberalism" on balance has created the greatest era of flourishing and peace humanity has ever experienced--we all live twice as long thanks to it. This is not a defense of colonialism and American interventionism, its simply a statement that liberal systems work far better than any other that has ever been tried.
It's not crazy at all. If you are a worker, you are the one actually making the company productive. If the majority of workers want their company to do a thing, that company should listen.
I see the username, but I still want to ask... how would your ideal company deal with a situation where all employees want to run the business in the ground?
I'm a strong believer in workers cooperatives and democratic organization. Usually, people don't want to run their livelihood into the ground, but sometimes they make errors. (Just like executives, if Amazon games and stadia are any indication.)
People are absolutely free to do those things right now. There are tens of millions of people with those sentiments. Why don't we see more attempted co-ops?
So, we have some giant coops out there. Some making billions in revenue.
But in the US it's really not well supported. If you want to found an LLC you click a few buttons on a form online and talk to any lawyer.
If you want to found a co-op, you generally have to file the paperwork in person or via the mail. No one in the municipal government will help, because they don't know anything except LLCs. You'll need to find a lawyer who can draft not only the articles of incorporation, but also can advise on the issuing of shares, democratic operation, and how new members can join.
Because profits are controlled by the workers, capitalistic investors won't know what to do with you, so you'll need to put in extra effort to find investors who are willing to be paid but not be made owners (or not more than any workers).
It's a high, high initial cost. But once it's going it can be incredibly self sustaining. Every dollar of profit ends up back in the pockets of the people working there, equally. Or they can collectively choose to use that profit to expand.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. Sometimes the lack of cooperatives is framed as some sort of Capitalist conspiracy against them. It is much more tractable to point out friction in the system that make starting co-ops hard and then find solutions to solve those over time.
Yeah, I don't think it's particularly intentional, but it is systemic. And self perpetuating - there are few co-ops, so investing in making more is a low priority.
I like the idea in principle, but I can't imagine a situation where a worker cooperative would vote in favor of a risky, but necessary pivot / layoff / long-term investment. Sounds like a recipe for killing intra-company innovation.
Right, the co-op solution is not to fire members, but split the burden of lean times across everyone. I don't think I've ever seen a CEO say, "I'll forgo my income this year to ensure we can keep the people here employed".
I thought higher pay tended to often to together with higher other benefits, like coworkers thinking you're important and management wanting your to think they're you're friend.
You’re right, everyone should just completely uproot their lives for the hell of it and start completely untested startups with no safety net whenever their boss cracks down, instead of justify complaining about his insanity
The same is true of leadership at all levels. The US political situation isn't looking that great because of the popularity of all kinds of jerk behavior that has become the norm. Ironically, Twitter itself is partly responsible for that, as crapping on your political opponents has become more important than having policy proposals or solving problems. It's a downward spiral when we accept shitty behaviors from leadership, because of exactly this copycat tendency of people--they emulate behavior of elites, sometimes unconsciously.
> But Gingrich had a plan. The way he saw it, Republicans would never be able to take back the House as long as they kept compromising with the Democrats out of some high-minded civic desire to keep congressional business humming along. His strategy was to blow up the bipartisan coalitions that were essential to legislating, and then seize on the resulting dysfunction to wage a populist crusade against the institution of Congress itself. “His idea,” says Norm Ornstein, a political scientist who knew Gingrich at the time, “was to build toward a national election where people were so disgusted by Washington and the way it was operating that they would throw the ins out and bring the outs in.”
> Gingrich recruited a cadre of young bomb throwers—a group of 12 congressmen he christened the Conservative Opportunity Society—and together they stalked the halls of Capitol Hill, searching for trouble and TV cameras. Their emergence was not, at first, greeted with enthusiasm by the more moderate Republican leadership. They were too noisy, too brash, too hostile to the old guard’s cherished sense of decorum. They even looked different—sporting blow-dried pompadours while their more camera-shy elders smeared Brylcreem on their comb-overs.
> Gingrich and his cohort showed little interest in legislating, a task that had heretofore been seen as the primary responsibility of elected legislators. Bob Livingston, a Louisiana Republican who had been elected to Congress a year before Gingrich, marveled at the way the hard-charging Georgian rose to prominence by ignoring the traditional path taken by new lawmakers. “My idea was to work within the committee structure, take care of my district, and just pay attention to the legislative process,” Livingston told me. “But Newt came in as a revolutionary.”
