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So here's my understanding of what happened, appreciating corrections: * Twitter was known for liberal corporate politics, most employees liberal * Purchased

So here's my understanding of what happened, appreciating corrections: * Twitter was known for liberal corporate politics, most employees liberal * Purchased by center-right billionaire in the name of freedom of speech (modern liberals against freedom of speech) * Twitter employees amuse themselves by making billionaire's life difficult * Billionaire delivers ultimatum, many employees out * Unclear if sufficient knowledge to maintain systems will survive It seems like with the benefit of hindsight, the correct play for Elon would've been to avoid major moves at first, let far left employees quit, replace them with new hires excited by working at a Musk company. Then eventually, maybe, deliver an ultimatum once new Musk-enthusiast hires had absorbed enough knowledge to maintain systems. I think the hard-charging approach Elon took was likely the correct one for Tesla/SpaceX, since employees at those companies mostly knew what they had signed up for, but Twitter was a much different management challenge since the existing workforce has/had an active dislike for Elon.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
solarkraft 4y ago
> Twitter employees amuse themselves by making billionaire's life difficult Where did you get that from? He immediately started firing people, so when should they have done that?
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  https://twitter.com/rlycalm/status/1592636069224542208 https://twitter.com/rlycalm/status/1592636069224542208 Granted, I don't know this person is actually an engineer as opposed to a troll. And she doesn't claim that she or other employees actively tried to create trouble. So there was an aspect of me reading subtext into her tweet + Elon's ultimatum. Maybe incorrectly.
  - Chinjut 4y ago
    That is a joke post. That person was never a Twitter employee. But even if they counterfactually were, big deal if the grunts at the organization you take over have a nickname for you.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
ffggffggj 4y ago
Out of curiosity, where do you tend to learn about this stuff? What sites/news sources do you use?
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  Mostly twitter actually. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/with_replies https://twitter.com/elonmusk/with_replies and tweets it recommends to me. I don't actually have an account.
  - ffggffggj 4y ago
    For what it’s worth, your post is wildly inaccurate. To me it reads like the understanding of someone who consumes a lot far-right stuff and cannot discern between online talk show narrative and factual real world events. You might consider enriching your media diet.
    - ShredKazoo 4y ago
      Well, I said I appreciated corrections :-) I think this comment from you is a bit too high-level to be useful though, maybe it'd be more helpful to identify the bullet point which is most inaccurate and explain why, with citations. I mostly vote for Democrats btw.
      - smcl 4y ago
        I'm not the person you replied to but when I read your comment at the top-level it suggested that "far left" and "liberal" people were a problem at Twitter and that they needed to be somehow removed from the org to fix it. This is a fairly common trope among the alt-right and far-right - that the damn snowflake liberals want to take away your freedom of speech (and take your guns, and turn your kids trans, etc etc), and to be honest I raised an eyebrow. Though it could possibly be that you meant it to be read as "ok assuming Musk thinks liberals/left-leaning employees are the problem, here's how he could have booted them in a less chaotic way ..."
spuz 4y ago
You're missing a significant bullet point which is that in-between Musk arriving and Twitter employees resigning, Musk fired 50% of the workforce. That seems like a much more significant factor in whether systems can be maintained.
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  Good point. And that also probably creates fear/resentment among the remaining employees. I guess Elon is a weird combination of being very good at the "visionary" aspects of leadership (inspiring people with "Occupy Mars") and being very bad at the "managing" aspects (creating psychological safety & high morale for employees). This leadership style doesn't work unless your employees believe in your vision.
  - mftb 4y ago
    He's done little to nothing since the takeover of Twitter to articulate a meaningful or inspiring vision. At best his messaging has been erratic.
- ActorNightly 4y ago
  If you need half of 7500 people to maintain a system like Twitter, something is fundamentally wrong with the tech stack and the tech people that work there.
  - ShredKazoo 4y ago
    Agreed. I used to work at a top 200 website (also social media) and we had about 30 engineers and another 30 non-engineer staff. I think cutting workforce was the correct move for an acquirer, but he probably should've moved just a bit slower (e.g. using a more sophisticated metric for employee productivity than "# lines committed"). And of course try to make cuts in a way that doesn't harm the morale of those who aren't cut.
  - lm28469 4y ago
    Technically your car will drive without a brake pedal, a roof and tires too
zarzavat 4y ago
His biggest mistake was saying that he would allow Trump back. In the minds of many left-leaning people that makes him a sympathizer in a coup attempt, and those left-leaning people succeeded in creating an extreme amount of pressure against Twitter’s customers (the advertisers) to starve the company. Musk clearly thinks of himself as creating a platform for free speech, but when it comes to coups there is really no such thing as a middle ground or neutrality.
