I’ve been through this process, on the management side. Since firing people is a lot harder than many think, layoffs are good ways of getting rid of lower performers.But that is pretty simple. If 50% of staff is incompetent, all the managers should have been fired and you’d expect the code to be falling apart. I doubt that’s the case.
You also rank people based on a year’s worth of experience managing them, not five minutes. Good point on how long it would take.
Not to mention I haven’t done any but trivial coding in the six years since I’ve retired, and I’m very rusty. How long has it been since Musk wrote any code, not to mention any of the type the Twitter people are writing? He’s not even competent to rate them, even if he had the time.
It is all about cutting expenses to make Twitter look profitable so he can unload it, or do an IPO. But he’s not doing it at all well.
If, to reduce the expenses of your fixing up the house, you fired half the carpenters and told the others to work 16 hour days, maybe you’d find that the sale price isn’t what you thought it would be since a casual inspect would show the thing to be sagging. That’s what Musk is doing.
Employees have no equity from the old days. They might have done well thanks to Elon overpaying though. He has promised stock for the people who stay, but I haven’t seen any evidence they’ve gotten it yet, or that it will be significant. Plus people who stay will have to believe Twitter won’t go bankrupt after they get the stock. I suspect things are worse than we are hearing.
And in your hypothetical, he manages to do this. It’s not nearly as clear cut that he will manage to do so in reality.
Well, yes, the employees are the ones who actually create wealth. Sure, we have a system that allows the wealthy to act as parasites and divert some of that wealth into their own pockets. But that’s not the same as creating it. It certainly doesn’t mean that they deserve it.
No, but you also didn’t actually create that wealth. You may have profited, but you did so based on the efforts of others, not based on your own.
And that’s assuming that you did pay them for their labor, rather than find any and every way to avoid doing so.
Because they don’t. Twitter is no longer a public company, as all the shares were bought up in the buyout.
Musk has said a lot of things that he didn’t follow up on. If you were an employee, would you believe him?
And they may well stand to lose everything.
I’d be interested in a cite for that, and what is meant by “growth.”
If it is growth in DAU, then that’s because people are going to twitter to watch the dumpster fire in action.
It’s not a growth in revenue or profit, or even new accounts.
When it comes to the experience of a twitter user, you should care. And that ranges from everything from functionality to moderation.
It could be new accounts, if the rate at which bots/spammers are weeded out is less than before all those people were layed off/quit.
Fair enough, but the only thing that really matters in the end is revenue and/or profit, and I see no indication that those have grown, much less by record amounts. Much rather the other way around.
Is there a record for how quickly $44 billion can go up in smoke?
That is indeed a supremely weird flex if it’s true. I can’t even really think of a way it could be made to take 6 months to learn BASIC. I suppose if you divided it up into once-per-week sessions or something.
Weird thing is that, shooing his critics off of the platform, or even destroying the platform before their very eyes, isn’t going to make the critics disappear from existence.
Didn’t Zuckerberg just lose $60 or $70 billion in one day when Meta crashed after his virtual reality stuff turned out to be a dud? I’m pretty sure Bezos has lost that much as well.
Musk doesn’t need to make money from Twitter. He can run it as a vanity project, or as his contribution to free speech, or whatever. He could lose every nickel and still be the richest man in the world. To,be sure, he’d like to make enough money that he doesn’t have to pay investors back out of pocket, but he doesn’t have to.
And when Starlink goes public, Musk will probably at least double or triple his wealth. Don’t forget that SpaceX is a private company, and it absolutely dominates space launch.
Let’s talk about Starlink for a minute. Before Musk came along, the idea of putting 30,000 - 50,000 satellites in LEO for cell service was a fantasy. But Musk lowered the cost of space launch to the point where it became a reality, then gambled billions of dollars on making it work. He also realized the synergy of using Starlink to increase the cadence of Falcon 9 launches, lowering per-launch costs further. No one else had the vision or the balls to take such big swings.
And Starlink may be the biggest advance in standards of living for the third world any individual has ever managed. It has the possibility of providing open communicatiins in countries where the government tries to control information, and of course it is a big factor in the war in Ukraine.
When he takes Starlink public, Musk could easily earn another $100 billion. SpaceX itself has been valued at $74 billion, but if Starship works properly expect that to double as well over the next few years. As it is, SpaceX launches more than double the mass to orbit than all other companies and governments in the world combined.
Far from going broke, Musk is actually the #1 candidate for being the first trillionaire. Twitter is not that important to this. If he lost half of his investment and sold it, the loss would be in the range of a number of losses he’s suffered when the market took a dive. He’s used to it. If Starship blows up on the pad, it will cost him billions. Musk takes big swings. He’s diversified enough that no one failure or even several can take him out of the game.
And Musk has also lost a ton with the valuation of Tesla coming down to something closer to reality.
I’m not talking about wealth on paper, this is something that he bought and paid for.
Then why all the cost cutting and concern about revenue?
Private does not mean personally owned. How much does he actually own of that, and how much is outside investment?
I’m not sure what you think you are arguing, I didn’t say he was going broke. Take a look at what you are replying to, and then try to figure out how any of your fawning comments actually relate to it. Hint, they don’t.
