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The absolute cruelty of Musk through this whole process is astounding. One has to assume he's like this at his other companies as well, which is absolutely shr

The absolute cruelty of Musk through this whole process is astounding. One has to assume he's like this at his other companies as well, which is absolutely shredding their reputation in my eyes.

hourago 4y ago
> The absolute cruelty of Musk through this whole process is astounding. That is by design. There is a mindset were powerful people feels that they need to show up their power, otherwise why do they have it? That is one of the reasons inequality causes many illnesses in society as the rich few feel the need to be cruel on people with less power. If it was not Musk it would be someone else.
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago
  Yeah, but didn't you know Musk is a "special person", so therefore can abuse the fuck out of anyone he wants. He isn't just some random emerald mine heir with some interest in technology. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/elon-musk-texts-twitter-trial-jack-dorsey/671619/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/elon-...
  - concordDance 4y ago
    How much money do you think he got from that mine?
    - SQueeeeeL 4y ago
      Idk, emeralds are worth what, $10. And there are like, 1,000 of them in a mine, so $10,000
- hectorlorenzo 4y ago
  > If it was not Musk it would be someone else. This is an argument that needs to be done really carefully: its logical conclusion is that his cruelty is deterministic and there is nothing he can do about it. People have a certain degree of agency, he actively chooses to be cruel amongst other options at his disposal.
- socialismisok 4y ago
  Maybe it's time to consider whether we're better off not having such concentrations of wealth... Let Musk keep $5B, he'll be able to live luxuriously forever on that. But he won't be able to ruin thousands of lives so easily.
  - SuoDuanDao 4y ago
  - krapp 4y ago
    The maximum value any human being should be able to control as wealth in any form - property, stock, rights, cash, what have you, is $1 million dollars. Anything more gets appropriated and redistributed by the state. More than rich enough to live on, but nowhere near rich enough to buy governments and corporations on a whim.
    - concordDance 4y ago
      So you think hedge fund account managers should only ever manage up to $1M in assets? Seems very inefficient... (Snark aside, this idea is completely unfeasible for a number of reasons you can probably think of given a couple of minutes)
      - SuoDuanDao 4y ago
        I think GP's point was that 1 billion is also completely unfeasible. 'there should be no billionaires' is just a dumb idea put out for impact more than any hope of achieving it. When I try to steelman the idea I come up with the fact that smaller amounts of capital can be allocated more efficiently, and that society should therefore try to ensure capital naturally flows to individuals with less rather than more assets. Not a bad point, Warren Buffet definitely made higher returns early in his career and he credits that in large part to being able to pick targets better when investing millions than when investing billions. But going from 'billionaires are a sign of capital inefficiency' to 'lets ban billionaires' rhetoric posits using violence to seize or suppress billionaires capital, which requires a larger concentration of capital than the billionaires have now. It's a statement at war with its own ideals, I shouldn't even be giving it the oxygen necessary to refute it.
- moonchrome 4y ago
  That's a bulshit generalization. The way Musk is handling the entire Twitter situation is a shitshow and I don't really see many people in his position playing it that way. Musk is a controversial character even among rich/powerful and his behavior is in character but not something I'd expect from many of his peers.
  - matwood 4y ago
    Agreed. Anyone else who purchased Twitter would absolutely end up restructuring. There would have been layoffs, etc... But, I highly doubt it would have been this shitshow. Fire, ask people back, then fire again. Roll out a feature that everyone tells you is going to cause impersonation issues, then roll it back when it....causes impersonation issues. I mentioned in a comment the other day that I heard a take that's very simple. Because Musk overpaid by so much, there is zero path to success. Now he's just trying to stave off bankruptcy which seems inevitable. He also seems to have zero vision. If he had a vision, getting rid of people doing the work is the last thing you want to do. The old adage, there are no bad teams, only bad leaders comes to mind. He appears to want to run Twitter as-is on a skeleton crew - more like a PE firm rather than visionary founder.
