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Tesla Engineers Visit Twitter Office to Review Code for Musk
- zeristor 4y agoHow does this work? The engineers work for Tesla, but Tesla isn’t buying Twitter? I was assuming Elon was, perhaps it’s a favour?
- quantified 4y agoYou do what the boss says. Of course, these are the engineers that can't even program a car to drive by itself.
- aeternum 4y agoHe's likely paying them a contracting fee.
- jjeaff 4y agoIt seems unlikely that the Tesla employment contract would allow outside consulting. But I could be wrong.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- HeckaSmart 4y agoHe is paying Tesla.
- skissane 4y agoMost likely, the contract is between Tesla and Musk’s Twitter acquisition vehicle (“X Holdings”), so it isn’t moonlighting, it is their day job. But, even if it is moonlighting - all employment contracts allow moonlighting with approval. Many firms are rather sparing in granting that approval - but it is a lot easier to say “yes” to an employee request if you know that’s what the CEO wants you to say.
- vxxzy 4y agoTwitter signs an agreement with Tesla’s new software consulting division!
- yumraj 4y agoSo siphon Twitter revenue to boost Tesla profit and its share price. Not a bad idea.
- xedeon 4y agoHow much annual revenue does Twitter generate compared to Tesla?
- zimpenfish 4y agoInternet suggests ~10% in 2021 (Twitter $5bn, Tesla ~$53bn)
- lupire 4y agoYou can't compare software services revenue to cars. COGS model is totally different.
- zimpenfish 4y agoI wasn't, I was just providing the numbers that GP asked for.
- treeman79 4y agohttps://companiesmarketcap.com/twitter/pe-ratio/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/twitter/pe-ratio/ Last P/E was -160. Which is really bad.
- skissane 4y agoSpaceX uses some Tesla parts (such as electric motors and batteries). Apparently, SpaceX has used Tesla engineers as consultants regarding those parts. Legally, Tesla isn't allowed to do "favours" for Musk's other businesses. From what I understand, SpaceX/etc pay Tesla the fair market value of all assistance received (both goods and services). And the cooperation has to (at a high level) be approved by the respective boards (both Tesla's and SpaceX's) while Musk is not in the room. Whatever assistance Tesla may have given Musk regarding Twitter would be subject to the same legal requirements.
- coffeeblack 4y agoOr both companies have accounting departments with experts who figure out the details, eg. what’s the amount in consulting fees that Tw pays to Tesla for this. Isn’t that obvious?
- clpm4j 4y agoThis is absolutely ridiculous, but probably sounds plausible to anyone who isn't a software developer. """ Earlier Thursday in Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, product leaders showed Tesla engineers the company’s code, so they could assess and explain to Musk what the company needs, according to one of the people. """
- toomuchtodo 4y agoI’m surprised not surprised Musk didn’t request access to code for due diligence review prior to closing.
- deminature 4y agoThe contract Musk signed relinquished any right to diligence. >It added another degree of uncertainty to whether Mr. Musk would complete the deal, even though he had waived his rights to do due diligence on Twitter when he bought it. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/06/technology/elon-musk-twitter.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/06/technology/elon-musk-twit...
- toomuchtodo 4y agoElon don’t care. I don’t say that in a good way. As Matt Levine said, “Musk did not become the world’s richest person by always honoring the letter and spirit of his commitments.”
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- akomtu 4y ago30 years ago he would subpoena Twitter and have lawyers review the mountain of printed code books.
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- zach_garwood 4y agoCan't the dude afford to hire his own independent contractors? Why bother Tesla employees with this?
- speedylight 4y agoWell they’re either on company time or being paid separately, either way I doubt they’re doing it for free!
- danielmarkbruce 4y agoTrust. He probably has a few engineers he trusts.
- seanhunter 4y agoAnd what “trust” probably means here is that they have technical chops but can also be relied on to tell Elon what he wants to hear.
- cheeze 4y agoIt's easier to reach out to one of your VPs and say "hey, I need a few folks" Whether they come from Tesla or are hired, Musk doesn't care. He just wants some DD
- coffeeblack 4y agoMoney is easy. Finding trustworthy people is hard.