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  Can you provide a source for Musk saying that he would allow Trump back? Last I heard, he formed an advisory board, and said account reinstatements were pending discussions of advisory board. In any case, I think you're correct that this is an important subthread.
  - joe-collins 4y ago
    https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/05/elon-musk-would-let-trump-back-on-twitter-says-ban-was-morally-wrong/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/05/elon-musk-would-... https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1524881263470993435 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1524881263470993435
    - ShredKazoo 4y ago
      Thanks!
consumer451 4y ago
> modern liberals against freedom of speech Can you please give me specific examples of speech that modern liberals are against?
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  An obvious bone of contention would be whether Trump should get to have an account or not. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33652055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33652055
  - consumer451 4y ago
    Companies can choose to whom and what they choose to provide a platform, can they not? For example, Elon Musk has owned Twitter for enough time to have re-instated @realdonaldtrump, yet he has not. Why is that?
    - ShredKazoo 4y ago
      The core of my argument is when Elon tweets about how he's in favor of freedom of speech, it makes many liberals squirm. The argument doesn't depend on these sort of details related to whether "freedom of speech" is a purely legal concept, vs one that also makes sense in the context of a social media platform.
      - consumer451 4y ago
        Since in reality, not even 4chan allows absolute free speech I see this whole thing as either disingenuous or naive. > The argument doesn't depend on these sort of details I would argue that without details arguments are just hand wavy.
      - consumer451 4y ago
        Separately, > ... freedom of speech, it makes many liberals squirm. I think this meme can be quickly disproved by looking at political subreddits. All right wing subs of which I'm aware have rules which filter out speech which does not toe the party line. I find the reality of the freedom with which I am allowed to discuss my ideas in righty subs to be extremely hypocritical when they are supposedly all about "free speech."
waiseristy 4y ago
The timeline you drew here is wack He started firing people day 1 and bragging about it online. Of course his remaining employees are going to shit talk him. The “ultimatum” sure as hell wasn’t in response to this either, I don’t know if you are implying that or not. He pulled this exact same stunt at Tesla just a few months ago. The dude is a raging asshole surrounded by yes men. If you value your health and your family you should not work for this man
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  I searched for the Tesla ultimatum you refer to. It seems to have been different, specifically saying execs couldn't work remotely: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-01/musk-s-tesla-ultimatum-return-to-office-or-work-somewhere-else?leadSource=uverify%20wall https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-01/musk-s-te... Contrast w/ Twitter ultimatum: https://twitter.com/donie/status/1592859900941852674 https://twitter.com/donie/status/1592859900941852674 I think the Twitter ultimatum is the kind of thing you send if you suspect most employees don't support your leadership / are not pulling their weight. Similar to the Zappos philosophy of offering a generous severance to everyone who quits, in order to have an office full of enthusiastic employees.
  - waiseristy 4y ago
    What are you talking about? You are completely fabricating a narrative here. > “Everyone at Tesla is required to spend a minimum of 40 hours in the office per week,” Tesla is RTO. Quit defending this billionaires psychopathic behavior. This is not a healthy way to run a company
    - ShredKazoo 4y ago
      I guess I over-indexed on the "Tesla Execs" in the headline. I don't think requiring 40 hours in office makes you "psychopathic". People can quit if they don't like it shrug
      - waiseristy 4y ago
SilverBirch 4y ago
Regular people have been trying to explain this to the "center-right" for a while now: Twitter's moderation policies weren't primarily dictated by their political views, they were primarily dictated by building an advertiser friendly platform. Which Musk exploded almost immediately by endorsing a far right homophobic conspiracy theory about a violent attack on the family member of an elected politician. You can say "with the benefit of hindsight" but I would put to you: with the benefit of foresight, lots of people told him exactly what would happen. The problem isn't the management structure, it's that Musk is unfamiliar with pretty basic facts about twitter, such as its engineering architecture, its business model, and its position in the market.
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  From what I understand, Twitter's moderation is noticeably more left-wing than that of Facebook. And yet Facebook makes a lot of ad dollars. So I do think there's a discretionary element there. I agree that Musk hasn't been behaving in a way that's advertiser-friendly. Jack Dorsey is super familiar with Twitter and said Elon was the best solution for it if it was gonna stay a company: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/25/jack-dorsey-says-elon-musk-is-the-singular-solution-i-trust/#:~:text=Solving%20for%20the%20problem%20of,extend%20the%20light%20of%20consciousness.%E2%80%9D&text=The%20idea%20and%20service%20is,it%20takes%20to%20protect%20both https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/25/jack-dorsey-says-elon-musk.... I'm sure we can find someone, somewhere who correctly predicted in advance how things could go down, but I'm skeptical that it was a widespread prediction. Certainly feel free to prove me wrong.
