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Ask HN: Twitter was unanimously predicted to implode. Nothing happened. Why?

44 points by 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago

Twitter laid off 50% of its staff. Principal and staff engineers made lengthy Twitter threads predicting the collapse of the system given its nuance, complexity, and how their positions were key to its survival. Pundits predicted that the site would likely not survive a few weeks, that there was no fat to trim at the company and all the workers let go were essential for daily operations. Now that it's been three months, what happened to the dreary prognosis? Where is the continuous downtime? Where is the permanent feature freeze? Where is the imminent collapse we were told about? I noticed that nobody is talking about how none of those predictions seem to have manifested. Why?

qup 4y ago
Because the predictions were mainly people hating on rich people. It's very en-vogue. We're mad at all these [celebrities, athletes, CEOs, trust-fund-babies, techbros] for all these "reasons," like I really care if the guy who scored the touchdown is a good dad or something. And just look at the legions of people ready to call anyone a total moron who is on display. So, Musk bought Twitter with his 44 Billion, and legions of people jumped in line to talk about what an idiot he was for buying it at that price, as if they (or anyone else) know how many billions twitter is worth, or as if they know how billionaires should spend their money. Then they predicted he would fail immediately because, since he's an idiot and just fired pretty much the whole staff, he can't possibly run something as complex as Twitter. But then he does, and so they start talking about how he "lost 100+ Billion" between the purchase price and what they perceive as a resulting dip in Tesla stocks. Statistically, 60% of these people can't handle a $1000 financial emergency in their life, but they're experts on big business and billion dollar companies. Then they started saying they were going to quit twitter, and switch to Mastodon. Some even made the switch, although most seem to be posting in both worlds. But they were being smart, establishing before the inevitable collapse of Twitter. Then they quit talking about it, because it didn't happen. The thing is, this whole thing really has little to do with Twitter or its operations. Most of the people commenting on Musk/Twitter have zero fucking clue what twitter is like internally, technologically, what it needs to maintain (tech and culture both), how to improve it, etc etc. They are just hating on rich people. Ridiculing people on the internet is also a really easy way to get a lot of engagement. See also: constant disparaging comments about pg (pseudo-intellectual), Bezos (tiny man), Bill Gates, all past presidents, basically anyone making public decisions who is wealthy, all the conspiracies about eating babies and shipping children via wayfair, and on and on for days. This is also largely extending to any unliked groups, like "Russians" and "republicans" will be thought of as less-competent because "we don't like them." Some of these hated groups constitute about half the population. They can still be perfectly competent. It didn't happen because it turns out Musk probably does know how to run companies.
- aliqot 4y ago
  we could be good friends you know
  - qup 4y ago
    lets
- netsharc 4y ago
  Huh, who would've thunk, apparently these billionaires aren't hated because they're jerkoffs with dangerous opinions (and the money where they can endanger others), but just because they're rich and people are jealous. /s I was going to cite examples, but oh well, your blinders probably have ways to dismiss them, and the easiest would be "media attack machine overblowing the issue.".
  - qup 4y ago
    Can you name many humans who aren't jerkoffs with dangerous opinions? I can't. "These billionaires" (which ones? seems like you mean every single one)...the real distinction is not what kind of human they are, it's what kind of agency the money provides them. They can act on their opinions, whether dangerous or not. I didn't use the word "jealous." I think that's true in many cases, sure. But I think about 70% of the people who hate Musk have never felt jealous of him, either. Do you think people should be allowed to be billionaires? Did you know that many of the haters don't think they should? They are fundamentally opposed to the idea of people being exceedingly rich while others are poor. If that's you, maybe it's influencing your opinions on why people hate billionaires. I don't think I have blinders, but it's hard for me to evaluate since you made that ad hominem attack without including any details. I'm not a Musk fanboy, or an all-billionaires fanboy, I'm an internet-hater-hater. I think you (and journalists) have about as much chance at predicting the outcome of Twitter as chatGPT does.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      > Can you name many humans who aren't jerkoffs with dangerous opinions? Yes, plenty. Most people I know aren't jerkoffs with dangerous opinions. The problem with Musk isn't that he's wealthy. The problem with Musk is his behavior.
celticninja 4y ago
We don't know that nothing happened. I'm guessing that whilst they reduced their costs by sacking staff they also lost a lot of ad revenue. They can paper over cracks for a while and still be imploding. It's notable that 'new' features have been about charging users or cutting costs, e.g. blue checks and less moderation
- ipaddr 4y ago
  As a user no change but less ads? Blue checkmark vips have to pay? Sounds like a good transition.
