6 ms·

In a few years, if not sooner, Twitter will be right there with Tesla/SpaceX in terms of resume cachet. Everyone will see their culture has been transformed to

by bentt 4y ago

In a few years, if not sooner, Twitter will be right there with Tesla/SpaceX in terms of resume cachet. Everyone will see their culture has been transformed to one of rigor and performance. The "A" players will surface and they will do more with half the staff (or less even) than they ever did with 7500 people... and it will be noteworthy. Musk will be in the mix heavy for about 6 months. He'll make executive hires that work for him and then will wander back over to SpaceX as they get closer to Starship getting off the ground. People will be flipping out the whole time and a few Twitter competitors will rise, which will be great. Each Twitter alike will take on its own culture and the bubbles will now be network wide, much like they are with big press outlets like Fox and NYT. But Twitter will be the big daddy that all the journalists are on and if you want to broadcast something it will be the best place.

kaashif 4y ago
Even if all of that is true, I'd be surprised if Musk manages to make a positive return on his investment. However good you are, if you pay way too much for something, you're worse than someone who just didn't overpay and made no other changes.
- bentt 4y ago
  Well, how do you measure return? People seem to think one of three things about Elon Musk: A) Musk is a typical rich asshole who only loves money. B) Musk is a typical power hungry asshole who loves power and money is a side effect. C) Musk is a big nerd who thinks he can solve big problems better than other people, and power and money are side effects. I believe he's type C (Hopeful Nerd). So for that type of person, his positive return is solving the problem. He thinks he can fix social media. He thinks social media is a big problem. He thinks humans need to fix social media or they are fucked, just like if they don't get off oil they are fucked, and just like if they can't leave Earth they are fucked. Fundamentally, he does think humans are worth saving. I would bet that the vast majority of people that choose to work with Elon believe he is type C (Hopeful Nerd) and believe in humanity as well. That's why they put up with all of his flaws and toxicity - because they believe in the cause and know it's a broken eggs == omelet situation.
  - HyperSane 4y ago
    Why does Musk tweet lame conspiracy theories he is obviously smart enough to know are false?
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    Why does he have to be one of those things? None of them are mutually exclusive. You can be a big nerd with lots of money and a narcissistic power-hungry attitude. Just because you’re obsessed with money doesn’t mean you also don’t crave power (the two routinely go hand in hand as money is a form of power). He seems to embody all three “types” fairly well.
    - bentt 4y ago
      Well it's less that HE is mutually exclusive, it's more that the polarized social media world tends to see through these extreme lenses. And probably some days he's more one than the other.
  - Febra33 4y ago
    I see you only listed three options but where's the fourth: D) Musk is the saviour of humanity and everything he does is perfect and in no way, shape or form subject to criticism.
    - bentt 4y ago
      Yeah extremists gonna extreme
- nemo44x 4y ago
  I think it's about more than money for Musk. It's about influence and nudging the world closer to how it "ought to be". This is why wealthy people buy newspapers that will never make money. It's about power and influence. And I agree with OP - all this will be forgotten when Twitter is considered an elite place to work in a few years. Love him or hate him, but the guy attracts really talented people that want to work with really talented people.
  - bentt 4y ago
    Great point. Bezos didn't buy WaPo to make money. But I think Bezos is far less idealistic than Musk. Personally, I don't like Bezos one bit, and not just because his rockets are shaped like dildos (though that does not help).
- hodgesrm 4y ago
  > Even if all of that is true, I'd be surprised if Musk manages to make a positive return on his investment. +1. It's hard to see how the ROI works out here. The price was 50% overvalued if not more, and Twitter has had severe problems with monetization. On the other hand, Musk actually uses Twitter at scale unlike the previous management of the company. That might give him more insight into the possibilities than his predecessors.
lowbloodsugar 4y ago
Bahaha. Rigor and performance?? Teslas kill people. SpaceX is cool, but pays fuck all because it’s cool. I once watched the YouTube video of musk talking about battery prices and buying raw materials on the London exchange, and I thought, wow this guy is so insightful, no wonder his companies do well. It’s not till later that I found out that everything he says is someone else’s idea that he takes credit for.
- hcurtiss 4y ago
  This is true of every CEO and corporate leader. They coordinate profound talent around them. That alone is a talent, and a very valuable one.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Right. Being an effective CEO is not about having original ideas. It's about selecting the best ideas, and creating a team to realize them.
- speedgoose 4y ago
  Tesla’s AIs save people too. And looking at the balance it’s quite good.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  > It’s not till later that I found out that everything he says is someone else’s idea that he takes credit for. There are a zillion ideas out there. The idea (!) is to be able to pick the right ones. For example: 1. never give up 2. don't beat a dead horse Which idea is correct?
Febra33 4y ago
This reads like sarcasm
voxl 4y ago
