You’ve cited a blog that observes he worked on Zip2 (which I assume was Perl/HTML like many things in 1995), and then states without evidence that he knows a few other languages (including, um, “Pearl”). Given Musk’s track record of lying about his other credentials, we need to see a little more than a fan blog stating without evidence “Musk knows Java” etc.
If you’ve worked in software as you claim, then you know a candidate can and will claim that they know any number of languages. And you also know that the state of the art in 1995 was vastly, dramatically different from what it is now, and that most of Twitter’s programming stack (to say nothing of web architecture) didn’t even exist 10 years ago. You wouldn’t hire someone on their word who says “I know Java”. You’d want to see their recent documented experience, and 1995 would not cut it.
Musk at this point is a “coder” in the same sense that my 12-year-old child is a “coder”. You wouldn’t trust this candidate to program anything but a toy project; you certainly would not hire them to be in any type of authority or oversight role over others.
This is more or less how I see it. As I said above, Twitter has enough of a skeleton crew to lumber on indefinitely. It will not go dark; it will occasionally be slower and glitchier and drop content here and there. Pre-acquisition, Twitter had outages; it will have more. If you think back to the pre-Discourse days of SDMB, users will suffer quite a bit of that before moving on.
The only wildcard is how long Musk can pay to do this after he’s torched brand safety, the thing that’s most important to his biggest revenue-paying customers. His idea that Twitter should switch its revenue mix away from advertising is bold and risky, but not stupid. However it’s quite stupid that he burned down his ad business without having an alternate model in mind.
Of course that’s only stupid if his primary intent is to make Twitter profitable. I continue to maintain that this was only a distant 4th or 5th priority behind his more primary goals around making sure Twitter is never again viewed as a reliable source of unfavorable information about Musk or Musk’s political interests. If this is the goal, then his strategy makes perfect sense - jettison all the pink-haired wokies, reduce to a skeleton crew of hardcore loyalists, keep Twitter alive long enough to cement its reputation as a cesspool of shitposters, then maybe turn it over to someone else. The only flaw, if there is one, was him overpaying by a multiple of 2 or 3 to make this happen. If he was thinking this strategy would help him protect the rest of his wealth, the return on investment seems not so good so far.
This article supports your speculation about the company surviving:
Pertinent to this thread topic: Some former employees who chose not to sign onto Musk’s new vision took to Twitter to explain their decisions.
“I left because I no longer knew what I was staying for,” Peter Clowes, a senior software engineer who resigned on Thursday, wrote in a thread. “Previously I was staying for the people, the vision, and of course the money (lets all be honest). All of those were radically changed or uncertain.”
Clowes noted any employee who chose to remain would have had to sign away their option to take severance before seeing their offer, and without a clear picture of the future Musk has planned. He said of his team of 75 engineers, only three chose to stay.
I just cannot help keep thinking that everything Musk is doing is geared to short term profits in hopes of turning around and selling off some or all of Twitter for as much as he can get.
Agree overall with your post about how to assess tech staff in general and developers in particular.
However, Musk is just one man. He can personally only interview, what, 8 developers per day? Maybe 16 if he does nothing else all day? Doing 1600 is the work of 100 days = 3+ months. During which time he could do exactly nothing else.
Could he, should he, have gone on an internal crusade to remove the low performers? Perhaps. Could he, should he, have done the evaluation both soon and quickly after the purchase settled, assuming it was to be done at all? Undoubtedly yes.
But what does a measured, calibrated albeit fast-moving judgmental pruning process have to do with simply constructively firing them all then letting the workers decide for themselves which small percentage are willing to crawl back under radically changed work circumstances?
This article I found interesting (though I’m not in agreement with the last part of the piece). It suggests that Musk’s plan to do lots of dumb things and keep what works is a fine plan for a rocketry company, because you can learn from your mistakes, and your next iteration will be better. Social media is a lot more complex, it doesn’t follow straightforward Newtonian principles, the interplay between different factors is not at all well understood.
The other part which is not mentioned in the article is that rockets, cars, internet payments, those things depend on functionality first and foremost. If you can get it to function well, at a competitive price, you can succeed. Social media isn’t like that. It isn’t enough to just function properly, it has to tap into the culture, fill an emotional need of your users so that you can sell their attention to people who want to pay for it.
Social media sites have died just because the kids of the day stopped being interested in them. It is entirely possible Twitter’s days were numbered anyway.
Iteratively building up to first your minimum viable product and then iteratively enhancing from there to a fully functioning economically successful product at scale, albeit with a few unavoidable goofs and dead-end side trips along the way.
versus
Taking a fully functional commercially successful and popular product / ecosystem and simply driving a tornado through your enterprise for the lulz of it. Maybe a shiny new reality will emerge from the chaotic wreckage, but that’s not the way to bet.
To amplify your point, your next rocket will not refuse to leave the launchpad just because it doesn’t like what happened to your previous rocket.
As you point out, Elon Musk is now working with people problems, rather than physics problems. He has a lot more - and more varied - people to satisfy at Twitter than he ever did at his other companies.
This is wrong on the details but right on the concept. Engineering a web service is a highly iterative process, even more so than rockets or cars. There’s only one Twitter. It’s not easy to kill it, but if you do, it’s done. So we automate and instrument the change process so we can ship small changes and revert them quickly if they don’t work.