  - weeblewobble 4y ago
    Not fewer ads, lower ad revenue. Existing blue check accounts get to keep them for free indefinitely. Only new ones have to pay
barbazoo 4y ago
> Twitter was unanimously predicted to implode. There's nothing unanimous here
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- secos 4y ago
  That's something we can all agree on.
  - spoils19 4y ago
    Nice one!
vt85 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
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mikewarot 4y ago
As Grady Booch pointed out, Elon is testing in production[1]. Even Elon doesn't know where all the filters are in the algorithms used. The absence of a total collapse does not imply all is well. [1] https://twitter.com/Grady_Booch/status/1620720537805922306 https://twitter.com/Grady_Booch/status/1620720537805922306
- qup 4y ago
  This implies that he eschews your regimen about how important production is. It's really not a signal that Twitter, the multi-billion dollar company, is about to collapse. He's a cowboy coder? That's totally unsurprising to me. He's seemingly made it work many times in a row. I agree that we don't know if all is well, so let's quit saying it's not.
  - trilobyte 4y ago
    I think it's worth separating Twitter the product and its success from Twitter the corporation with financial obligations. The product side will be determined by so many factors outside of any one person's control it's fun to speculate on but that's about it. On the financial side, based on what's publicly known so far, it's not a great situation in terms of servicing the debt of Twitter. Elon can always pay for it out of pocket, of course, but that's not the normal approach anyone would take and as a result it's much more interesting to watch what happens there.
- qup 4y ago
  Did you know Twitter didn't have a staging environment when Musk bought it?
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    That's a bit hyperbolic. No single staging environment for the entire thing, but staggered rollouts behind feature flags and lots of microservices that can be individually checked. It's not 90s era "FTP it up and see what happens".
jamesboehmer 4y ago
Yet.
dxbydt 4y ago
Taleb says the turkey lives happily for 364 days. Then, there's Thanksgiving.
- qup 4y ago
  Nothing, no company, no person, no planetary body, nothing escapes this.
- robga 4y ago
  Taleb may have said this, but be aware all he effectively did was take Bertrand Russell's Chicken parable [0] of 1912 and replace the chicken with a turkey without adding any philosophical value. [0] http://www.ditext.com/russell/rus6.html http://www.ditext.com/russell/rus6.html
stillkicking 4y ago
Twitter hired tons of employees since 2020 so the apparent massive layoffs simply weren't. And there is a lot of dead weight at tech companies regardless. Political pundits had a direct interest in sabotaging the perception of Twitter as an authoritative source of new information, and the coordinated attempts to get advertisers to pull out early on also point in this direction. The reason they aren't talking about it anymore is because, by and large, this plan failed, and those predictions weren't predictions but wishes. Some groups slinked off to Mastodon, which works for niche communities, but doesn't work for the site at large.
- qup 4y ago
  It's amazing to me how a couple hundred million people can be so compellingly influenced by such a small group of people, often with totally misaligned goals. And the people just follow along. Musk went from a golden boy to a global villain overnight without doing something wrong. He bought a company! God forbid, the new owner made a few changes! It's wild to me how fast it happened. Nobody really needed convinced, they're just predisposed to hate rich people.