Imagine being this far down into a cult of personality and people reading it and thinking to themselves "yeah _this_ comment is fine"
idiotsecant 4y ago
SpaceX and Tesla have no 'resume cachet'. They are widely known in engineering circles as hiring huge numbers of entry level or just barely above entry level engineers, exploiting their interest in technology to work them like rented mules until they burn out, and then discarding them. It's not a negative having worked at one of these places necessarily but unless the next employer is looking for an engineer with soul burned out of them it's not a positive either.
- bentt 4y ago
  Yeah, and then there are those that make it and stay. I doubt you hear from them. Anyone still at SpaceX/Tesla feel free to pipe in.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > SpaceX and Tesla have no 'resume cachet'. Among hiring managers at big companies, they absolutely do.
  - masterof0 4y ago
    I agree, those people saying that Tesla and SpaceX are not a great experience to have in your resume, are pushing wishful thinking to new boundaries.
  - kenjackson 4y ago
    As a hiring manager I can say that SpaceX has very little cachet, but Telsa has some. At least not in the SW space. Maybe in areas more related to their domains they have more.
  - nsxwolf 4y ago
    At my company, I promise you someone on my team would see the resume and shout "Holy shit this guy/gal worked at SpaceX!"
    - brian-armstrong 4y ago
      This. And everyone would stand up and clap.
jasmer 4y ago
Twitter is not 'SpaceX' in every way. It's 'social' and 'media' which are completely different operating environments. Twitter is long, long established as another company. The 'user base' of Twitter is entirely different kind of customer. He has no 'big government subsidies' to rely on, aka neither Tesla nor Space X would exist without major budgetary support from Big Gov. I suggest Twitter under Elon may be more profitable. Or different in some other way as well, but I'll give it only 25% chance it becomes like you're suggesting.
- mavhc 4y ago
  No company would exist with major budgetary support from the government. Energy is subsidised, roads exist, international commerce, the internet, laws, money.
  - johnsillings 4y ago
    That is an extremely expansive definition of "budgetary support."
  - stonogo 4y ago
    The commenter you're replying to was obviously talking about direct government payment for SpaceX services and direct government rebates for Tesla (and other electric car) customers, not infrastructure investments.
    - mavhc 4y ago
      Paying for services? How communist of them.
conductr 4y ago
> The "A" players will surface and they will do more with half the staff (or less even) than they ever did with 7500 people It's still not obvious to me what they did with 7500 people that couldn't have been done with 10% of that
- Rebelgecko 4y ago
  Content moderation?
whimsicalism 4y ago
Twitter already has more "resume cachet" than Tesla/SpaceX. Feel like there are more and more people here who know nothing about the industry.
CobrastanJorji 4y ago
In a way, I agree. Twitter's moving into an era where they have way fewer people but also huge pressure to release a bunch of changes on nightmarishly short schedules. I guarantee there's some senior tech lead who's just been handed a "make $8/month blue checkmarks happen, you have two weeks" assignment. In an environment like that, "rock stars" who can knock out projects in short order are going to see their careers skyrocket. But the trick is, they're going to pull this off by taking every shortcut they can. Code reviews are out, refactoring is out, performance and scalability concerns are out, etc. They will successfully launch the thing and then flee to the next glorious launch opportunity. This will work very, very well for a while. The thing about taking on a lot of debt is that it allows you to accomplish big things in short order. But the debt will be hidden, and over a year or two, they will start to find that suddenly getting projects done is becoming nearly impossible, even compared to the pre-Musk days. And things will slowly fall apart. It might be that all of the technical debt they're about to take on will have been worth it. Debt's a tool, and maybe making big changes to adjust their company's heading is worth it. And maybe to Musk, it's VERY worth it, because technical debt doesn't show up on financial ledgers, and he probably wants the company to look as solvent as possible. But I wouldn't want to be a software engineer there in a year.
- galdosdi 4y ago
  Good analysis IMHO. Hmmm. Maybe the plan is to flip the company before the chickens come home to roost?
galdosdi 4y ago
This makes no sense. Tesla, SpaceX, like video game companies, are able to punch above their hiring weight because the domain is "sexy" (engineers get excited about electric cars, space exploration, and video games) Social media just isn't these days, from an engineering perspective. The fun parts (scaling distributed infrastructure) are already old hat and it's mostly a business rules complexity problem. Most of what all these people are doing relates to complicated and boring business details. It's a corporate job. It won't pay, for engineers, in excitement, so it has to pay in money. So I'm not sure where all these people that are so excited to work their asses off for something that will be boring for them will come from (exciting for the businesspeople, as there are very hard business problems, but not for the engineers, as there are no hard tech problems in this domain anymore). The only option will be to do what FAANG and hedge funds have always done, and either really overpay to force top talent to care about these boring problems, or just settle for average talent with average productivity and average outcomes.