- dilyevsky 4y agoWill he try to migrate twitter to windows server again?
- notjustanymike 4y agoDid they bounce any pull requests?
- yuppie_scum 4y agoI’ve heard the Tesla architecture is a hot mess. Maybe it’s more for the benefit of Tesla.
- panick21_ 4y agoTesla architecture might be a mess (very likely), but I bet a lot of money that among car companies that make billions in revenue their architecture is not that messy in comparison. If you consider the horror stories you hear from other car companies and their attempts at software.
- jjeaff 4y agoI bet most other car companies do very little software dev in-house. Just tons of outside vendors all providing different pieces.
- cheeze 4y agoI hire a lot of folks from auto industry. Many of the bigger players do most of their stuff in house. Most of it is... cobbled together quite poorly.
- jjeaff 4y agoThat is surprising. They must be working under heavy constraints for it to be as poor as it is.
- nso95 4y agoYou'd be surprised
- cocoland2 4y agoFrom my prior experience in a big car company. A lot of us are getting better as well, remember that there is baggage accumulated over the years. Like most things, this takes time. This bureaucracy be shed overnight, it is a painful metamorphosis. I know of systems of record where developers are close to retirement, devices which are fabricated by vendors. Every CIO change swings between "we are a car company, outsource" vs "software is eating the world, insource". Sure enough things are changing for the better.
- marstall 4y agooh sure, the problem is in "the code". just need to fix the code and then twitter will be all set.
- ALittleLight 4y agoIf you have some vision about what to do with Twitter it would probably help to understand the code base.
- lupire 4y agoWhy? Do you think Pichai or Cook/Jobs read the code? They hire engineers to build.
- ALittleLight 4y agoIn this context we are talking about Musk using developers he trusts to review Twitter's codebase. Isn't that exactly the same thing? Musk wants an understanding of Twitter's code, so he brings in people to establish that knowledge and convey it to him.
- cozzyd 4y agoMusk is going to be mad when he finds out Twitter bots don't know how to drive a car either.
- Bilal_io 4y agoWhat do you mean? It's quite simple. do {accelerate()} while(!didWeJustAccident())
- prng2021 4y agoYes let's have engineers that work on an in-car OS and a website that could be created on WordPress assess another company's product that is globally distributed and one of the most highly trafficked sites in the world. Edit: Didn't mean to downplay the tremendous effort that goes into Tesla's driver assistance features. Just that the architecture, codebases, and problems addressed are so wildly different between the companies.
- stonecharioteer 4y ago
- runlevel1 4y agoTo wit, Elon consults his brother, Kimbal, on a social media blockchain idea: https://muskmessages.com/d/40.html https://muskmessages.com/d/40.html I'm sure Kimbal's background as a chef, restaurateur, and designated lackey on Elon's various companies' Board of Directors has prepared him well on the subject.
- water8 4y agoWell, he’s got 3, multi-billion dollar companies under his belt. Maybe it works.
- xedeon 4y agoYou realize that the car stuff is only a small part of the entire infra and stack right?
- prng2021 4y agoMy point was just that neither company's engineers has the necessary knowledge to make any meaningful assessment of the other company's architecture and codebases. Both sides are the result of years of iterations to address very unique problems.
- wellthatsawrap1 4y ago
- lob_it 4y agoThis is obviously a ploy to get an immediate rebate on the 44 billion dollar price he just paid. Musk's technical team was an easy choice for an internal fraud bounty program to split the difference from any fraudulent misrepresentation by the original twitter management.
- gomijacogeo 4y agoI wonder how having engineers running errands at the boss's side-hustle benefits TSLA shareholders.
- skissane 4y agoTesla definitely benefits from its relationship with SpaceX - the Falcon Heavy maiden launch, Bob and Doug riding Teslas to the launch pad - those are the kind of positive brand stories that money can’t buy. Nobody knows how Twitter under Musk will turn out. Some critics predict it will soon be a far right swamp no advertiser will want to have anything to do with. If they are right, Tesla’s association with Twitter stands to do it great harm. But if they are wrong, Tesla could benefit from its association with Twitter, much as it does from SpaceX. Musk is (surely) telling Tesla’s board and execs that having just paid billions for a firm, he isn’t about to alienate all its customers (the advertisers) - and the Tesla team is going to take his word for it.