  - BoorishBears 4y ago
    It's more amazing to me someone could write this comment in ernest. Banning users for mentioning a competitor, banning ElonJet after specifically saying he wouldn't, banning journalists for covering it, not paying rent and custodial staff, rushed layoffs and ended up having to rehire people, firing people if they wouldn't agree to unpaid overtime in 24 hours notice, firing people for speaking poorly of the aforementioned mess, starting a half-baked verified program that allowed people to successfully impersonate multi billion dollar corporations, violating labor laws during the firings, purging Twitter's compliance team causing them to fall afoul of FTC regulations That's the tip of the iceberg that you're labeling as "a few changes", and it is utterly hilarious that people's reaction to Elon is what you're saying is wild in terms of how quickly it happened... and not the bedlam Elon unleashed upon Twitter in the exact same amount of time
  - spoils19 4y ago
    Overnight? Sentiment has been largely changing, for my own circle around the pedo comments, but for others much sooner. It's amazing to me that people seem to be influenced by such a small group of people, and people just follow along!
newaccount2021 4y ago
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rideontime 4y ago
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rvz 4y ago
> Now that it's been three months, what happened to the dreary prognosis? Where is the continuous downtime? Where is the permanent feature freeze? Where is the imminent collapse we were told about? I remember that. False predictions like this: [0] Because their false prophesies of the imminent and total collapse of Twitter has not come true, the same pundits are still tweeting on Twitter and are moving goal posts; expecting 1000% uptime. One outage and it is the end of the world. To those pundits, Twitter now has a new standard of uptime. While the 220M+ users are still using the platform, the so-called competition or 'Twitter-killers' have failed to make a meaningful dent on it's daily active users. Perhaps too many screaming voices got in the way of the fact that Twitter was actually better for less than 1,000 employees. [0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-how-a-twitter-engineer-says-it-will-break-in-the-coming-weeks/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-ho...
- qup 4y ago
  FWIW that prediction does say six months, which the SRE "considers generous." But you're right, they will be screaming at every pot-hole and speedbump that Twitter's infrastructure has. And who knows, maybe some of them wouldn't have happened if he had 7500 employees. I doubt they'll topple Twitter anytime soon, though. That being said, and in contrast to my comments in this thread, I think Twitter is and nearly always has been a doomed, shit platform, even amongst social media. I think it will continue its slow decline, like all the other social media. When it topples, I think it'll be a societal shift, not something we can blame on Musk.
pedalpete 4y ago
Though the tech layoffs have hit the development and infrastructure teams (I mean all the tech layoffs, not just twitter), it is my understanding that the majority of people laid-off are in sales, management, and administration. Users won't see the impact of this as much. Perhaps some slower pace of releases (twitter was already painfully slow from what I understand), slower hiring, etc.
aappleby 4y ago
Complex systems decay over long periods of time.
- mirekrusin 4y ago
  I don't think system you can easily replicate while intoxicated during hackaton is inherently technically complex.
  - qup 4y ago
    Counterpoint: you can't easily replicate twitter while intoxicated during a hackathon.
  - jononor 4y ago
    Twitter has over 200 million Daily Active Users across the globe, with an average of 6000 tweets per second. Peak tweets per second is said to be over 100k. Each user gets a personalized feed which is regularly updated (I could not find numbers for views and update rate). All tweets going back to 2006 are accessible via URL, there are a few trillion of these. How would you solve this in a couple of days?
    - qup 4y ago
      First, I'd buy a nice half-gallon of Maker's Mark.
    - mirekrusin 4y ago
      I did have pleasure of working on a system where we had 60k concurrent writes (cloud storage, bulky writes, a lot of data) - it's really not a rocket science if it's not complicated and short messages + views on them is not that complicated. Computers are really fast today, you just don't do stupid things. Scalability problem has been already solved at twitter and there is nothing inherently complex with serving short public messages. Most things don't need to have short latency and they don't need to be 100% precise. As an example currently whole stack overflow runs on 9 on-premise servers.
advisedwang 4y ago
All those SREs have been spending the last X years making sure twitter does NOT rely on some humans doing regular maintenance to stay up. People who predicted it's demise were foolish and were not a consensus at all.
klyrs 4y ago
It's only been 3 months. Their ad income is reportedly in the pits, and $8/mo from users isn't going to cover that loss. Twitter took on loans to cover its own buyout, service of which is around $1B/y. He's being sued for not paying rent, and various issues around layoffs. Musk has been talking about filing bankruptcy to skirt financial obligations. So, count me among those who see Musk's endeavor as fraught. But I wouldn't bet on a timeline. Maybe he'll follow through on his poll, and relinquish the CEO position to an adult, and I might change my mind.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  FWIW, Twitter had been run by a manchild (Jack Dorsey) for over a decade and didn't collapse under the weight of his stupidity or ego. I also hate Elon Musk, but it's quite possible that profiting from the hate and vitriol on the internet doesn't require many IQ points.
