9 ms·

It's insane how bad Elon stepped in it with this guy. While I'm sure there were many people at Twitter doing mostly nothing, he happens to publicly pick on a gu

• darth_avocado 4y ago
  > I'm sure there were many people at Twitter doing mostly nothing So just because he is well known, you suddenly believe a Twitter employee. But others who Elon claims to not be working, they’re probably not working?
  • mediaman 4y ago
    It's true of any large company. There are many people not doing anything. Simply because of the number of employees, and the manner in which large companies tend to stop focusing on outcomes. That doesn't mean most were not doing anything, but "most" is not the word used in the comment to which yours replies.
    • silvestrov 4y ago
      aka Price’s Law: Why Only A Few People Generate Half Of The Results https://medium.com/darius-foroux/prices-law-why-only-a-few-people-get-half-of-the-rewards-599562d607ab https://medium.com/darius-foroux/prices-law-why-only-a-few-p...
      • MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
        That article is total garbage and the author comes off as a complete douche bag. Did he add anything of value or just regurgitate a link to Wikipedia, quote Jordan fucking Peterson and take some time to attack some straw-man voss-water drinking academics he made up?
      • mrxd 4y ago
        This is true in the entertainment industry, but it's because consumers want to buy what everyone else is buying. Not because there's a huge difference in performance. In fact, it's the opposite. There are many equally attractive/talented performers who can do the job just as well. It's very competitive, success is rare and fleeting even when it does come. This translates into other parts of the economy. High income households experience high income volatility, consistent with the hypothesis that there is lots of competition at the highest levels of success—not very little competition.
  • bfeynman 4y ago
    I assume if you came into work and your manager says stop everything you're doing and then in the afternoon calls you into a meeting and says you're fired with cause because you aren't doing anything you would probably thank them for helping the business!
  • kentm 4y ago
    I think that this person is more trustworthy than Musk. After reading Musk's depositions he is not a person that I would consider to be honest and forthright.
  • vidarh 4y ago
    It's almost irrelevant whether or not he was doing anything - even if he for some reason 100% deserved to be fired, the way Elon responded was wildly unprofessional. All Elon needed to do was to reply "thanks for bringing this to my attention, clearly the ball has been dropped somewhere. I'll make sure someone responds to your e-mail", and then take it private.
  • stonogo 4y ago
    He doesn't have to work. Twitter acquired his company and the payout was structured as salary for tax reasons. Musk firing him suddenly turned that opex into capex, for no other reason than Musk has no idea what is going on in a company he runs.
    • msikora 4y ago
      But in this case the "tax reasons" was to maximize the tax: "In an agreement between him and Twitter, most of the purchase price was paid as salary to maximize the tax he would pay for the sale in Iceland. He chose to pay for tax out of respect to Iceland for the disability benefits he received."
• capableweb 4y ago
  > It's insane how bad Elon stepped in it with this guy. While I'm sure there were many people at Twitter doing mostly nothing, he happens to publicly pick on a guy who single-handed built one of the most well-respected branding agencies in the tech industry, and who also has debilitating muscular dystrophy. Haraldur seems like a pretty accomplished guy and I don't like what Musk did either. But none of the things you wrote about are about things Haraldur did at Twitter. Without knowing more about the situation, we're all just guessing it, but it is possible for a accomplished individual to join a company and then lose motivation and not do much.
  • PragmaticPulp 4y ago
    > but it is possible for a accomplished individual to join a company and then lose motivation and not do much Nobody deserves to be fired without communication, without HR being able to confirm if they work at the company, and then proceed to be publicly mocked on Twitter for their physical disability. Speculating about the person's work at Twitter is beside the point. Thousands of Twitter employees have been let go, but mocking someone for their physical disability on the internet is something else entirely. The perspective warp that happens in these comment threads is baffling. If someone posted the same scenario (getting fired without communication, then their CEO mocked their disability on Twitter) as an "Ask HN" thread, everyone would have their pitchforks out. Replace unknown CEO with Elon Musk, and suddenly commenters are doing mental gymnastics to ignore the real bad behavior and try to justify something else using speculation.
    • jonahx 4y ago
      > and then proceed to be publicly mocked on Twitter for their physical disability Today is my first time hearing about this scandal. Do you have a link to the mocking in question?