  - SilverBirch 4y ago
    Facebook is a very different business from Twitter in 3 ways - firstly scale, they're more than 5x the size, secondly in engagement - they have enormous amounts of demographic and behaviour data about their users and they track them extensively across the web, and finally business model - Twitter does brand advertising whereas Facebook is much closer to point of sale, an advert on Facebook is likely to directly convert to a sale, whereas an advert on twitter is just mainly brand advertising - Facebook's type of advert is far more valuable. So it's difficult to directly compare them. But more importantly there's a big difference between how Facebook and Twitter work - Facebook is default closed, people can't interact with you unless you're putting yourself out there - either by friending people or joining a group, so there's a natural barrier against the spread of harassment, brigading and the toxic behaviour becoming public. There is a whole load of toxic neo-nazi stuff on Facebook, but it's out of view, and because ads are highly targetted there's no concern about brand safety. On Twitter it's default open, so if people are going around loudly spreading far right homophobic conspiracy theories about a violent attack on an elected official everyone is going to know about it - that's why Twitter has to be so careful. There were a lot of people who have been in social media who explained in a lot of detail about how these things work when Elon first got involved. For example, Yishan Wong ran reddit back in 2012, at the time he had an extremely similar free speech maximalist view similar to Musk's current view. He did a very clear explanation of the dynamics of why that approach simply doesn't work - https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440 https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440 .
watwut 4y ago
1.) Twitter was not biased for liberals. That part is just not true, no matter what grievance machine says. 2.) Musk intentions were not free speech by any meaningful sense. He does not have track record of valuing it. He values only speech of those he agrees it and is super eager to punish whoever disagree with him. The first departments that had to go were the ones where actual free speech issues are dealt with. Like, human rights team. Free speech is more then just saying n-word or ability to harass your opponents. It is also not giving your details to law enforcement and policies related to nonwestern countries. 3.) Twitter employees making it difficult for him is just not true. The worst that happened was few people disagreeing with him about technical matters. The free speech advocate was unable to process even technical disagreement. 4.) The idea that it ia far left employees leaving or that there was even that many of them is bonkers. Conservative people think about their employment conditions too. They dont necessary like being humiliated, they are not all doormats and natural born yes men.
mola 4y ago
Oh comeon. Musk acted like a douch to his employees. Actively trying to make their life crap and shitpoating on how bad they are. This had nothing to do with politics. More like ppl with other options taking them to avoid being treated like crap. A Much simpler explanation
dale_glass 4y ago
Here's my own understanding: * Musk didn't really want to buy Twitter. He screwed up and got locked into a contract he couldn't figure out a way out of. * Having figured that he vastly overpaid, he panicked and tried to cut down the fat. Problem is that he hasn't spent enough time there to figure out where's the fat. * Musk fundamentally doesn't understand what he has bought. He doesn't understand that Twitter's business relies on pleasing advertisers, who don't give a crap about free speech ideals and are very risk averse. * Musk doesn't understand that what he bought is far more about people skills than anything else. Managing an online community is an exercise in cat herding. At Twitter's scale you also have to content with thorny legal issues. None of that is fun. Many forces push things into a familiar direction, and "free speech" is a very tough direction to pick. * Musk doesn't understand even the basics of the platform he bought, like why the blue checkmarks provided any value. He proceeded to immediately throw a huge wrench into that system, to nearly no economic benefit. * Musk is trying to have his cake and eat it too. On one hand he wants unrestricted free speech, on the other hand he wants to make money from advertisers that don't care for free speech. You can pick one or the other. * Musk seems not to understand that Twitter isn't SpaceX. There's few places where you can work on a rocket, but a lot of places where you can maintain a backend. You can sell the dream of colonizing Mars to rocket engineers, but Twitter employees can go most anywhere else and do mostly the same thing. * Musk seems not to understand that since his employees have plentiful options, he can't strong arm them. They can leave. They're generally well paid, and his takeover provides plentiful options for them to organize, help each other and start lawsuits if he breaks any laws.
- watwut 4y ago
  > He doesn't understand that Twitter's business relies on pleasing advertisers, who don't give a crap about free speech ideals and are very risk averse. Musk does not care about free speech either.
  - dale_glass 4y ago
    That's a good point, true free speech fanatics are extremely rare. Most everyone in reality thinks that their group is being silenced, and wouldn't mind silencing their ideological opposition.
dangerface 4y ago
> * Twitter employees amuse themselves by making billionaire's life difficult Elon got them to print out their code and pissed off the advertisers that where paying them. I don't think it was the employees that made life difficult.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