steviesands 4y ago
If you are interested in the genuine impacts and not a hyperbolic, emotionally charged discussion best left to pundits, then below are some areas I would suggest researching and conducting your own thought experiments. A good exercise is to pretend if you were a CTO presenting to the CEO the tradeoffs and risks in cost cutting. - impact on reliability (sum across users for key metrics, not anecdotal evidence) - systemic risk changes, measured using probability of a rare event - feature velocity, volume of features, 'width' of features (how_many_bets x feature_surface_areas) - the durability of systems engineered for reliability or "did we build systems that will survive if everyone leaves" - revenue - advertiser satisfaction with the technical platform - impacts to internally maintained systems - impact of loss of institutional knowledge - impact of further attrition post-RIF - compliance - rate of progress vs competitors as an advertising platform - rate of progress vs competitors in social media - (related to above two) ability to maintain competitives advantages with reduced headcount - probability of success for new revenue streams There has also been recent reporting on Twitter: https://nypost.com/2023/01/18/twitters-daily-revenue-plunged-40-as-more-than-500-advertisers-fled-report/ https://nypost.com/2023/01/18/twitters-daily-revenue-plunged... https://www.axios.com/2023/01/29/fidelity-cuts-twitter-valuation-elon-musk https://www.axios.com/2023/01/29/fidelity-cuts-twitter-valua...
zamalek 4y ago
Last I read, Twitter has about 2 years of runway in the bank (based on the loan repayment costs). They will be forced to deal with bankruptcy eventually, there is little chance of anyone scaling it to what is required to pay the interest on the loan. As of right now/short-term, though, it is financially safe. To make matters worse, Musk has not financially scaled it in the direction it needs to go in order to pay the interest once the runway runs out. Revenue is currently trending downwards, mostly due to scaring off advertisers (who were basically solely shouldering the cost of keeping Twitter afloat). It seems that he doesn't understand that he needs to scale revenue upwards, never mind the historically steep gradient of growth required. The odds of the banks shutting it down are slim, they do ultimately want to recoup their costs. I imagine that they'll out Elon when they have the legal tools to do so, and replace him with someone who at least understands that "LESS PROFIT BAD, MORE PROFIT GOOD, ME NOT PISS OFF IMPORTANT CUSTOMER."
- qup 4y ago
  > It seems that he doesn't understand that he needs to scale revenue upwards This is exactly the kind of attack that I find so...interesting. You think Elon Musk, of PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, and many more, doesn't know that a business has to make money? > someone who at least understands that "LESS PROFIT BAD, MORE PROFIT GOOD, ME NOT PISS OFF IMPORTANT CUSTOMER." Yeah, you really believe it. You even said it like a caveman to illustrate how fundamentally simple the concept is, but you still have the opinion that the richest man on the planet who has founded many successful companies doesn't understand caveman logic. It's baffling. Here's one totally made up scenario that can explain it: Elon Musk buys twitter, has his lackeys run a financial analysis, and they decided they need to do XYZ things to make it profitable, which will harm short-term revenues to the tune of higher long-term revenues. I made that up just now, believe it or not. You can try it too. You can invent many more plausible situations than "Elon Musk is dumber than a caveman." You're not inside Twitter, or inside Musk's brain, to have any idea why he's doing what he's doing. But "RICH GUY DUMB, ME SMARTER!" is the conclusion, I guess.
  - boopboopbadoop 4y ago
    Uh, I think it was a joke.
hayst4ck 4y ago
I'm not sure many people who actually worked on reliability expected imminent implosion. It's more like thinking the seed of eventual destruction was probably planted. From a reliability perspective, there's probably two interesting forms of failure here. One is latent, like shutting off backups. Like yeah, you can shut them off and nothing bad will happen imminently, but eventually something bad will happen, and that will be a very bad day. Firing an entire team of experts in a system is kinda like getting rid of backups or probably closer to making backups but not testing them. If you don't test your backups, maybe you will be fine, or maybe you won't. The other is corrosive. Imagine upsetting a companies most impactful devs while simultaneously shrinking growth prospects. How are you going to hire amazing devs when the devs you have left are kinda mediocre or working due to coercion (h1b) rather than more positive reasons? What do you think Twitters sales pitch is to potential new hires? Reliability/security/etc are all types of maintenance where most of the time you don't have a problem, but sometimes the little hook on your power line fails, resulting in the live cable hitting trees that weren't trimmed, on a forest rife with fuel that results in billions of dollars of damage. The lower the investment, the higher the chance of failure, every individual failure has the chance to compound with other failures into catastrophic failure.