    - Ekaros 4y ago
      Restructuring and refocusing firm sized of Twitter should take weeks if not months. Not saying that it wasn't needed, but the approach taken seem just insane. Then again, part of reason behind this might be that now he is playing with something he paid with it own money and lot of it. Not a "toy" project of couple million or dozen million.
      - matwood 4y ago
        > Restructuring and refocusing firm sized of Twitter should take weeks if not months. Not saying that it wasn't needed, but the approach taken seem just insane. Agree completely. Part of my shitshow comment is how haphazard and plan free the layoffs have gone.
    - moonchrome 4y ago
- kqr 4y ago
  Not only that: the power itself depends on other people believing in it. If literally nobody in the company believes you to be the CEO, then you are no more powerful than anyone else. Similarly, even if you're not the CEO, but everyone believes you are, you have all the power of being one. This means if you want to stay powerful, you have to exercise your power to remind people that you have it, thus reinforce their belief in it, and retain it so you can exercise it again to remind people and so on. Of course, I would argue there are better ways to gain and display power.
  - quantified 4y ago
    True. Most CEOs don't run around displaying their power this way.
- radu_floricica 4y ago
  I agree it's probably by design, but I contest that it's a bad thing. People comment on this takeover with a mindset where the company is made only of employees and owner. There are quite a few more stakeholders in this, much more than usual in this case. There are its clients (advertisers), its users, and everybody that's indirectly affected by the dialogue that goes on Twitter. From the mindset I mentioned, yes, Musk is needlessly cruel and a bully. But he was quite clear from the beginning that he's doing it in good part for society at large - so the normal priority of stakeholders is actually reversed. Society and discourse become most important, then users, then clients and employees.
  - kibwen 4y ago
    > But he was quite clear from the beginning that he's doing it in good part for society at large Judge a man by his actions, not by his words. So far, his actions have been cruel and destructive, not only to Twitter's employees and Twitter's users, but also to everyone forced to share a society with the newly-chaotic, increasingly-bot-filled, resurgently-hateful, woefully-undermoderated Twitter. Musk is a liar. Stop worshiping this man.
    - nickpp 4y ago
      Haven’t seen any change at all as a Twitter user since the whole Elon brouhaha started.
      - Volundr 4y ago
        Really? I've seen 2fa break, the rules for parody accounts change multiple times, ones making fun of Elon banned and the blue checkmark fiasco where a bunch of people were able to purchase official looking accounts for prominent companies and people.
        nickpp 4y ago
        Oh, I read about those but I saw absolutely no change in my daily use, other the tweets commenting, of course. The app worked fine. I am at most a casual user though.
- bhaak 4y ago
  > If it was not Musk it would be someone else. I don’t know the name of this fallacy but the “if X doesn’t do it somebody will” doesn’t seem convincing. Especially as the previous management of Twitter wasn’t like that so it’s actually already disproved by history.
- quantified 4y ago
  > If it was not Musk it would be someone else. Do you mean that in the sense that some superrich person at a different company, or do you mean that in the sense that pretty much every superrich person who would run Twitter would act the same way?
pif 4y ago
He is not more cruel than the stakeholders who sold the company without ever worrying about the employees.
- socialismisok 4y ago
  He is. Demonstrably.
  - joxel 4y ago
    I mean, to be fair, the stakeholders of twitter had a chance to not allow a sell. Musk wanted to back out. They knew what would happen. Note, this doesn't absolve Musk of any of his actions, but the stakeholders are also assholes.
    - mindslight 4y ago