by bentt 4y ago

kaashif 4y ago

Even if all of that is true, I'd be surprised if Musk manages to make a positive return on his investment. However good you are, if you pay way too much for something, you're worse than someone who just didn't overpay and made no other changes.

bentt 4y ago
Well, how do you measure return? People seem to think one of three things about Elon Musk: A) Musk is a typical rich asshole who only loves money. B) Musk is a typical power hungry asshole who loves power and money is a side effect. C) Musk is a big nerd who thinks he can solve big problems better than other people, and power and money are side effects. I believe he's type C (Hopeful Nerd). So for that type of person, his positive return is solving the problem. He thinks he can fix social media. He thinks social media is a big problem. He thinks humans need to fix social media or they are fucked, just like if they don't get off oil they are fucked, and just like if they can't leave Earth they are fucked. Fundamentally, he does think humans are worth saving. I would bet that the vast majority of people that choose to work with Elon believe he is type C (Hopeful Nerd) and believe in humanity as well. That's why they put up with all of his flaws and toxicity - because they believe in the cause and know it's a broken eggs == omelet situation.
- HyperSane 4y ago
  Why does Musk tweet lame conspiracy theories he is obviously smart enough to know are false?
- mynameisvlad 4y ago
  Why does he have to be one of those things? None of them are mutually exclusive. You can be a big nerd with lots of money and a narcissistic power-hungry attitude. Just because you’re obsessed with money doesn’t mean you also don’t crave power (the two routinely go hand in hand as money is a form of power). He seems to embody all three “types” fairly well.
  - bentt 4y ago
    Well it's less that HE is mutually exclusive, it's more that the polarized social media world tends to see through these extreme lenses. And probably some days he's more one than the other.
- Febra33 4y ago
  I see you only listed three options but where's the fourth: D) Musk is the saviour of humanity and everything he does is perfect and in no way, shape or form subject to criticism.
  - bentt 4y ago
    Yeah extremists gonna extreme
nemo44x 4y ago
I think it's about more than money for Musk. It's about influence and nudging the world closer to how it "ought to be". This is why wealthy people buy newspapers that will never make money. It's about power and influence. And I agree with OP - all this will be forgotten when Twitter is considered an elite place to work in a few years. Love him or hate him, but the guy attracts really talented people that want to work with really talented people.
- bentt 4y ago
  Great point. Bezos didn't buy WaPo to make money. But I think Bezos is far less idealistic than Musk. Personally, I don't like Bezos one bit, and not just because his rockets are shaped like dildos (though that does not help).
hodgesrm 4y ago
> Even if all of that is true, I'd be surprised if Musk manages to make a positive return on his investment. +1. It's hard to see how the ROI works out here. The price was 50% overvalued if not more, and Twitter has had severe problems with monetization. On the other hand, Musk actually uses Twitter at scale unlike the previous management of the company. That might give him more insight into the possibilities than his predecessors.

lowbloodsugar 4y ago

Bahaha. Rigor and performance?? Teslas kill people. SpaceX is cool, but pays fuck all because it’s cool. I once watched the YouTube video of musk talking about battery prices and buying raw materials on the London exchange, and I thought, wow this guy is so insightful, no wonder his companies do well. It’s not till later that I found out that everything he says is someone else’s idea that he takes credit for.

hcurtiss 4y ago
This is true of every CEO and corporate leader. They coordinate profound talent around them. That alone is a talent, and a very valuable one.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Right. Being an effective CEO is not about having original ideas. It's about selecting the best ideas, and creating a team to realize them.
speedgoose 4y ago
Tesla’s AIs save people too. And looking at the balance it’s quite good.
WalterBright 4y ago
> It’s not till later that I found out that everything he says is someone else’s idea that he takes credit for. There are a zillion ideas out there. The idea (!) is to be able to pick the right ones. For example: 1. never give up 2. don't beat a dead horse Which idea is correct?