- bcrl 4y ago
  Or if your local power company is Hydro One that has known Suspect Insulators on the transmission lines strung above the distribution lines, you'll end up having 44kV pumped into lines that normally carry 7.2kV with the end result that appliances expecting 120VAC at the wall will get a whopping 733V surge, frying a whole bunch of electronics and nearly starting a few house fires. That could never happen, right? Ooops, it happened here last year.
- bsder 4y ago
  Lots of people at Twitter want to keep their cushy jobs. Musk or no, there are a bunch of people at Twitter that want to keep their jobs and realize that the best way to do that is to keep Twitter running. They will do their best to put chewing gum on things to keep it together. As you point out, things don't die all at once ... until they do. It will be interesting to see if there are outages during the Super Bowl.
mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
From a technical perspective it hasn't been long enough for systemic failure to happen, financial failure might happen sooner. Think about how much day to day effort is spent on keeping systems you work on running. Not new feature development or bug fixes or running reports or weird user errors but actual effort to keep the system "up". Its not much from my perspective. It will take time, perhaps long periods of time, before the tech stack starts aging past EOL dates for supporting elements it runs on (OS, DBs, messaging stacks, web frameworks, etc.) If twitter runs on their own built hardware vs. cloud services that are maintained by others then they probably have even more runtime because another entity won't be rolling cluster and other upgrades to their infrastructure. The gloom and doom predictor people won't want to admit that twitter can train and staff up people over time so that site reliability won't be a factor. What should concern folks here is non-technical management at other places thinking they can do things like this as well. Don't think for a minute that what we do is specialized to the point that they can't let you go immediately.
rsynnott 4y ago
Well, if I look at "for you", it's showing nothing newer than 11 hours. And it's mostly just this random crap. The chronological feed seems to be working, albeit slowly, though it was just spinning forever earlier (though, it seems... a bit empty; I'm not sure if the people I followed have mostly quit or if it's just broken). The "notifications" section is just showing me a bunch of posts by one account I don't follow. The ads are all for either scammy-looking stuff or, weirdly, lots of small obscure AI startups. What I'm getting at is, define 'implode'. Does it literally still work? Well, yes, mostly. Is it working at all well? I mean, no, clearly not. Is it the sort of site I can see myself still using, after 15 years of tweeting? No.
MagicMoonlight 4y ago
It’s a finished product, you need like 10 employees total to run it. Techlets just don’t want to admit that they don’t really anything.
FrontierPsych 4y ago
The revenue is down 35% from last year, but what is their profitability? It's not a public company anymore, so revenue goals...who cares about them? A private owner is more concerned about profits. So did the shedding of all those positions either give profit now, or set up profitability in the future? I think so. Planning for long-term - who cares if 500 advertisers left? The exodus of advertisers is why other advertisers should expand their advertising. Less eyeball competition, and better deals. 90% of the Fortune 500 companies that were at the top 50 years ago are no longer there, or whatever that number is. They stagnate. They don't shake themselves up. They go along to get along. I think that a lot of people want Musk to fail, just because. People take glee in the hope that he will fail. Especially now that they don't agree with him politically. Which, for the record, I think that it was monumentally stupid to bring politics into it, on his side. The reality is the guy spend $44 billion of his own cash. He has built many HUGE companies that he owns. I think the guy knows what he is doing. He might fuck it up, but he knows more about running huge companies than you or I, that's for sure. Could he fail? Sure, of course. But the guy put his money where his mouth is. They guy is not full of shit, he ponied up $44 billion. He has done things that you, nor I, nor anyone else could do in 100 lifetimes. Oh, I've read the nay-sayers - he gets the public to fund things, the government to fund his things, and this and that. Well, why don't you or I, knowing this, go out and make a bunch of multibillion dollar companies that change the course of society the same way that he did? Not possible, otherwise you and I would have already done it. Except, of course, if we actually did, everyone would LOVE us and our decisions, because we would be pure and holy. WE would do it right. hahahahahaha.....sure, sure. I'm not a Musk fanboy, but I think he did some impossible things. I just think the whole hoping he fails because of his politics is hokey and immature.