      Do you know that "maximize shareholder value" trope that's trotted out every time a corporation kicks over a baby carriage? This is one of the few times it's actually relevant. Letting Musk back out of the deal would have been a gross dereliction of fiduciary duty, would have landed the board members in court personally, and perhaps wouldn't have even stopped the sale given how shareholder-friendly Delaware is. Despite all the lofty platitudes about building good companies, startups are always headed towards the uncaring wood chipper of finance. In a way, Musk violently running the company into the ground (ala the cliche of the rich person buying a sports car only to crash it on the way home) is a better outcome than the surveillance-monetization pot slowly boiling.
    - evanelias 4y ago
      Isn't the board of directors legally responsible for obtaining the best financial result for shareholders? If someone makes an above-market-value offer for the company, I doubt they can just say "no" without severe consequences and lawsuits. On top of that, GOP members of congress were threatening an investigation if they turned down the offer: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/22/republicans-demand-twitter-board-save-records-on-musks-bid.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/22/republicans-demand-twitter-b...
mathw 4y ago
I've read a load of stuff recently talking about how SpaceX and Tesla survive when he's in charge there too, and apparently SpaceX have a load of people who basically are a buffer between Musk and the bits of the company that actually get the job done. Twitter has no such buffer, so we get to see the full scale of his hubris and impulsiveness in action.
- ahiknsr 4y ago
  > I've read a load of stuff recently talking about how SpaceX and Tesla survive when he's in charge there too, and apparently SpaceX have a load of people who basically are a buffer between Musk and the bits of the company that actually get the job done. https://twitter.com/cestperdu/status/1595778031481942016 https://twitter.com/cestperdu/status/1595778031481942016
  - loceng 4y ago
- concordDance 4y ago
  > apparently SpaceX have a load of people who basically are a buffer between Musk and the bits of the company that actually get the job done. Every company I've worked for has this, its very common. Also, I suspect this is the same story being repeated rather than being sourced from multiple different spacex middle managers. (Which doesn't mean its untrue, just don't assume hearing something in multiple places means it has more than one root source)
doitLP 4y ago
As one former early Tesla engineer remarked to me “Your chances of being summarily fired go up exponentially when you are in the same room as Elon”
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
loceng 4y ago
Cyberdog 4y ago
I’m dumbfounded by the idea that Musk was under any societal or business obligation to keep underperforming employees on his payroll. As much as you may hate Musk, if you’ve been in this industry for a while, you know SV is full of people who are better at slacking, whedling, and coasting than coding, and in some cases have no skill at all and are clearly nepotism hires. Musk clearly does not have time for that sort of hiring, but I don’t think it’s a unique thing to him; any other non-SV businessowner would almost certainly be doing the same.
- socialismisok 4y ago
  I'm dumbfounded that anyone thinks these were underperforming employees.
- anonymousab 4y ago
  The idea is that Musk clearly doesn't judge performance and rather just fires haphazardly, as somewhat evidenced by the failed attempts to rehire various critical staff. Firing them with much less severance than the "nonbelievers" he pushed out previously is a pointlessly cruel action. Over in the EU, it is quite clearly a set of societal obligations that he is violating, ones that are enshrined in law.
- salad-fan 4y ago
  If you think the way Space Karen has gone about these RIFs is even remotely effective at achieving that objective, I have a bridge to sell you.
- fzeroracer 4y ago
  Musk has already fired what, over 80% of employees? If your rationale is that they were all underperforming then you clearly don't actually care and are just using this as a convenient wedge to push your agenda. If they weren't all underperforming, then Musk arbitrarily fired a bunch of people for nonsensical reasons.
bogomipz 4y ago
Indeed it seems he has: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/21/technology/elon-musk-twitter-management.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/21/technology/elon-musk-twit...
thefz 4y ago
Musk, Jobs... all byproducts of the calvinistic and very american idolatry of wealth. Not much else.