Febra33 4y ago

This reads like sarcasm

voxl 4y ago

Imagine being this far down into a cult of personality and people reading it and thinking to themselves "yeah _this_ comment is fine"

idiotsecant 4y ago

SpaceX and Tesla have no 'resume cachet'. They are widely known in engineering circles as hiring huge numbers of entry level or just barely above entry level engineers, exploiting their interest in technology to work them like rented mules until they burn out, and then discarding them. It's not a negative having worked at one of these places necessarily but unless the next employer is looking for an engineer with soul burned out of them it's not a positive either.

bentt 4y ago
Yeah, and then there are those that make it and stay. I doubt you hear from them. Anyone still at SpaceX/Tesla feel free to pipe in.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> SpaceX and Tesla have no 'resume cachet'. Among hiring managers at big companies, they absolutely do.
- masterof0 4y ago
  I agree, those people saying that Tesla and SpaceX are not a great experience to have in your resume, are pushing wishful thinking to new boundaries.
- kenjackson 4y ago
  As a hiring manager I can say that SpaceX has very little cachet, but Telsa has some. At least not in the SW space. Maybe in areas more related to their domains they have more.
- nsxwolf 4y ago
  At my company, I promise you someone on my team would see the resume and shout "Holy shit this guy/gal worked at SpaceX!"
  - brian-armstrong 4y ago
    This. And everyone would stand up and clap.

jasmer 4y ago

Twitter is not 'SpaceX' in every way. It's 'social' and 'media' which are completely different operating environments. Twitter is long, long established as another company. The 'user base' of Twitter is entirely different kind of customer. He has no 'big government subsidies' to rely on, aka neither Tesla nor Space X would exist without major budgetary support from Big Gov. I suggest Twitter under Elon may be more profitable. Or different in some other way as well, but I'll give it only 25% chance it becomes like you're suggesting.

mavhc 4y ago
No company would exist with major budgetary support from the government. Energy is subsidised, roads exist, international commerce, the internet, laws, money.
- johnsillings 4y ago
  That is an extremely expansive definition of "budgetary support."
- stonogo 4y ago
  The commenter you're replying to was obviously talking about direct government payment for SpaceX services and direct government rebates for Tesla (and other electric car) customers, not infrastructure investments.
  - mavhc 4y ago
    Paying for services? How communist of them.

conductr 4y ago

> The "A" players will surface and they will do more with half the staff (or less even) than they ever did with 7500 people It's still not obvious to me what they did with 7500 people that couldn't have been done with 10% of that

Rebelgecko 4y ago
Content moderation?

whimsicalism 4y ago

Twitter already has more "resume cachet" than Tesla/SpaceX. Feel like there are more and more people here who know nothing about the industry.

CobrastanJorji 4y ago

In a way, I agree. Twitter's moving into an era where they have way fewer people but also huge pressure to release a bunch of changes on nightmarishly short schedules. I guarantee there's some senior tech lead who's just been handed a "make $8/month blue checkmarks happen, you have two weeks" assignment. In an environment like that, "rock stars" who can knock out projects in short order are going to see their careers skyrocket. But the trick is, they're going to pull this off by taking every shortcut they can. Code reviews are out, refactoring is out, performance and scalability concerns are out, etc. They will successfully launch the thing and then flee to the next glorious launch opportunity. This will work very, very well for a while. The thing about taking on a lot of debt is that it allows you to accomplish big things in short order. But the debt will be hidden, and over a year or two, they will start to find that suddenly getting projects done is becoming nearly impossible, even compared to the pre-Musk days. And things will slowly fall apart. It might be that all of the technical debt they're about to take on will have been worth it. Debt's a tool, and maybe making big changes to adjust their company's heading is worth it. And maybe to Musk, it's VERY worth it, because technical debt doesn't show up on financial ledgers, and he probably wants the company to look as solvent as possible. But I wouldn't want to be a software engineer there in a year.

galdosdi 4y ago
Good analysis IMHO. Hmmm. Maybe the plan is to flip the company before the chickens come home to roost?

galdosdi 4y ago

This makes no sense. Tesla, SpaceX, like video game companies, are able to punch above their hiring weight because the domain is "sexy" (engineers get excited about electric cars, space exploration, and video games) Social media just isn't these days, from an engineering perspective. The fun parts (scaling distributed infrastructure) are already old hat and it's mostly a business rules complexity problem. Most of what all these people are doing relates to complicated and boring business details. It's a corporate job. It won't pay, for engineers, in excitement, so it has to pay in money. So I'm not sure where all these people that are so excited to work their asses off for something that will be boring for them will come from (exciting for the businesspeople, as there are very hard business problems, but not for the engineers, as there are no hard tech problems in this domain anymore). The only option will be to do what FAANG and hedge funds have always done, and either really overpay to force top talent to care about these boring problems, or just settle for average talent with average productivity and average outcomes.