If you believe Musk is trying to do good engineering, then indeed it does appear that he’s trying to make it rocket science. He sees Twitter as a failed rocket launch. He wants to trash the design and go back to the drawing board. He fails to understand that Twitter actively loses money every minute it’s “in the shop for repairs.”
However, as I’ve said before, I don’t think Musk is trying to do any software engineering, nor to make Twitter profitable. What he’s doing is like a dictator trying to alter a political dissident’s attitude by doing brain surgery. If the surgery succeeds, he wins. If the patient dies, he still wins. In either case he has fun experimenting.
I fully believe that’s what Musk is doing with Twitter. His “Chief Engineer” routine is just a performance to maintain his own image. This is so that when he eventually steps down (as he must), he can claim that he rolled up his sleeves, dug into the details, and found that Twitter was too far gone to fix. He will have ruined Twitter’s credibility, while retaining his own, which was always the goal of this project.
Not at all. Twitter became profitable in 2018, and its profits were on a dramatic upward trend until the pandemic, and was on a recovery trend after that. Its revenue has consistently increased every year since 2017 cite.
Everyone needs to bear in mind that Twitter was not in need of dramatic fiscal or technical fixes when Musk bought it. Musk bought it to control the content. That’s why he’s hyping up nonexistent engineering and fiscal problems, making a big show of playing the determined savior. In reality he’s weakening the company so he can bend it to his will, and using false narratives to conceal intent and deflect blame.
That’s a whole different matter. Market cap is paper money, it’s not money you can take to the bank. Just look at Tesla and how it has “lost” a hundred billion in value over the last year.
And of course, since twitter is no longer publicly traded, market cap is more or less meaningless.
No, he didn’t. That ignores all the people who work there that are the ones who actually create wealth. Hedge funds will do this. They will take a company, do a leveraged buyout, gut it, then sell off the pieces. People lose jobs, the country loses manufacturing capability, but the hedge fund made money. Did they “earn” that?
If you think they did, then sure, if Elon raises the cap on twitter, then he will have, by your definition, earned that difference.
But, by your definition, you also have to admit that Musk has lost hundreds of billions of dollars on the same balance sheet that you posit him hypothetically “earning” a few billion. IMO, that would make him a terrible businessman.
That’s the nature of having a job. I don’t think that Musk is the originator of that idea.
Assuming the wikipedia article is more of less accurate, it certainly is more complicated than that. X.com merged with Confinity, and PayPal was originally a Confinity brand name which later got applied to the payment processing system.
Not that that excludes the possibility that Musk personally had technical involvement, but it certainly looks more like an agglomeration of companies with many origins and product lines and messy leadership struggles and many products eventually landing on Paypal, rather than a straight line from “Musk founds X.com” to “X.com turns into PayPal and takes over online payments”.
Kinda depends when you start counting. Even if we assume Twitter literally dies and he drives it to zero value, he’s worth about $100 billion more than he started out as, which is a strikingly successful run of business.
Not copying the entire post.
Do you really think number of checkins correlates to code quality? Even if there were a few programmers who were retired in place, they wouldn’t be close to 50% and would have been the first to go.
Silicon Valley has a corporate hierarchy - there are a few top companies, and many, many you’ve never heard of. Twitter was a top company. I worked for top companies, and I knew very few incompetent or lazy programmers. They also understood what they were doing.Your experience might have been different. If so, I feel for you.
In the very early days of Microsoft they were working with IBM on an OS, and there was a major culture clash, because IBM evaluated programs and programmers on number of lines of code written, while the people at Microsoft back then knew that smaller is better. If Musk really thinks that checkins are the way of distinguishing all but the most incompetent, he is as clueless as those old IBMers.
Can Musk code? Yes, but …
According to the biography by Ashlee Vance, the software was eventually almost completely rewritten by its new hires. The computer science students that took over the project were able to re-write large chunks of code written by Musk in just a few lines of code. The codebase was also not very flexible originally. Meaning that if changes needed to be made in the future, it would be very difficult.
So perhaps Musk would think the IBMers had it right.
Another interesting thing from my source is that Musk taught himself VIC20 basic in a few days from a manual - which was supposed to take 6 months to go through. I don’t know where that number came from, but only a very dim person would take 6 months to go through a BASIC manual. I taught my 60-year old father in laws, who was a musician, BASIC in under a week. Maybe Musk said that to make himself look smarter.
So even a top manager of programmers wouldn’t be able to weed out all but the dumbest staff members using this information. But a bad one could convince himself that he could.
LOL. Poor people. Always taking money to “The Bank”.
Valuation then. Whatever. The point is Elon Musk only makes money on Twitter if he sells the company for a profit.
And if Elon Musk increases the value of Twitter, who is responsible for building the wealth? The employees who would have been content with the status quo?
If I buy a fixer-upper home and flip it for millions, am I obligated to give the carpenter or the roofer an extra bonus because they “built wealth”? I paid them for their labor.
I’m not sure why you believe my assumption that Twitter employees may still hold equity in Twitter. Plenty of private tech companies provide their employees with stock, options, and other forms of equity sharing. And according to this article, Musk has indicated he will continue the practice..
IOW, “exceptional employees” who contribute to the growth of Twitter 2.0 may stand to gain a great deal financially.
And FWIW, every article I came across showed that Twitter has seen increased (possible even record) growth under Elon Musk. Which makes sense. I don’t use Twitter, but if I did, why should I or any user care about their internal management issues?