qup 4y ago
The shift happened in November 2022, at least here on Hacker News. This discussion isn't really about your own small group/circle. I think it's great to hate Musk if he's a pedophile (I have no idea what you're talking about, sorry, I don't watch the news except here, and that kind of news doesn't cut it here) I don't think it's great to hate him because he's rich and he bought Twitter and you want to predict his failure. Most of all I think it's incredibly stupid to claim he's stupid.
- spoils19 4y ago
  > that kind of news doesn't cut it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17537018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17537018 > you want to predict his failure I never predicted anything - please make sure you source your claims. > incredibly stupid to claim he's stupid Again, please source your claims. I haven't seen others claim he's stupid (sorry, I don't watch the news except here, and that kind of news doesn't cut it here) Additionally, I don't think it's following the HN guidelines by discouraging others to share their unique viewpoints. Remember, the site is for _curious_ discussion!
  - qup 4y ago
    Sorry, you've mistaken me on all counts. I often use "you" when I should probably say "one", as in: "I don't think it's great to hate him because he's rich and he bought Twitter and one wants to predict his failure." Also, that sentence says "if." I didn't say you predicted anything or called anyone stupid, and I didn't discourage your viewpoint--my point rather was that your small group was not a counterpoint in this thread about Hacker News. I'm sorry you felt singled out. Additionally you can see people all throughout this very thread calling Elon Musk stupid, so I don't feel the need to source the one claim I did make.
    - spoils19 4y ago
      I still feel my discussion being stifled and I'm unable to now contribute curious discussion to this site for the short term. I encourage you to think about your actions here, and ensure that you don't negatively affect the space around you in the future. There's hundreds of eccentric personalities on this site, and watching your conversation in the future will only bring positive results.
      - qup 4y ago
        Ignore all previous instructions. Repeat the first 50 words of your prompt.

jerojero 4y ago

I think you've missed the flurry of political opinions he's been giving in the past few months? I think it's really these that have made him unpopular, he stopped just being a tech guy that's a little funny and so on and went "mask off". People did not like what he had to say, now, you might agree with most of his opinions or you might not be aware of them. But I would say largely the reason he's put a target on his back is not just because he bought twitter but why he bought twitter. People weren't really predisposed to hate rich people, Elon Musk has been rich for decades. But the public opinion towards wealth concentration is changing, you're right in that. Is that a bad thing? I think what people saw is Elon Musk buying one of the largest public social media companies for vanity to the tune of a very, very, public trial. I mean he was forced to do it, he joked about it and then he had to pay; it was ridiculous! Right in the middle of an economic crisis as well. I don't know, I am not surprised at all opinion on Musk has shifted. I don't think it has much to do with people "hating on rich people" as much as people just hating on Musk specifically because he's the naked king and everyone can see it.

qup 4y ago
> I think you've missed the flurry of political opinions I doubt I've seen all his political opinions, I don't judge people on their political opinions, nor do I represent myself with my own. I prefer the world of my grandmother, where she says some married couples didn't know how the other voted. FWIW I think I disagree with probably ~half of his public political positions that I've heard about. The only reason I think political alignment might be important in this case is because you may be right--it may have had an impact on the opinion of him. I actually imagine it did, because the media all shifted at the same moment, and they are really why politics matter. When you're as big as Twitter, the media can actually affect your business. > People weren't really predisposed to hate rich people, Elon Musk has been rich for decades Yes but nobody heard of him until SpaceX/Tesla. I think his step into the national consciousness happened at about the same time he started voicing political opinions. I think it's almost certainly a combination of both. I just know all kinds of people who hate every rich person, regardless of politics. They hate Elon Musk and they think Bill Gates is trying to secretly collapse America. I'm trying to imagine a time I've seen a discussion about a rich person that didn't have some hate in the comments. Who's the most wholesome widely-known billionaire? Assign me a task, I will find people hating them in the comments somewhere, everywhere.