Which wonderfully contextualizes Musk’s absurd cost-cutting measures at Twitter. Why is the richest man in the world obsessing over forcing his employees to pay for meals while he’s making them stay late hours at the office?
Either it was never about cost-cutting, or he’s not as well-off as he’d like us to think. Take your pick.
Maybe I am missing something, but I don’t see how an employee can be awarded significant equity at Twitter. It is like a start-up with $44B in ‘VC’ investment. To top it off Musk way over-paid so the first stage is just growing into its price tag. A rock star developer isn’t going to get a typical start-up grant of 0.1% – that’s a $44M value.
What might they get, 0.001%? 8k shares @ $54.20? Unless you really believe in Musk, it seems like there are better options.
That depends on what you mean by “significant”. Can Twitter offer equity to its employees? Sure, but from what I understand about how this tends to work in private companies they’d only be able to sell it if there’s a liquidity event that would allow them to sell their shares at the current valuation at which they’re raising capital, or hang on to to them for later. They can’t just dump them on the market place, because there is no marketplace. They might be able to privately sell them if that’s somehow allowed by securities laws that govern them, but that’s probably not going to net much unless a liquidity event is right around the corner and someone will buy for a slight discount to that valuation to get the cash now to the seller.
This doesn’t seem particularly enticing in a business that someone just paid the billions that Elon did when that cash didn’t remain in the business but was used to buy out old shareholders. There’s no sudden growth that they’re going to be looking at because of the new funding that would make the equity pop in value. And if they do offer equity awards that place a low value on the shares being issued and thus make it seem more potentially profitable to own long-term, we’ll know just how much value Elon has destroyed so far while he’s owned it.
I’m late to this but… no. Twitter is not growing. Twitter has ~360 million subscribers, and about 120 million of those are inactive. What Elon and the Muskrats are citing is the number of active users increasing, not the number of subscribers. A few million dormant subscribers have awakened to comment on the train wreck, but they aren’t new subscribers.
I don’t know much about coding. It’s a bit like Biblical Hebrew to me-- I can understand a text in front of me, but I can’t compose in the language.
That said, the request looked a little silly to me. It looked like someone thinks code should be read like a novel; there should be exciting parts, and clever turns of expression.
Code, I think-- and again, I’m a novice-- reads more like a dissertation. The language is chosen for its functionality, and not entertainment value.
I suppose there could be parts of a dissertation you could be especially proud of for their concision or clarity, when other people have not been able to achieve this on the same subject, but you reader needs to be as familiar as you are with other source material to appreciate you.
I don’t know about Starlink, but SpaceX is not 100% owned by Musk. An article from last year says Musk owns 43.6% of SpaceX:
Pretty decent analogy. Code isn’t generally a rollercoaster of punctuated exciting moments. It does stuff; ideally all of it does stuff, mostly in tiny pieces (including comments, which should do the stuff of explaining what the other stuff is about).
I love Chesil Beach - it’s truly an amazing natural wonder. I could not, for the life of me, bring you the most exciting pebble, or indeed bring you a pebble that would really represent the whole beach.
That’s pretty much it. People who work for a startup (which Twitter is, now) only make money if it IPOs, or perhaps gets bought out. If it closes, or sells for peanuts, they’re SOL. So anyone still working for Twitter who is offered stock to work insane hours is going to have to decide whether to bet on it increasing in value. Obviously, lots of people thought this was a bad bet.
When my first PhD advisor died they started a series of memorial lectures for him. The first was by Alan Perliss of Yale on “Programming as Literature.” It was about making one line APL programs to do all sorts of stuff. It made Finnegan’s Wake look like Fun with Dick and Jane. Since my advisor was an early advocate of structured programming, back when that was a bit controversial, all his students were rather pissed off at Perliss.
APL, for those who don’t know it, was a particularly obscure functional language invented at IBM which needed a special typeball for an IBM selectric typewriter/terminal to code in it.
Now BASIC hardly has data structures pre se, so maybe that’s why Musk feels he can tell the quality of a programmer by a few lines of code.
The people who quit working at Twitter (quit, not laid off) are for the most part not brave rebels taking a stand. They have the enormous privilege of being able to quit because they are able to get a new job quickly or have a lot of savings or they can get by without a salary for a while because of a familial support system. A few might think that staying there will tarnish their resume and are taking a calculated risk. Many of those left behind aren’t fanboys. They just need a fucking job.
Oh, come on. Musk programmed in BASIC when he was 12. That’s the language I started in, and you probably did too.
According to the link I posted earlier, most of Musk’s code has been written in Java, Python, C, Pearl, Shell, and ML stacks. He apparently has also written some of the OpenAI libraries, so he knows modern languages and whatever tech stack OpenAI uses. And since this code is open source, I imagine you could go to Github and actually look at what he’s checked in.
Judging his current skill by what he did when he was 12 or as a young non-CS student in college isn’t really fair. Actually, judging his management by his coding ability in the first place is kind of ridiculous.
In my experience, many sofrware managers wind up there because they were mediocre coders. My boss and my bosses’ boss were like that, and both openly admitted it. They took the management track at work as soon as possible because tthey didn’t like coding and weren’t very good at it. That doesn’t make them bad managers, or unable to tell when a developer is trying to snow them.