solarkraft 4y ago

> Twitter employees amuse themselves by making billionaire's life difficult Where did you get that from? He immediately started firing people, so when should they have done that?

ShredKazoo 4y ago
https://twitter.com/rlycalm/status/1592636069224542208 https://twitter.com/rlycalm/status/1592636069224542208 Granted, I don't know this person is actually an engineer as opposed to a troll. And she doesn't claim that she or other employees actively tried to create trouble. So there was an aspect of me reading subtext into her tweet + Elon's ultimatum. Maybe incorrectly.
- Chinjut 4y ago
  That is a joke post. That person was never a Twitter employee. But even if they counterfactually were, big deal if the grunts at the organization you take over have a nickname for you.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

ffggffggj 4y ago

Out of curiosity, where do you tend to learn about this stuff? What sites/news sources do you use?

ShredKazoo 4y ago
Mostly twitter actually. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/with_replies https://twitter.com/elonmusk/with_replies and tweets it recommends to me. I don't actually have an account.
- ffggffggj 4y ago
  For what it’s worth, your post is wildly inaccurate. To me it reads like the understanding of someone who consumes a lot far-right stuff and cannot discern between online talk show narrative and factual real world events. You might consider enriching your media diet.
  - ShredKazoo 4y ago
    Well, I said I appreciated corrections :-) I think this comment from you is a bit too high-level to be useful though, maybe it'd be more helpful to identify the bullet point which is most inaccurate and explain why, with citations. I mostly vote for Democrats btw.
    - smcl 4y ago
      I'm not the person you replied to but when I read your comment at the top-level it suggested that "far left" and "liberal" people were a problem at Twitter and that they needed to be somehow removed from the org to fix it. This is a fairly common trope among the alt-right and far-right - that the damn snowflake liberals want to take away your freedom of speech (and take your guns, and turn your kids trans, etc etc), and to be honest I raised an eyebrow. Though it could possibly be that you meant it to be read as "ok assuming Musk thinks liberals/left-leaning employees are the problem, here's how he could have booted them in a less chaotic way ..."

