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Unless he thinks Twitter doesn't need data engineers at all, they now have to staff an entire department from scratch, with zero handoff of institutional and tr

Unless he thinks Twitter doesn't need data engineers at all, they now have to staff an entire department from scratch, with zero handoff of institutional and tribal knowledge. Maybe on a long enough time horizon, they're really that bad that it's worth it anyway, but realistically, I doubt Twitter has just been hiring nothing but worthless shitheads. Whatever you think you can achieve with a new team could have been achieved with at least some of these people. It's like sacking the entire Los Angeles Lakers. Yeah, they suck and they're an embarrassment, but there aren't literally zero salvageable personnel and you can't hope to field a better team from scratch within a few seasons, and you'll have to overpay just to try. At least there is no salary cap for tech firms, so they're legally allowed to overpay, but seeing the company is a mess and you risk being fired en masse just to put on a show for the press as far as I can tell, you're going to have to overpay even more now. Maybe his plan is to automate it all? Full self data engineering within 5 years?

Consultant32452 4y ago
One important thing to remember is that Elon had access to Twitter data for quite some time and you can be certain his team has built tooling to do whatever Elon wanted. It won't be a mature system, surely, but it will be in place.
wwweston 4y ago
Let's posit that he didn't buy twitter for the potential profits on twitter revenues, since there are any number of equal/better options for that, some of which he's already involved in. Perhaps he bought it because he's interested its capacity to shape (dare I say manipulate) public discourse, which he's utilized heavily, and may have taken umbrage when that was limited in any way. Now, perhaps, he plans to manipulate it further, in the way a singularly-minded owner can. One possible problem with that plan is if internal staff see what's happening, don't like it, and tell the world. Data engineering is the staff likely in the best position to see what's really happening on the platform and potentially tell others. So an owner motivated by wanting to manipulate the platform without pesky whistleblowers might want to fire them all and replace them with people selected for loyalty and/or buy-in on the motivations for manipulating twitter as a platform.
- krainboltgreene 4y ago
  > Perhaps he bought it because he's interested its capacity to shape (dare I say manipulate) public discourse, which he's utilized heavily, and may have taken umbrage when that was limited in any way. So interested he tried to get out of it multiple times.
  - wwweston 4y ago
    Any potential displays of buyer's regret are ultimately framed by the much more weighty evidence that he made an offer in the first place. Certainly no one forced him to do that. "He didn't really want it" just doesn't fly given that context. We don't know why he indicated at some points he wanted to back out. Maybe he just thought he could renegotiate a better deal. Maybe he really did have second thoughts about whatever his reasons were for making the offer in the first place. But he was, at some point, at least $44B or on the order of "one fifth his net worth" interested. Which seems pretty interested to me.

Consultant32452 4y ago

One important thing to remember is that Elon had access to Twitter data for quite some time and you can be certain his team has built tooling to do whatever Elon wanted. It won't be a mature system, surely, but it will be in place.

wwweston 4y ago

Let's posit that he didn't buy twitter for the potential profits on twitter revenues, since there are any number of equal/better options for that, some of which he's already involved in. Perhaps he bought it because he's interested its capacity to shape (dare I say manipulate) public discourse, which he's utilized heavily, and may have taken umbrage when that was limited in any way. Now, perhaps, he plans to manipulate it further, in the way a singularly-minded owner can. One possible problem with that plan is if internal staff see what's happening, don't like it, and tell the world. Data engineering is the staff likely in the best position to see what's really happening on the platform and potentially tell others. So an owner motivated by wanting to manipulate the platform without pesky whistleblowers might want to fire them all and replace them with people selected for loyalty and/or buy-in on the motivations for manipulating twitter as a platform.

krainboltgreene 4y ago
> Perhaps he bought it because he's interested its capacity to shape (dare I say manipulate) public discourse, which he's utilized heavily, and may have taken umbrage when that was limited in any way. So interested he tried to get out of it multiple times.
- wwweston 4y ago
  Any potential displays of buyer's regret are ultimately framed by the much more weighty evidence that he made an offer in the first place. Certainly no one forced him to do that. "He didn't really want it" just doesn't fly given that context. We don't know why he indicated at some points he wanted to back out. Maybe he just thought he could renegotiate a better deal. Maybe he really did have second thoughts about whatever his reasons were for making the offer in the first place. But he was, at some point, at least $44B or on the order of "one fifth his net worth" interested. Which seems pretty interested to me.