> For revolutionary purposes, the House of Representatives was less a governing body than an arena for conflict and drama. And Gingrich found ways to put on a show. He recognized an opportunity in the newly installed C-span cameras, and began delivering tirades against Democrats to an empty chamber, knowing that his remarks would be beamed to viewers across the country.
Newt Gingrich and Roger Ailes have done far more damage to political discourse than anything social media could hope to do.
Yes, everything is a conspiracy orchestrated by ${group you don't like} for ${nefarious purpose}. There's no way that people legitimately change their own views.
Stating a goal of ending bi-partisan politics and following through on enacting that goal all in public in a very documented way isn't a conspiracy. There is a direct connection between the dysfunction in politics today and the explicit and public actions taken by conservatives to make it this way.
'treat your employees nicely' exists in tech for one reason only: to deter unionization in the face of overwhelming profiteering at the expense of an overworked tech cattle.
if twitter employees understand now the excess capital from their labor has been extracted without due pleasantries such as notice or severance, then Musk has done far worse to the tech industry than just lay a bunch of people off, hes galvanized the case for tech worker unions.
Tech "treated employees right" because for awhile software engineers had a "monopoly on skill". If you rewind to around 2008 and earlier there really were more getting work done, building real things jobs out there than people who could do it. There were a lot of startups that hand a hard time getting people to just build the initial CRUD apps to start their business.
Startups and smart companies realized that if you couldn't compete on pay you could compete on how you treated employees. In the years leading up to the start of the current boom the pay differential between big companies and startups was't as vast as it is now.
Then industry started pushing hard to create more software engineers from the traditional path of increased undergrad comp sci enrollments to the development and expansion of the bootcamp industry. Then the money started to go up and more and more people started rushing into the industry for the money. When I started in tech ~2005 almost every software person I knew got into the field because they loved to write code and build things, when I talk to recent software engineers almost all of them answer that compensation is their main driver today.
Now anyone hiring today (or let's say 3 months prior to today) will claim that it's still really hard to find good devs. However the amount of work being done that is essential and productive has dramatically decreased. Head counts have been expanding because money was flowing and managers need more people under them to get promoted (this logic flows even to the CEO level).
But now this long, long tech bubble is starting to burst and we'll companies across the board start asking "how much of this work is really necessary? how can we become profitable?" and we'll realize as an industry that we are way over indexed on software engineers.
This is exactly what happened during the dotcom era, I guess most people are just too young to remember. Anyone who could use a computer got hired to work in tech, paid ridiculous for the time, there were tons of people enrolling in EE and CS, a huge number of software engineers. The the bubble burst and a lot of the engineers disappeared, CS enrollments dropped radically, salaries went way down, and the only people left in the industry were people who just really like writing code and building things.
There's parts of what you wrote that are somewhat accurate but for the most part this is nonsense.
> when I talk to recent software engineers almost all of them answer that compensation is their main driver today.
I don't really understand what you're saying here. If you're trying to imply that folks are getting into the industry solely to make money, there is some truth to that but it's hardly the majority. That being said it's foolish to imagine that if the money dried up that everyone writing software would keep doing it. But software isn't going anywhere, so neither will the money.
Outside of a few areas, the global situation is that software engineers make decent salaries but are far from the top, especially outside of North America.
I suspect that part of this is a re-buttle to WFH. In the past, managers generally could see who was doing what. Now it's based on trust. If someone decides to watch TV all day while sometimes checking slack... well then they can. No one ever had any idea how long coding tasks took anyway. Some people are doing fine in this new world, and some are struggling. Whether I'm succeeding or struggling depends on the day.
It's been known for a long time that the output of teams is highly variable, and difficult to compare within an organization. If your team isn't delivering, and you are delivering slightly more than the average - where does that leave the company?
I mean, there's the possibility that Twitter was entirely mismanaged and they had tons us useless staff. Given their profitability, I'd say this is exactly the case.
I think you're giving Musk too much credit by classifying this as not "treating employees nicely" - he's mismanaging things in every way possible. The individual treatment of employees is such a small subset of it (e.g. Bezos also mistreats employees but seems much more grounded & competent than Musk).