spuz 4y ago

You're missing a significant bullet point which is that in-between Musk arriving and Twitter employees resigning, Musk fired 50% of the workforce. That seems like a much more significant factor in whether systems can be maintained.

ShredKazoo 4y ago
Good point. And that also probably creates fear/resentment among the remaining employees. I guess Elon is a weird combination of being very good at the "visionary" aspects of leadership (inspiring people with "Occupy Mars") and being very bad at the "managing" aspects (creating psychological safety & high morale for employees). This leadership style doesn't work unless your employees believe in your vision.
- mftb 4y ago
  He's done little to nothing since the takeover of Twitter to articulate a meaningful or inspiring vision. At best his messaging has been erratic.
ActorNightly 4y ago
If you need half of 7500 people to maintain a system like Twitter, something is fundamentally wrong with the tech stack and the tech people that work there.
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  Agreed. I used to work at a top 200 website (also social media) and we had about 30 engineers and another 30 non-engineer staff. I think cutting workforce was the correct move for an acquirer, but he probably should've moved just a bit slower (e.g. using a more sophisticated metric for employee productivity than "# lines committed"). And of course try to make cuts in a way that doesn't harm the morale of those who aren't cut.
- lm28469 4y ago
  Technically your car will drive without a brake pedal, a roof and tires too

zarzavat 4y ago

His biggest mistake was saying that he would allow Trump back. In the minds of many left-leaning people that makes him a sympathizer in a coup attempt, and those left-leaning people succeeded in creating an extreme amount of pressure against Twitter’s customers (the advertisers) to starve the company. Musk clearly thinks of himself as creating a platform for free speech, but when it comes to coups there is really no such thing as a middle ground or neutrality.

ShredKazoo 4y ago
Can you provide a source for Musk saying that he would allow Trump back? Last I heard, he formed an advisory board, and said account reinstatements were pending discussions of advisory board. In any case, I think you're correct that this is an important subthread.
- joe-collins 4y ago
  https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/05/elon-musk-would-let-trump-back-on-twitter-says-ban-was-morally-wrong/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/05/elon-musk-would-... https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1524881263470993435 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1524881263470993435
  - ShredKazoo 4y ago
    Thanks!

consumer451 4y ago

> modern liberals against freedom of speech Can you please give me specific examples of speech that modern liberals are against?

ShredKazoo 4y ago
An obvious bone of contention would be whether Trump should get to have an account or not. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33652055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33652055
- consumer451 4y ago
  Companies can choose to whom and what they choose to provide a platform, can they not? For example, Elon Musk has owned Twitter for enough time to have re-instated @realdonaldtrump, yet he has not. Why is that?
  - ShredKazoo 4y ago
    The core of my argument is when Elon tweets about how he's in favor of freedom of speech, it makes many liberals squirm. The argument doesn't depend on these sort of details related to whether "freedom of speech" is a purely legal concept, vs one that also makes sense in the context of a social media platform.
    - consumer451 4y ago
      Since in reality, not even 4chan allows absolute free speech I see this whole thing as either disingenuous or naive. > The argument doesn't depend on these sort of details I would argue that without details arguments are just hand wavy.
    - consumer451 4y ago
      Separately, > ... freedom of speech, it makes many liberals squirm. I think this meme can be quickly disproved by looking at political subreddits. All right wing subs of which I'm aware have rules which filter out speech which does not toe the party line. I find the reality of the freedom with which I am allowed to discuss my ideas in righty subs to be extremely hypocritical when they are supposedly all about "free speech."

