$150K in the Bay Area ain’t all that much. And that amount is before taxes. Just saying.
Now even Jack Dorsey is fact-checking Elon’s twits.
Wait, what’s the Actually Verified thing there? Is that a chrome extension or is that real?
It’s a Chrome extension.
SpaceX buying Twitter ads? That’s like making a bulk purchase of your own book to get it on the best-seller list.
It is hardly the most suspect acquisition that Musk has had one company work with another.
Stranger
TL;DR Why is Musk’s purchase “the end of Twitter”? What plans for Twitter does Musk have that are alarming?
He wants to turn it into a better version of YouTube with higher payouts to creators, a global payment system with returns better than the stock market, and the most reliable source of information on the internet. All while slashing staff and budgets.
This should clear things up:
Stranger
They deserve to earn what an employer is willing to pay them, neither more nor less. This is basic economics.
To me, there’s at least 3 separate non-trivial existential risks to Twitter that Musk is actively driving forward at a breakneck pace:
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Technical: Twitter may not have the requisite engineering talent to keep the site up and running for much longer and the site could simply fail whale one day and never come back. Just today, the component responsible for sending 2FA authentication texts was turned off or stopped working (unclear which). Anyone who uses 2FA and signs out of Twitter can’t sign back in until this is fixed. Other bugs are creeping into the site and it looks like at an accelerated rate.
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Financial: Advertising revenue is declining far faster than the cost cutting is happening. The new Twitter is loaded up with debt and there could come a time when there’s no realistic prospects of Twitter ever reaching a financial breakeven point at which case everything past that point is just throwing good money after bad.
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Userbase: Declining interest in Twitter could feed upon itself and Twitter could experience what happened to MySpace with users flocking elsewhere.
Obviously all three feed upon each other in complicated ways but each independently could spell the complete end of Twitter. Whats alarming is that Musk seems to wake up every day and makes a decision that makes each of these risks even larger.
And if their employer isn’t willing to pay them what they think they’re worth, they’re within their rights to tell the rest of the world every last detail of how they’re getting screwed over, in accordance with Elon Musk’s deeply held beliefs that all legal speech should be permitted and totally free of consequences.
Of course, they are, no one is saying otherwise. A potential future employer might not view that favorably, though.
Or they might view it super favorably! The world is awash in possibilities!
Then fuck 'em. I wouldn’t want to work for an employer who has a problem with me telling the truth about how I built up a company that an idiot billionaire asshole bought out and destroyed through sheer incompetence and egotism.
Among other things:
He seems to want to blur the distinction between accounts that are verified to belong to a real, particular, person or organization, and other accounts. That is a disastrous idea. It destroys the whole reason for Twitter’s existence.
Can you at least acknowledge that during a time of massive morale failure maybe kicking his employees in the gnads just because he can is not a wise move?
I don’t know if you are aware but employees are good things for a company to have, and if you convince all of them to quit, or following your suggestion of
leaving nobody including (or perhaps espcially) the CEO knowing how the company works, it might not be the best way to maximize shareholder value.
No, basic economics states that there are two parties in any transaction. They deserve to earn a sum that lies between whatever an employer is willing to pay them and whatever pay they are willing to accept.
Meanwhile they employees owe their employer somewhere between the amount of work they are willing to do and the amount of work the employer requires. And feeling valued by their employer has a large effect on that first value.
Two things.
First, many thanks to @Stranger_On_A_Train for cluing in me to the excellent Mike Judge movie Office Space. All these years it had somehow escaped my attention. Watched it last night and it was hilarious!
Second, the company culture parodied in that movie is remarkably similar to how I’m imagining Twitter right now under the “leadership” of Musk. And the dedication of the typical Twitter employee being pretty much like that of Peter Gibbons in that clip. 