- jh0486 4y agoWe always seem to forget that the majority of US citizens identify as conservative or moderate. Personally, I'm middle-left and found the endless hordes of far-left mobsters to be as equally unappealing. It appears the country is finally trending back to moderate after the dumpster fire that was the last 7 years. Will companies continue to be hyper focused on political stances now that they're missing earnings? I think companies will leave the virtue signaling to the internet and get back thinking about how to maximize revenue. If people use the platform, and companies get click-through, I think they will advertise on it. Conservative Moderate Liberal U.S. adults 36 37 25
- mijamo 4y agoWhat does "moderate" mean in this context? From an outside perspective both Biden and Obama have felt extremely moderate for instance.
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- unboxingelf 4y agohttps://archive.ph/uf7aW https://archive.ph/uf7aW
- tiarafawn 4y ago> Twitter’s engineers can no longer make changes to code as of noon in San Francisco, the people said. I'm quite curious about the - Structure: Deployment freeze VS full-on halt of development on feature branches - Enforcement: Mere policy VS technical block via permission revocation (what happens if an urgent hotfix is required?) - Communication: Did anyone see this coming? Was it communicated in a respectful manner? Any Twitter engineers here who are able to talk about any of this?
- coffeeblack 4y agoEnforcement: I would imagine that there is a way for hotfixes by a small group of trustworthy employees. That would be the common sense approach. Communication: yes, this is the obvious cautious first step. There seem to be many ideologically driven people at Twitter and those kind of people can become dangerous very quickly. The big first task will be to find them and remove them from their positions, so that the rest of the employees can continue with their jobs.
- pjc50 4y agoThis is basically the "seize the telephone exchange and TV station" phase of a coup, where ideologically driven people can be replaced with different ideologically driven people. Musk himself has described his ideological motivations.
- water8 4y agoNo, we just want people to stop censoring the other side. It doesn’t take a genius to see where that road leads. Only one party, uses their feelings as justification for silencing dissent.
- pjc50 4y ago> It doesn’t take a genius to see where that road leads https://twitter.com/Esqueer_/status/1585808070466076673 https://twitter.com/Esqueer_/status/1585808070466076673 (screenshots of racial slurs and calls for mass murder)
- ManuelKiessling 4y agoCan't wait for the moment when my text cursor does a phantom braking while I'm writing a tweet.
- tibbydudeza 4y agoCongrats to Parag Agrawal on getting 42 million.
- papacostas 4y ago"ok guys make me a regex that replaces @realDonaldTrump with @BillGates. make it global and multiline"
- fsoteras_xps 4y agoI don't understand Musk infatuation with twitter, is just another social virtual pool with some interesting posting but also a ton of toxic comment and useless discussions. It's true that it has hundreds of millons of rabid users but so had mySpace at its prime, but hey what do I know...
- lupire 4y agoMusk made $100B in stock valuation from his Twitter-based PR/advertising operation.
- 18pfsmt 4y agoTSLA is currently trading at less than half of its all time high. He could've made the same comment to a reporter from the NYTimes or Wall St. Journal with the same effect.
- tim333 4y agoIt's become quite influential in the worlds media. Back in the Trump days the world's headlines used to be "Trump tweeted <x>". Not that I miss the Trump stuff but the same goes for a lot of influential figures. It was interesting in covid times that a lot of the newspapers had headlines "University x finds so and so about covid" but you could go on Twitter and read the tweets from the Prof of Virology at said university and get a much more accurate version released about 12 hours earlier. It put me off the MSM a bit to see how much they span things. It can be a superior source of info as long as you are careful to follow the real experts and not the cranks.
- mikewarot 4y agoTesla and Twitter programmers have opposite goals. A Tesla programmer wants the car to minimize interactions with the world, and avoid collisions. A Twitter programmer wants the feed to maximize interactions with the world, and avoid misses (aka boring content)
- sarah22245 4y ago
- Ava4312 4y ago