waiseristy 4y ago

The timeline you drew here is wack He started firing people day 1 and bragging about it online. Of course his remaining employees are going to shit talk him. The “ultimatum” sure as hell wasn’t in response to this either, I don’t know if you are implying that or not. He pulled this exact same stunt at Tesla just a few months ago. The dude is a raging asshole surrounded by yes men. If you value your health and your family you should not work for this man

ShredKazoo 4y ago
I searched for the Tesla ultimatum you refer to. It seems to have been different, specifically saying execs couldn't work remotely: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-01/musk-s-tesla-ultimatum-return-to-office-or-work-somewhere-else?leadSource=uverify%20wall https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-01/musk-s-te... Contrast w/ Twitter ultimatum: https://twitter.com/donie/status/1592859900941852674 https://twitter.com/donie/status/1592859900941852674 I think the Twitter ultimatum is the kind of thing you send if you suspect most employees don't support your leadership / are not pulling their weight. Similar to the Zappos philosophy of offering a generous severance to everyone who quits, in order to have an office full of enthusiastic employees.
- waiseristy 4y ago
  What are you talking about? You are completely fabricating a narrative here. > “Everyone at Tesla is required to spend a minimum of 40 hours in the office per week,” Tesla is RTO. Quit defending this billionaires psychopathic behavior. This is not a healthy way to run a company
  - ShredKazoo 4y ago
    I guess I over-indexed on the "Tesla Execs" in the headline. I don't think requiring 40 hours in office makes you "psychopathic". People can quit if they don't like it shrug
    - waiseristy 4y ago

SilverBirch 4y ago

Regular people have been trying to explain this to the "center-right" for a while now: Twitter's moderation policies weren't primarily dictated by their political views, they were primarily dictated by building an advertiser friendly platform. Which Musk exploded almost immediately by endorsing a far right homophobic conspiracy theory about a violent attack on the family member of an elected politician. You can say "with the benefit of hindsight" but I would put to you: with the benefit of foresight, lots of people told him exactly what would happen. The problem isn't the management structure, it's that Musk is unfamiliar with pretty basic facts about twitter, such as its engineering architecture, its business model, and its position in the market.

ShredKazoo 4y ago
From what I understand, Twitter's moderation is noticeably more left-wing than that of Facebook. And yet Facebook makes a lot of ad dollars. So I do think there's a discretionary element there. I agree that Musk hasn't been behaving in a way that's advertiser-friendly. Jack Dorsey is super familiar with Twitter and said Elon was the best solution for it if it was gonna stay a company: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/25/jack-dorsey-says-elon-musk-is-the-singular-solution-i-trust/#:~:text=Solving%20for%20the%20problem%20of,extend%20the%20light%20of%20consciousness.%E2%80%9D&text=The%20idea%20and%20service%20is,it%20takes%20to%20protect%20both https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/25/jack-dorsey-says-elon-musk.... I'm sure we can find someone, somewhere who correctly predicted in advance how things could go down, but I'm skeptical that it was a widespread prediction. Certainly feel free to prove me wrong.
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  Facebook is a very different business from Twitter in 3 ways - firstly scale, they're more than 5x the size, secondly in engagement - they have enormous amounts of demographic and behaviour data about their users and they track them extensively across the web, and finally business model - Twitter does brand advertising whereas Facebook is much closer to point of sale, an advert on Facebook is likely to directly convert to a sale, whereas an advert on twitter is just mainly brand advertising - Facebook's type of advert is far more valuable. So it's difficult to directly compare them. But more importantly there's a big difference between how Facebook and Twitter work - Facebook is default closed, people can't interact with you unless you're putting yourself out there - either by friending people or joining a group, so there's a natural barrier against the spread of harassment, brigading and the toxic behaviour becoming public. There is a whole load of toxic neo-nazi stuff on Facebook, but it's out of view, and because ads are highly targetted there's no concern about brand safety. On Twitter it's default open, so if people are going around loudly spreading far right homophobic conspiracy theories about a violent attack on an elected official everyone is going to know about it - that's why Twitter has to be so careful. There were a lot of people who have been in social media who explained in a lot of detail about how these things work when Elon first got involved. For example, Yishan Wong ran reddit back in 2012, at the time he had an extremely similar free speech maximalist view similar to Musk's current view. He did a very clear explanation of the dynamics of why that approach simply doesn't work - https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440 https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440 .