My real curiosity from the whole affair is gauging the actual impact a CEO can have on a company's success / failure. No doubt Twitter's had issues as a product for a long time, long before Musk came along. Whatever direction the company goes next, will be be due to or despite Musk's input.
SpaceX does not seem to have a problem attracting talent and even poaching it from competitors.
The difference might be in the fact that Musk founded it and allegedly takes part in the recruitment process himself. Maybe he wants to do the same at Twitter. Turning an already existing company with an already existing company culture around is much more complicated, though.
SpaceX is going somewhere. Twitter is going nowhere.
This is a political play.
Musk may be a competent engineer, but he's used to being Emperor. He's completely out of his depth with culture and politics. So he's unprepared for the brutal muck-racking, humiliation, and character assassination that underpin political power games.
The "You can have free speech for just $8/month" accidental branding is already such a bad look. I don't see that he has the instincts, talent, or experience to even understand why - never mind to do better.
I think the difference is SpaceX doing cool cutting-edge things with rockets. People want to be a part of that and are willing to take less pay and poorer working conditions to do so.
Twitter is boring. Its explosive growth days are behind it, working there now is basically about maintaining a legacy platform that has a bunch of problems that mostly aren't technology problems. It's about as interesting as working for a big insurance company; if the paycheck and working conditions aren't there, you're not going to be able to attract talent.
Does Twitter have the ability to have a mission vision that people will sacrifice for? That's what keeps the recruiting pipelines full for the other companies and allows for the "we put up with Elon's BS" culture.
There's already a bigger org doing this - Amazon. They are constantly hiring and struggling to replace those who leave - even during their new corporate hiring freeze.
Tech workers are still in very high demand. And the younger generation seems much more willing to unionize or refuse poor working conditions.
Amazon is a completely asinine company that not only recognizes the need and difficulties to continue replacing turnover, they continue to actually maintain a turnover goals and mechanisms.
I really do think they are going to speedrun themselves to labor pool exhaustion in a first for a company in the US. Their management seems fully head in sand.
But hey, even Bezos said in an interview that he doesn't see Amazon lasting forever, even 30 years tops.
This is the part that concerns me as well. WFH was a fluke of sorts and the timing allowed a lot of workforce to maintain rather adamant pose. My company's management is already using all the 'key' words in meetings like 'in person collaboration' and so on suggesting they are planning an RTO.
They just don't seem to dare to do it yet, because they poached a whole lot of people from companies that did RTO. This would like leave a bad impression.
It depends. People are jumping to conclusions on this point before full information is available.
There are many carve-outs that will dismiss WARN liability: if severance packages are offered and accepted (with appropriate conditions), the WARN act is irrelevant.
This is basically fake news and a performative suit.
The WARN act states that companies that dont provide notice have to pay 60 days severance. the penalty is reduced by any severance pay from the employer. Twitter is already paying 60 days of severance.
I know this is a heated topic with diverse opinions, but lets try to improve the quality of information and knowledge..
> tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they will be productive"
Is/was it? The shortage of qualified engineers have made some employers extra careful/generous, to attract and keep them. Or some others to divert brains away from their own occupations which could have ended up competing with them.
Alternatively, if Musk is successful then it will show that a lot of firms are bloated and this rot is maintained under the guise of "treating employees nicely", in the same way that union featherbedding is considered a "nice" practice.
I think Apple (esp successful as it was under Jobs) and Amazon (known to put its employees in the wringer) have already made that point. China is going to make that point louder over the decade to come (eg TikTok is successful here, a lot of it on the backs of people working "996" over in China).
Luckily we'll still have Oracle as a counterexample...
Tech companies that treat their employees right might put a veneer of strategy to it in order to make it palatable to shareholders ("we're not wasting your money, we're retaining critical talent"), but I think the real reason that some CEOs and company cultures value treating people right is just for the sake of it, not because of ulterior motives. I guess, as the boss, it's kind of nice to work at a place where people don't hate your guts bc they think you're a psychopathic monster. Being nice to employees is a value that's easier to sustain when there's massive profitability growth but it is not necessarily done in pursuit of profit itself.
Are people really expecting Twitter to survive The Musk? His rash actions almost feel like sabotage. I honestly expect Twitter to be dead or irrelevant in 2 years at most.
