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> What are the incentives for Twitter’s best to stay? Money maybe? If the employee count is half and they have more lax firing due to non performance, theoreti

> What are the incentives for Twitter’s best to stay? Money maybe? If the employee count is half and they have more lax firing due to non performance, theoretically it could allow them to better reward top performers. Not sure if that is practically what is happening, but Musk seems to have good enough track record previously in building teams of productive people. Also lot of best people like to work in productive teams, and don't like teammates that slack off without repercussion.

jsnell 4y ago
Musk has a great track record at building top teams in situations where the company has a world-changing mission, and the company is basically the only place in the world you can work to achieve that mission (Tesla, SpaceX). That attracts people who care about that mission, and means they'll accept relatively low pay and Musk's abusive management practices. Nu-Twitter doesn't have that. They've got interesting infrastructrure problems, but so do a dozen other companies working at similar scale. Musk's product vision seems to be incredibly incremental, e.g. the $8 checkmarks. Honestly, the only mission that Musk seems to be setting up in his public writing is the free speech bit, applying only to his alt-right pals? And if that's the mission he tries to build a team around, it's hard to see advertisers and normal users sticking to the platform for much longer.
- willmadden 4y ago
  He hasn’t shown you his hand. The obvious stuff: * adding features people want but are denied by ESG transnationals (privacy, e2e encryption, removing politically motivated censorship) - this is huge and a guaranteed win short term. Stuff that will happen if the google/Apple make the wrong moves, which they likely will: * programmable mobile phone with crypto chip and starlink carrier for recurring revenue when/if google and Apple ban Twitter app from their walled gardens * adding crypto/stable coin based “wallet” to Twitter which cross-sells the mobile phone with crypto chip
  - nkohari 4y ago
    > programmable mobile phone with crypto chip and starlink carrier for recurring revenue when/if google and Apple ban Twitter app from their walled gardens This would be a world-class feat of engineering, which would also require that Twitter hire a set of engineers entirely different than the ones they have. It's difficult to see how they'd pull this off successfully.
    - Firmwarrior 4y ago
      Man, I was wondering about this myself, as a guy with 10 years in the phone firmware business I don't think Musk has any realistic chance of competing with Apple. Apple has been poaching from the best of the best in every level the phone industry for over a decade now. He could quickly and effectively crank out an undifferentiated Android phone for sure, but I'm not sure what he'd do with it or how he'd convince anyone to buy it. His phone would be more expensive to make than the ones out of Moto, Huawei, etc, and it wouldn't work as well. Maybe if he hired aggressively or borrowed people from Tesla somehow he could make a good Android phone, but I don't see why anyone would buy it. I actually thought that by now we wouldn't really be bothering with apps so much, and computers would be more like the one on Star Trek. I don't think Musk could just toss that together any time soon though, haha.
      - willmadden 4y ago
        People won't buy it because it has a fifth vestigial camera or whatever the latest gimmick is. Smart phones are a commodity at this point. They'll buy it because 1) they don't want transnational ESG digital hall monitors spying on them and curating what apps they can install, and 2) it would have global cell coverage. That's more than enough to compete with Google and Apple at this point. People are fed up, I think you underestimate just how many people.
        Firmwarrior 4y ago
        There's no way he'll be able to get global cell coverage IMO. Even if he pulled it off, that's a feature for fancy rich people. Most people don't travel regularly. I don't think the privacy angle is going to help at all either. If anyone actually cared about privacy or control we'd all be using the same weird open source pocket computer as Stallman. That said, I wish him the best of luck
- YetAnotherNick 4y ago
  There are many more space with good funding(Blueorigin, Virgin Galactic etc.) and lot more EV companies with more money to burn than Tesla. It could be just luck that Tesla or SpaceX became top in their field, but having watched lot of Musk's interviews, I am biased to say that he has talent in understanding engineering inefficiencies and assembling team to solve those.

jsnell 4y ago

Musk has a great track record at building top teams in situations where the company has a world-changing mission, and the company is basically the only place in the world you can work to achieve that mission (Tesla, SpaceX). That attracts people who care about that mission, and means they'll accept relatively low pay and Musk's abusive management practices. Nu-Twitter doesn't have that. They've got interesting infrastructrure problems, but so do a dozen other companies working at similar scale. Musk's product vision seems to be incredibly incremental, e.g. the $8 checkmarks. Honestly, the only mission that Musk seems to be setting up in his public writing is the free speech bit, applying only to his alt-right pals? And if that's the mission he tries to build a team around, it's hard to see advertisers and normal users sticking to the platform for much longer.

willmadden 4y ago
He hasn’t shown you his hand. The obvious stuff: * adding features people want but are denied by ESG transnationals (privacy, e2e encryption, removing politically motivated censorship) - this is huge and a guaranteed win short term. Stuff that will happen if the google/Apple make the wrong moves, which they likely will: * programmable mobile phone with crypto chip and starlink carrier for recurring revenue when/if google and Apple ban Twitter app from their walled gardens * adding crypto/stable coin based “wallet” to Twitter which cross-sells the mobile phone with crypto chip
- nkohari 4y ago
  > programmable mobile phone with crypto chip and starlink carrier for recurring revenue when/if google and Apple ban Twitter app from their walled gardens This would be a world-class feat of engineering, which would also require that Twitter hire a set of engineers entirely different than the ones they have. It's difficult to see how they'd pull this off successfully.
  - Firmwarrior 4y ago
    Man, I was wondering about this myself, as a guy with 10 years in the phone firmware business I don't think Musk has any realistic chance of competing with Apple. Apple has been poaching from the best of the best in every level the phone industry for over a decade now. He could quickly and effectively crank out an undifferentiated Android phone for sure, but I'm not sure what he'd do with it or how he'd convince anyone to buy it. His phone would be more expensive to make than the ones out of Moto, Huawei, etc, and it wouldn't work as well. Maybe if he hired aggressively or borrowed people from Tesla somehow he could make a good Android phone, but I don't see why anyone would buy it. I actually thought that by now we wouldn't really be bothering with apps so much, and computers would be more like the one on Star Trek. I don't think Musk could just toss that together any time soon though, haha.
    - willmadden 4y ago
      People won't buy it because it has a fifth vestigial camera or whatever the latest gimmick is. Smart phones are a commodity at this point. They'll buy it because 1) they don't want transnational ESG digital hall monitors spying on them and curating what apps they can install, and 2) it would have global cell coverage. That's more than enough to compete with Google and Apple at this point. People are fed up, I think you underestimate just how many people.
      - Firmwarrior 4y ago
        There's no way he'll be able to get global cell coverage IMO. Even if he pulled it off, that's a feature for fancy rich people. Most people don't travel regularly. I don't think the privacy angle is going to help at all either. If anyone actually cared about privacy or control we'd all be using the same weird open source pocket computer as Stallman. That said, I wish him the best of luck
YetAnotherNick 4y ago
There are many more space with good funding(Blueorigin, Virgin Galactic etc.) and lot more EV companies with more money to burn than Tesla. It could be just luck that Tesla or SpaceX became top in their field, but having watched lot of Musk's interviews, I am biased to say that he has talent in understanding engineering inefficiencies and assembling team to solve those.