watwut 4y ago

1.) Twitter was not biased for liberals. That part is just not true, no matter what grievance machine says. 2.) Musk intentions were not free speech by any meaningful sense. He does not have track record of valuing it. He values only speech of those he agrees it and is super eager to punish whoever disagree with him. The first departments that had to go were the ones where actual free speech issues are dealt with. Like, human rights team. Free speech is more then just saying n-word or ability to harass your opponents. It is also not giving your details to law enforcement and policies related to nonwestern countries. 3.) Twitter employees making it difficult for him is just not true. The worst that happened was few people disagreeing with him about technical matters. The free speech advocate was unable to process even technical disagreement. 4.) The idea that it ia far left employees leaving or that there was even that many of them is bonkers. Conservative people think about their employment conditions too. They dont necessary like being humiliated, they are not all doormats and natural born yes men.

mola 4y ago

Oh comeon. Musk acted like a douch to his employees. Actively trying to make their life crap and shitpoating on how bad they are. This had nothing to do with politics. More like ppl with other options taking them to avoid being treated like crap. A Much simpler explanation

dale_glass 4y ago

Here's my own understanding: * Musk didn't really want to buy Twitter. He screwed up and got locked into a contract he couldn't figure out a way out of. * Having figured that he vastly overpaid, he panicked and tried to cut down the fat. Problem is that he hasn't spent enough time there to figure out where's the fat. * Musk fundamentally doesn't understand what he has bought. He doesn't understand that Twitter's business relies on pleasing advertisers, who don't give a crap about free speech ideals and are very risk averse. * Musk doesn't understand that what he bought is far more about people skills than anything else. Managing an online community is an exercise in cat herding. At Twitter's scale you also have to content with thorny legal issues. None of that is fun. Many forces push things into a familiar direction, and "free speech" is a very tough direction to pick. * Musk doesn't understand even the basics of the platform he bought, like why the blue checkmarks provided any value. He proceeded to immediately throw a huge wrench into that system, to nearly no economic benefit. * Musk is trying to have his cake and eat it too. On one hand he wants unrestricted free speech, on the other hand he wants to make money from advertisers that don't care for free speech. You can pick one or the other. * Musk seems not to understand that Twitter isn't SpaceX. There's few places where you can work on a rocket, but a lot of places where you can maintain a backend. You can sell the dream of colonizing Mars to rocket engineers, but Twitter employees can go most anywhere else and do mostly the same thing. * Musk seems not to understand that since his employees have plentiful options, he can't strong arm them. They can leave. They're generally well paid, and his takeover provides plentiful options for them to organize, help each other and start lawsuits if he breaks any laws.

watwut 4y ago
> He doesn't understand that Twitter's business relies on pleasing advertisers, who don't give a crap about free speech ideals and are very risk averse. Musk does not care about free speech either.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  That's a good point, true free speech fanatics are extremely rare. Most everyone in reality thinks that their group is being silenced, and wouldn't mind silencing their ideological opposition.

dangerface 4y ago

> * Twitter employees amuse themselves by making billionaire's life difficult Elon got them to print out their code and pissed off the advertisers that where paying them. I don't think it was the employees that made life difficult.