The absolute cruelty of Musk through this whole process is astounding. One has to assume he's like this at his other companies as well, which is absolutely shredding their reputation in my eyes.

hourago 4y ago

> The absolute cruelty of Musk through this whole process is astounding. That is by design. There is a mindset were powerful people feels that they need to show up their power, otherwise why do they have it? That is one of the reasons inequality causes many illnesses in society as the rich few feel the need to be cruel on people with less power. If it was not Musk it would be someone else.

SQueeeeeL 4y ago
Yeah, but didn't you know Musk is a "special person", so therefore can abuse the fuck out of anyone he wants. He isn't just some random emerald mine heir with some interest in technology. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/elon-musk-texts-twitter-trial-jack-dorsey/671619/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/elon-...
- concordDance 4y ago
  How much money do you think he got from that mine?
  - SQueeeeeL 4y ago
    Idk, emeralds are worth what, $10. And there are like, 1,000 of them in a mine, so $10,000
hectorlorenzo 4y ago
> If it was not Musk it would be someone else. This is an argument that needs to be done really carefully: its logical conclusion is that his cruelty is deterministic and there is nothing he can do about it. People have a certain degree of agency, he actively chooses to be cruel amongst other options at his disposal.
socialismisok 4y ago
Maybe it's time to consider whether we're better off not having such concentrations of wealth... Let Musk keep $5B, he'll be able to live luxuriously forever on that. But he won't be able to ruin thousands of lives so easily.
- SuoDuanDao 4y ago
- krapp 4y ago
  The maximum value any human being should be able to control as wealth in any form - property, stock, rights, cash, what have you, is $1 million dollars. Anything more gets appropriated and redistributed by the state. More than rich enough to live on, but nowhere near rich enough to buy governments and corporations on a whim.
  - concordDance 4y ago
    So you think hedge fund account managers should only ever manage up to $1M in assets? Seems very inefficient... (Snark aside, this idea is completely unfeasible for a number of reasons you can probably think of given a couple of minutes)
    - SuoDuanDao 4y ago
      I think GP's point was that 1 billion is also completely unfeasible. 'there should be no billionaires' is just a dumb idea put out for impact more than any hope of achieving it. When I try to steelman the idea I come up with the fact that smaller amounts of capital can be allocated more efficiently, and that society should therefore try to ensure capital naturally flows to individuals with less rather than more assets. Not a bad point, Warren Buffet definitely made higher returns early in his career and he credits that in large part to being able to pick targets better when investing millions than when investing billions. But going from 'billionaires are a sign of capital inefficiency' to 'lets ban billionaires' rhetoric posits using violence to seize or suppress billionaires capital, which requires a larger concentration of capital than the billionaires have now. It's a statement at war with its own ideals, I shouldn't even be giving it the oxygen necessary to refute it.
moonchrome 4y ago
That's a bulshit generalization. The way Musk is handling the entire Twitter situation is a shitshow and I don't really see many people in his position playing it that way. Musk is a controversial character even among rich/powerful and his behavior is in character but not something I'd expect from many of his peers.
- matwood 4y ago
  Agreed. Anyone else who purchased Twitter would absolutely end up restructuring. There would have been layoffs, etc... But, I highly doubt it would have been this shitshow. Fire, ask people back, then fire again. Roll out a feature that everyone tells you is going to cause impersonation issues, then roll it back when it....causes impersonation issues. I mentioned in a comment the other day that I heard a take that's very simple. Because Musk overpaid by so much, there is zero path to success. Now he's just trying to stave off bankruptcy which seems inevitable. He also seems to have zero vision. If he had a vision, getting rid of people doing the work is the last thing you want to do. The old adage, there are no bad teams, only bad leaders comes to mind. He appears to want to run Twitter as-is on a skeleton crew - more like a PE firm rather than visionary founder.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    Restructuring and refocusing firm sized of Twitter should take weeks if not months. Not saying that it wasn't needed, but the approach taken seem just insane. Then again, part of reason behind this might be that now he is playing with something he paid with it own money and lot of it. Not a "toy" project of couple million or dozen million.
    - matwood 4y ago
      > Restructuring and refocusing firm sized of Twitter should take weeks if not months. Not saying that it wasn't needed, but the approach taken seem just insane. Agree completely. Part of my shitshow comment is how haphazard and plan free the layoffs have gone.
  - moonchrome 4y ago
kqr 4y ago
Not only that: the power itself depends on other people believing in it. If literally nobody in the company believes you to be the CEO, then you are no more powerful than anyone else. Similarly, even if you're not the CEO, but everyone believes you are, you have all the power of being one. This means if you want to stay powerful, you have to exercise your power to remind people that you have it, thus reinforce their belief in it, and retain it so you can exercise it again to remind people and so on. Of course, I would argue there are better ways to gain and display power.
- quantified 4y ago
  True. Most CEOs don't run around displaying their power this way.
radu_floricica 4y ago
I agree it's probably by design, but I contest that it's a bad thing. People comment on this takeover with a mindset where the company is made only of employees and owner. There are quite a few more stakeholders in this, much more than usual in this case. There are its clients (advertisers), its users, and everybody that's indirectly affected by the dialogue that goes on Twitter. From the mindset I mentioned, yes, Musk is needlessly cruel and a bully. But he was quite clear from the beginning that he's doing it in good part for society at large - so the normal priority of stakeholders is actually reversed. Society and discourse become most important, then users, then clients and employees.
- kibwen 4y ago
  > But he was quite clear from the beginning that he's doing it in good part for society at large Judge a man by his actions, not by his words. So far, his actions have been cruel and destructive, not only to Twitter's employees and Twitter's users, but also to everyone forced to share a society with the newly-chaotic, increasingly-bot-filled, resurgently-hateful, woefully-undermoderated Twitter. Musk is a liar. Stop worshiping this man.
  - nickpp 4y ago
    Haven’t seen any change at all as a Twitter user since the whole Elon brouhaha started.
    - Volundr 4y ago
      Really? I've seen 2fa break, the rules for parody accounts change multiple times, ones making fun of Elon banned and the blue checkmark fiasco where a bunch of people were able to purchase official looking accounts for prominent companies and people.
      - nickpp 4y ago
        Oh, I read about those but I saw absolutely no change in my daily use, other the tweets commenting, of course. The app worked fine. I am at most a casual user though.
bhaak 4y ago
> If it was not Musk it would be someone else. I don’t know the name of this fallacy but the “if X doesn’t do it somebody will” doesn’t seem convincing. Especially as the previous management of Twitter wasn’t like that so it’s actually already disproved by history.
quantified 4y ago
> If it was not Musk it would be someone else. Do you mean that in the sense that some superrich person at a different company, or do you mean that in the sense that pretty much every superrich person who would run Twitter would act the same way?