996 culture in China already highlights this as a valid strategy. Perhaps a little too obscure for the typical pointy haired boss. Elon will be a great poster boy.
I do agree there's a lot of people in tech who don't work hard and the problem has only gotten worse recently. I personally appreciate a blue collar approach to development. Don't be arrogant, do what you say you will and make sure that you're putting in your 40-50 hours a week of work, not 20 hours of work and 20 hours of ping-pong and bullshitting. Above all, be a professional.
However, if you think for a second that you can replace US developers, building products for Americans with someone from Nigeria you are off your ass. The hardest part of software development isn't yolo-ing code into an IDE. It's collecting requirements, troubleshooting and translating that into both code and requirements docs for other teams.
This is hard for native english speakers and approaching impossible for offshore teams. It works reasonable well with teams in the Americas because the timezones are close and the culture/language barriers aren't as high.
> However, if you think for a second that you can replace US developers, building products for Americans with someone from Nigeria you are off your ass.
I've been a SWE for decades and have worked on large, complex projects. I've always been an IC, never officially a manager (personal choice), but at the moment as part of my regular job writing code I am also managing a team of 10 developers from a country where they are being paid around 1/5th our rates and they are doing a very good job at at it.
I don't make the hiring decisions where I am at the moment, and this was the decision. It turned out that, yes, good developers from country X can easily replace good developers from country Y.
It's the same skills, you either have them or you don't.
>if you think for a second that you can replace US developers, building products for Americans with someone from Nigeria you are off your ass.
Looking at some of the crap coming out of the faangms - and a few others - I'll take a bet on the non-us developers ('nigerians')/ ui-deciders making a quite a few substantial improvements, and certainly not changing things just for the fuck of it.
My hosts file is now full of the software-i-use-the-most's ip adresses so they don't/ can't auto-update when they try to phone home and all end up looking the same, whereas previously each had 'character'.
LOL. You're completely delusional. How exactly do you suppose multi-billion dollar companies selling to Americans while hiring Indians, like Freshdesk, operate? The average IIT grad is going to smack you - as cute as it is you think you're worth 6 figures because you can "collect requirements in English"
This arrogance is why you'll be out of a job in ten years. The rest of the world is here to eat your lunch, yet American egos refuse to see the signs.
I'm not saying international developers are incompetent, it's quite the opposite. I've worked with great engineers from all over the world, but I'm willing to say that on average, American engineers in American companies do a better job building products for Americans and Western Europeans.
Come try to get my salary, I'm doing my best to stay ahead and justify it. We'll see who wins but I've been here before :)
> * The hardest part of software development isn't yolo-ing code into an IDE. It's collecting requirements, troubleshooting and translating that into both code and requirements docs for other teams.*
Pre-agile development laundered all that through a bunch of heavyweight documents and such. And while it had issues - leading to the whole agile thing - it also didn't completely not work.
If actors and football players can unionize so can software developers. There’s no point in intentionally allowing our peers to be treated worse, because then it allows our bosses to treat us just as badly. The most famous actors have all the power to demand better and yet are still part the guild because the demands they can make actually rise as the floor of actor treatment also rises.
The audacity to think that running a company well involves running your employees into the ground is peak Republican stupidity. There are thousands of companies that are great and profitable and yet are still great places to work.
> trying to unionize despite being the most privileged class of people in human history.
That's absurd. They're not even close to the most privileged class today, let alone in history. The most privileged class of people today are old money, born wealthy. Apart from them, there are plenty of new-money C level execs, finance people, celebrities, and so on who are rich enough to never work again, let alone unionize. Religious leaders can be extremely privileged as well.
I dont think Musk necessarily thinks all of that is ending.. more that he doesn't want to pay for all the employees that currently exist at twitter so he's making life miserable for them.
It's funny because you would've been one of the first people fired at Twitter given that you seem to work in sales. I also imagine you do not in fact work 14 hour days 7 days a week like Musk demands which would seem to make you an entitled softy.
Insanely profitable trillion dollar company that the entire world depends on ? Let me guess you're in saas sales or some other unproductive garbage like that
Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive". Musk is not a proponent of that. He is a micromanaging, capricious, easily distracted, arrogant and vindictive CEO.
If twitter thrives then we can expect copycats to try and spread his shitty work philosophy (like everyone idolises Jobs.)