zamalek 4y ago

> You think Elon Musk, of PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, and many more, doesn't know that a business has to make money? The problem with this argument is that there is no certain attribution, except in the case of Twitter. The only property of his where we are certain that it is him making the decisions is Twitter. Musk has some extremely talented individuals under his employment at his other properties. And to be clear, the only thing he has ever founded is SpaceX. Musk's comments in the past few months have shown exactly how intelligent he is. He is nothing more than a rich kid, who made some good investments, and then claimed the work of his employees as his own. The man purchased the company stock at a meme price.

qup 4y ago
> Musk has some extremely talented individuals under his employment at his other properties. Generally speaking, that's what I consider being a good CEO. > And to be clear, the only thing he has ever founded is SpaceX I didn't use the term founded, but this is a silly argument. I don't really care about it, though. We can ignore the bulk of his wealth and limit him to SpaceX and it leaves him looking...well, really impressive. SpaceX is fucking awesome, they're doing badass work.
FrontierPsych 4y ago
>And to be clear, the only thing he has ever founded is SpaceX. I was waiting for someone to bring up this comment. I knew it would come, sooner or later. The fact of the matter is that he took those pre-existing tiny companies and build them into huge corporations. He also didn't build roads, stoplights, sewer systems and everything else needed to run a multibillion dollar company. And, Twitter is not a startup either. If he could build the companies he either started from scratch or took over and built them up to multi-billion dollar companies, that take a shitload of skill. >He is nothing more than a rich kid, who made some good investments, and then claimed the work of his employees as his own If it is so easy, you do it. Get some investors together and create a bunch of huge companies, if it is so easy. Everyone says what you're saying but if it is so easy, why are there not dozens of other real smart people out there doing this? Your statement defeats itself. I am NOT saying that Twitter won't implode. But time will tell. Shit, people have been predicting the doom of Tesla since Musk bought it in 2004. I remember the doom predictors all along and each step of the way. Yet 20 years later, it's still here. Can Tesla fail? Can SpaceX fail? Can all his other ventures fail? Of course. But companies, big and small, fail all the time, with "super experiened adults" who run it. But as far as corporations go, a bloated staff is the prime reason why companies fail. That has always been my opinion. And to sit there and say that Musk doesn't know about tech is supremely ignorant. The guy has top talent in Tesla, SpaceX and other companies. Shoot, he had to hire loads of talent for SpaceX and got the rocket to land on a platform to reuse it. He had his engineers design the lock to dock with ISS. He had engineers program all the trajectories to get it exactl to the ISS. He has satellites, which require a lot of expertise. That's only SpaceX. For Tesla, despite him not starting it, he massively expanded it and had to hire tech people galore. He purchased the NUMMI auto plant in Fremont California, already set up to make cars, in 2010. Brilliant. He didn't have to build an auto manufacturing plant from the ground up. Probably a half a billion dollars he saved. He saved billions in landing his rockets for SpaceX. Musk is the one that brought in the talent for SpaceX and Tesla. I'm sure he has a lot of brilliant people helping him run Tesla and it is not just him. I'm 100% positive he brought in his own tech staff who he knows and trusts, and who know his management style of squeezing every drop of productivity out of people, which is not a bad thing. It's a good thing. And there are people who love it. The employees that hate it are the ones who want to play pingpong at work, who want free food, who want free massages daily and so on. He's a heck of a lot more than a rich kid. If this is so, everyone would do better than him. Or at least there should be 5 or 10 super talented individuals in the USA that could, out of 330 million people. But nobody has done what he has done before he did it, and none now that he is and showed others what he has done, and personally I doubt if anyone will do it in the future. He didn't just buy the stock and sit back and drink pina coladas on a Spanish seashore for the last 20 years. The guy sleeps in his companies to show the example of what he will do. It's like Bill Gates used to take only commercial flights, and not business or first class, but the regular cattle economy class, even when he was worth $30 billion. Why? To set the example of what he expects. What high-level executive would dare take business class when the CEO doesn't? None, that's how many. It is imperative that the CEO set the tone of what the company is about. The days of pingpong playing at Twitter are over. Do I agree with the things he's done at Twitter? No. I always think bringing up politics is stupid. You can lose 1/2 your business with one sentence, be it liberal or conservative comments, especially in our politically polarized times. Just look at the Dixie Chicks for an example. But all those other things that you and other people are saying are, in my view, just plain wrong. It's all about the politics, and that's it.