      • buggy6257 4y ago
        https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1633011448459964417 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1633011448459964417 He also had a (now deleted) comment where he called the guy "just the worst": https://twitter.com/JamesClayton5/status/1633155915892527104 https://twitter.com/JamesClayton5/status/1633155915892527104
• zht 4y ago
  yea unfortunately what I've seen on twitter are people saying "well if he's not working why is elon paying him" for these groups of people Elon is tied to their identity and he can do no wrong
  • 1-more 4y ago
    I cannot understand the Stan culture for Elon. I get it for the military guys who tell you to lift and make your bed. I get it for Joe Rogan. I get it for the MMA masculinity influencers. I get it for Trump and DeSantis. I do not get it for Elon.
    • timmytokyo 4y ago
      He's the richest man in the world. For a lot of people, that's enough to earn their admiration. There's this warped perception that if you have a lot of money, there must be something exceptionally positive about your character.
      • yitianjian 4y ago
        Also the techbro dream - the marketing has worked for his image, and he's the ideal of a smart, successful, techie, engineer - although realistically he's only one of those
      • 1-more 4y ago
        Yeah that's gotta be the one.
      • vidarh 4y ago
        It's the Just World Fallacy/Hypothesis. The belief that "you get what you deserve", good or bad. It's at the root both of a lot of hero worship and also at the root of a lot of unwillingness to help people who are struggling out of the shared belief that you must have done something to deserve where you are - good or bad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
    • danpalmer 4y ago
• dbreunig 4y ago
  Elon did what he's done for the past decade. Can't help but play to a crowd and let the lawyers figure it out later. This is a cocktail of calling a rescue diver a pedophile, mocking all skills that aren't coders, and unnecessary cruelty when laying off workers. If Haraldur intended to bait him, it was a near-flawless execution. I'm sure there are countless labor, disability, and health info privacy lawyers lining up in Halli's DMs.
  • jack_riminton 4y ago
    I suspect this too, Haraldur seems like a smart dude who's been stewing about Elon's mismanagement and assholerly for a while
    • throwntoday 4y ago
      [flagged]
      • eigart 4y ago
        Elon?
    • jack_riminton 4y ago
      Here's the kicker; Twitter would be liable for paying him $100m if he got fired https://www.bosshunting.com.au/hustle/elon-musk-firing-halli-thorleifsson-twitter-100-million-mistake/ https://www.bosshunting.com.au/hustle/elon-musk-firing-halli... (allegedly)
      • msikora 4y ago
        And the reason is that he took the $100m in salary so he can pay as high tax as possible: "In early 2021, Haraldur sold Ueno to Twitter. In an agreement between him and Twitter, most of the purchase price was paid as salary to maximize the tax he would pay for the sale in Iceland. He chose to pay for tax out of respect to Iceland for the disability benefits he received. Per the agreement, he paid the second highest tax of an individual in Iceland in 2021."
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• jklinger410 4y ago
  > I mean this guy is literally in a wheel chair. I didn't know being paralyzed made you immune to criticism.
  • asddubs 4y ago
    I chuckled at the weirdly heavy emphasis on that part too, but I think what they're getting at is that elon accused someone who's in a wheelchair of faking their disability. this isn't just carpal tunnel where it's effectively invisible and you just have to take someones word for it (which to be clear, I'm not saying is fair game to just publicly accuse people of faking on a whim)
    • nemo44x 4y ago
      I guess Musk was asking why he claims he can't type due to his disability but yet manages to tweet all day. That's probably a lot different than claiming someone is faking a disability.
      • danso 4y ago
        It doesn’t help Musk’s case that he appears unaware of typing-by-dictation software, which is efficient for prose but not necessarily for coding
        • Sai_ 4y ago
          Speaking of audio to text, how does one insert a full stop to separate sentences? I tried once to use Siri to voice-to-type - got stuck on this and never used it again.