pif 4y ago

He is not more cruel than the stakeholders who sold the company without ever worrying about the employees.

socialismisok 4y ago
He is. Demonstrably.
- joxel 4y ago
  I mean, to be fair, the stakeholders of twitter had a chance to not allow a sell. Musk wanted to back out. They knew what would happen. Note, this doesn't absolve Musk of any of his actions, but the stakeholders are also assholes.
  - mindslight 4y ago
    Do you know that "maximize shareholder value" trope that's trotted out every time a corporation kicks over a baby carriage? This is one of the few times it's actually relevant. Letting Musk back out of the deal would have been a gross dereliction of fiduciary duty, would have landed the board members in court personally, and perhaps wouldn't have even stopped the sale given how shareholder-friendly Delaware is. Despite all the lofty platitudes about building good companies, startups are always headed towards the uncaring wood chipper of finance. In a way, Musk violently running the company into the ground (ala the cliche of the rich person buying a sports car only to crash it on the way home) is a better outcome than the surveillance-monetization pot slowly boiling.
  - evanelias 4y ago
    Isn't the board of directors legally responsible for obtaining the best financial result for shareholders? If someone makes an above-market-value offer for the company, I doubt they can just say "no" without severe consequences and lawsuits. On top of that, GOP members of congress were threatening an investigation if they turned down the offer: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/22/republicans-demand-twitter-board-save-records-on-musks-bid.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/22/republicans-demand-twitter-b...

mathw 4y ago

I've read a load of stuff recently talking about how SpaceX and Tesla survive when he's in charge there too, and apparently SpaceX have a load of people who basically are a buffer between Musk and the bits of the company that actually get the job done. Twitter has no such buffer, so we get to see the full scale of his hubris and impulsiveness in action.

ahiknsr 4y ago
> I've read a load of stuff recently talking about how SpaceX and Tesla survive when he's in charge there too, and apparently SpaceX have a load of people who basically are a buffer between Musk and the bits of the company that actually get the job done. https://twitter.com/cestperdu/status/1595778031481942016 https://twitter.com/cestperdu/status/1595778031481942016
- loceng 4y ago
concordDance 4y ago
> apparently SpaceX have a load of people who basically are a buffer between Musk and the bits of the company that actually get the job done. Every company I've worked for has this, its very common. Also, I suspect this is the same story being repeated rather than being sourced from multiple different spacex middle managers. (Which doesn't mean its untrue, just don't assume hearing something in multiple places means it has more than one root source)

doitLP 4y ago

As one former early Tesla engineer remarked to me “Your chances of being summarily fired go up exponentially when you are in the same room as Elon”

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

loceng 4y ago

Cyberdog 4y ago

I’m dumbfounded by the idea that Musk was under any societal or business obligation to keep underperforming employees on his payroll. As much as you may hate Musk, if you’ve been in this industry for a while, you know SV is full of people who are better at slacking, whedling, and coasting than coding, and in some cases have no skill at all and are clearly nepotism hires. Musk clearly does not have time for that sort of hiring, but I don’t think it’s a unique thing to him; any other non-SV businessowner would almost certainly be doing the same.

socialismisok 4y ago
I'm dumbfounded that anyone thinks these were underperforming employees.
anonymousab 4y ago
The idea is that Musk clearly doesn't judge performance and rather just fires haphazardly, as somewhat evidenced by the failed attempts to rehire various critical staff. Firing them with much less severance than the "nonbelievers" he pushed out previously is a pointlessly cruel action. Over in the EU, it is quite clearly a set of societal obligations that he is violating, ones that are enshrined in law.
salad-fan 4y ago
If you think the way Space Karen has gone about these RIFs is even remotely effective at achieving that objective, I have a bridge to sell you.
fzeroracer 4y ago
Musk has already fired what, over 80% of employees? If your rationale is that they were all underperforming then you clearly don't actually care and are just using this as a convenient wedge to push your agenda. If they weren't all underperforming, then Musk arbitrarily fired a bunch of people for nonsensical reasons.

bogomipz 4y ago

Indeed it seems he has: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/21/technology/elon-musk-twitter-management.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/21/technology/elon-musk-twit...

thefz 4y ago

Musk, Jobs... all byproducts of the calvinistic and very american idolatry of wealth. Not much else.