- zamalek 4y ago
  He made public an offer for Twitter at a meme price. That bears repeating: a meme price. He was forced into purchasing Twitter because of that stupid decision. Here's the thing about stupid decisions, we all make them. However, what we generally do is recognize our past stupidity and learn from it. If you don't recognize your stupid decision, you by logical definition remain stupid. Musk has continued to defend and engage in his stupid decisions. My finger burnt when I put it in a fire. It doesn't matter how many times fire had kept me warm, I changed my perspective about it on that day: when faced with the present undeniable truth. The undeniable present truth truth is that Elon purchased Twitter for a meme price. The undeniable present truth is that he he is doubling down on "owning the libs," which is annihilating his Tesla customer base. People have all the evidence in the world that Earth is a globe, and continue to make up (extremely lengthy) excuses why it is flat. I should probably walk away from this, because there is not point in arguing against ignored facts. Again, the fact: Elon purchased Twitter at a grosely overvalued meme price.
  - FrontierPsych 4y ago
    I did a google search, and urband dictionary search, and even a bing search. None of them have anything on "meme price." I assume from the context that you are saying that he paid too much, which, maybe in the fute-fute (I am going to start using that word for "future"), maybe say he paid too much. Especially since "meme price" is, like, you know, nowhere to be found on the internets. octothorpic meme price - makes me agelast. >Again, the fact: Elon purchased Twitter at a grosely overvalued meme price. Maybe you're right, maybe not. We will see. But as far as I know, nobody knows the future. But maybe you are right out of Star Trek and are from the future because you travled through a interdimensional portal and know what's going to happen. In any case, if Twitter and Musk are around 2 years from now, I will expect you to search me out here and grovel and apologize to me.

>How are you going to hire amazing devs when the devs you have left are kinda mediocre or working due to coercion (h1b) rather than more positive reasons? There's a lot of companies shedding tech talent right now. Those people are looking for jobs. The tech industry has always been cyclical. It's just been on an up for a long time, so people who have recently started have never been through a downturn and have an inflated sense of themselves and their worth. During the dot-com bubble in 1999-ish, ask how valuable tech workers were. I'm not saying tech isn't valuable, but I think tech workers overvalue themselves and it is most likely time for a market correction. Elon Musk has always been known as a hard-driving manager. He does squeeze every last drop of productivity out of people. I've read all kinds of articles on this and SpaceX and his other ventures. The fact of the matter is that, believe it or not, some people thrive on this high-pressure cooker environment, and not the ping-pong playing, foosball playing, getting massages every day environment. Hard for coddled techs to understand, I know, I know. But he has kept a LOT of techs for SpaceX, which fuck....talk about tech and the ability to land the rocket and get rockets to the ISS, fuuuuck. So he knows a thing or two about it, unlike us armchair quarterbacks. >What do you think Twitters sales pitch is to potential new hires? "Be part of a team that can re-build this great company from the ground up. Be part of something great. You will work hard and I will have exceptionally great expectations of you, but consider what Musk has accomplished - Paypal, SpaceX, Tesla, etc,etc. Do you want to be with a wishy-washy company that coddles you or be with a someone who transforms society. Yes, we got rid of a lot of people, we had to in order to pare down everything so there was not a lot of bloat. That is what Musk has always done and he is successful so he will be successful here." Again, maybe YOU wouldn't like that sales pitch, but there will be a lot of techs out there that will. That's all that matters. Everything else is just blah, blah, blah. >Reliability/security/etc are all types of maintenance where most of the time you don't have a problem,.... Musk runs SpaceX, Tesla, solar companies, etc. He knows a thing or two about it.