Did Musk ever explain why he carried a sink to the office on the first day?
Dumb joke. “I’m in charge of Twitter. Let that sink in!”
I know that Musk did not do any due diligence before taking over, but did he actually talk to anyone who works, or worked as the case may be, at Twitter before walking in as the owner?
Here’s a pretty good piece on the link between Elon Musk thinking he’s funny, and preferring right wing “humor”, to his drive to purchase and “transform” twitter.
Gift link to WaPo: Elon Musk’s Twitter is a safe space for bros who think they’re funny
I think a missing piece of the puzzle is what is happening in the rest of the tech world, especially with Zuck’s company. Laying off 11K people shows that the business model they’ve all relied on is coming to an end. Many of these didn’t make a profit from their product, it was the stock prices going up. That happened because (1) it’s been incredibly cheap to borrow money and (2) as long as a company is expanding, they can refer everyone to supposed future profits.
A lot of people have gotten insanely rich, from stock prices going up, not really thinking about i if there was ever going to be a profit in five or ten years - they’re only looking at the next quarter report.
It’s not as cheap to buy money anymore and it’s going to get more expensive. And there’s a limit to how much a company can actually expand. This has been felt by Apple and Microsoft for some time. Apple hit peak iPhone customer base a while ago. MS can only sell so many office and Windows subscriptions.
However, they offered tangible products. I wonder how Google and Amazon will fare. Probably better than the pure social media companies.
I had a bet with myself that Musk would drive Twitter into the ground by the end of the year. Then I revised that to the end of the month. Now I’ll be surprised if it lasts to Thanksgiving.
Other people were getting the attention that he deserved.
While Stark has Musk massively outmatched in the engineering department, he was pretty clueless socially, and I don’t know that he would have done much better with twitter.
Stark was the better engineer, but Hammer was the better businessman.
He would have given it that fancy holographic interface that you can touch and move stuff, and there would be much rejoicing.
…
Don’t ask why that would make Twitter better. I’m an idiot businessman too. 
Fair, and I have to admit, I’d probably pay $8 for that.
Dang. Now who does that remind me of… 
Great article. The comments are entertaining, too. There are a few Muskrats among the commenters, but most of them are hilariously mocking. Musk basically gathered the employees together and told them, among other things, that those working from home had better show up at the office or be fired. When one of the employees pointed out that Twitter offices themselves are distributed, Musk just repeated his order. He also added that, as at Tesla, exceptions could be made for really exceptional contributors, thus diplomatically implying that none of the dumbasses he was addressing were in that category. Oh, and he wants to turn Twitter into an online bank, and Twitter going bankrupt was a realistic possibility.
All in all, quite inspiring and motivating, I’d say. It also occurs to me that at Twitter, as with virtually any tech company, the employees were given regular stock options, which in many cases would have been very lucrative. What extra incentives are they getting now that Twitter has been taken private? It must suck to work there right now with that idiot at the helm. Musk urged all the employees to work with “maniacal urgency”. I suspect that thousands of resumes are even now being updated and printed with maniacal urgency.
I agree with the sentiment, but Twitter is big enough to have enormous inertia. It may take awhile. And I suppose there is some non-zero probability that during that time period, Musk may learn a few things, the most crucial of which would be to hire someone competent to run the place and get the hell out of the way.
No. He bought the initial tranche of stock on his own, though Dorsey was already trying to get him on the Board. Then he and Dorsey and Agarwal had a series of negotiations by text and email, and I believe a single in-person meeting. That whole time Dorsey was apparently urging Musk to buy the whole thing and take it private, as the only thing that could save Twitter, and I’m sure that played to Musk’s ego.
They’ve just closed Twitter Blue again. Chaos, though the kind of chaos that people were spending $8 to provoke.
Who, especially tech people, prints resumes?
I always did, but you have to understand that I haven’t formally applied for a job for quite a while. The last time I did, printing was high-tech – the Gutenberg press with its amazing movable type was still revered as a modern marvel.
Gosh - I am old. I typed my resume on an electric typewriter (a letter-o-tron, we called it, by gum)
I’m pretty sure they were on the verge of announcing layoffs. That’s why they were so eager to force Musk to buy it at that high price.
Looks like one of the most expensive business fuckups ever. Did Twitter swindle Musk or is he really this bad at business? It’s hard to wrap my head around the richest person in the world appearing to be so bad at business.
Based on this latest news, it’s possible he’s just plain batshit insane:
Not real ‘value’; at 84% of the pre-Twisaster value, Tesla is still overvalued by at least an order of magnitude.
Although most people don’t seem to grasp this, Elon has little-to-no involvement in daily operations at SpaceX and arguably has not since the early days of Falcon 9. Gwynne Shotwell and the operational management team have been exclusively responsible for the success of SpaceX in their ongoing launch operations while Elon has made occasionally appearance at Boca Chica in between appearances on SNL and ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ (which sounds like a coffee-infused yak butter enema) or cosplaying Tony Stark or whatever this is:
https://ktar.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ap_8e7f1296ba5346d3934c81137e64fac1.jpg
Given that the future of SpaceX has been leveraged out upon the success of Starlink I’m sure that Shotwell, et al, are highly focused on trying to make it financially viable. Unfortunately, the satellite telecom business has a long history of bankruptcies and a vanishingly short list of success without massive government subsidies. Whether Starlink is capable of being scaled to the extent of being a multiple-tens-of-billions of dollars of revenue necessary to recoup the investment while being capable of providing broadband access is highly questionable not withstanding what is going to happen the first time they get a cascading failure from a solar charged particle storm or have a collision spraying debris across an entire orbital azimuth at 500+ km altitude.
You mean a workforce culture like this?:
or this?:
Fortunately for Elon, employees are fleeing the burning hulk of Twitter so quickly that they aren’t even bothering to stick around for the complementary harassment.
Stranger