          • wlonkly 4y ago
            Some TTS tools figure it out from flow in the same way that automated captions do, and most (all?) let you dictate punctuation as well. (Some capital T capital T capital S tools figure it out from flow in the same way that automated captions do comma and most open paren all question mark close paren let you dictate punctuation as well period)
• wpietri 4y ago
  > while I'm sure there were many people at Twitter doing mostly nothing As somebody who was a manager at Twitter (briefly; laid off in 2017 after 7 months) I want to say that this is very much a management problem, not a worker problem. When I started there, in my initial 1:1s with my team, each told me their story of their time at Twitter. Every single one had worked on at least one project that they were excited about and made great progress on but that at the last minute got canceled by senior execs. At least one; some had more. So I believe that the main reason Twitter had a justified reputation for low feature velocity was executive-level chaos. Dorsey was the half-time CEO from 2015-2022. When I was there, the VP Product position was jokingly called "defense against the dark arts teacher", as a new person swapped in every year or so. I'm sure it's possible to have a half-time CEO, but for that to work you need a very clear vision and an excellent executive team that is actually working as a team, neither of which I saw during my time there. It would not surprise me at all that Twitter ,ended up with some people who became discouraged and were just biding their time. However, during my time there I never met anybody like that. Twitter was full of smart, passionate people who loved the product. That said, if Twitter, months after Musk's takeover and after massive layoffs still has do nothing people, that is 100% Musk's fault. All the people there have passed multiple selection filters by Musk and his goons. Musk has had months to change the culture, share his vision, and build a sense of mission. In my view, he's failed comprehensively. At this point, him publicly shitting on his workers is just him displaying his lack of basic competence as a manager.
• gooseus 4y ago
  Unfortunately it doesn't matter, the market has decided that a company led by a person like this is worth many multiples of a similar company led by a regular person who would never consider doing something like this.
  • krapp 4y ago
    ...in no small part because the brazen arrogance, sociopathic cruelty and shit-eating snark people like Elon possess signal them as alpha males in modern society, and people honestly think those qualities are necessary in innovators and leaders (although I suspect a lot of that is people projecting a power fantasy from their own misanthropic behavior.) That so many beta fanboys in this thread are white knighting for him is as ghastly as it is to be expected. ... and because this is Hacker News, yes I'm aware the "alpha/beta" male thing is based on a discredited model of wolf pack hierarchy but the meme was assimilated into popular culture anyway so it's true for people now even if it was never true for canines.
• porker 4y ago
  > If you were a well-funded tech company looking for design help from say 2014-2020, Ueno was probably on your shortlist What was it about Ueno's work that made it so good? I've admired it from the first time I saw Halli & Ueno's portfolio, but I've never been able to identify what it was. Clean and bold?
• toss1 4y ago
  Yup, when just a simple trivial response would do. Either no reply & cc:HR, or "Yup, HR should get on this". With that kind of money and power, the #1 or #2 richest person in the world, you can afford to be extremely gracious and self-effacing. And it is good for your wealth. Instead, Elon chooses to make a public show of being a smug, petty, abusive, asshat. What an impoverished emotional weakling is on display here. Almost sad and pitiful, except for his abuse of others.
  • 93po 4y ago
    Elon didn't make this public, the (independently very wealthy) employee did that.
    • kentm 4y ago
      The employee tried to confirm the firing, which is relevant to his contract, privately with HR. After getting no response, he asked Elon about his employment and contract status publicly as a last-ditch effort. Instead of answering the question, Elon tried to pivot into talking about the guy's work in order to save face publicly. That part of it is on Elon, not on the employee in question. Its incredible to me how people are burying the lede here to somehow rehabilitate Musk's disastrous response.
    • dyno12345 4y ago
      here "wealthy" is a dig on the employee
    • toss1 4y ago
      Yes, Elon did exactly that. Thorleifsson repeatedly inquired of HR, then made a single tweet to Musk. As I pointed out, Musk could have 1) simply ignored it, 2) ignored it and cc'd HR to reply, or 3) publicly replied something brief and to the point, such as "Yes, terminated, cc:HR to close out paperwork". Yet, musk chose to do none of the above, instead choosing to escalate the situation, evidently while underestimating his opponent. This is absolutely 100% on Musk, it's his company, his response, and he's the wealthiest and one of the most powerful men in the world. He chose it, and the fact that he got publicly pwnd is entirely his own doing. But, as usual, there's that meme about some weird nerd who always throws himself in front of a valid point to try to protect Elon. (If it matters, I also posted on HN several things defending Musk, but this is indefensible)
• ornornor 4y ago
  > Elon It irks me so much that everyone calls him Elon like we’re all pals with him and he’s just one of us. He isn’t. I find him to be an insufferable douche, he’s probably a psychopath, and he’s just a despicable human overall. His companies are remarkable though but they’ve been built on the sweat tears blood and exploitation of so many people that I don’t think they’re respectable. But sure let’s keep calling him Elon like he’s just everyone’s friendly neighbor or uncle. /end rant