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People should read Elon Musk by Walter Issacson. Here's an excerpt from the chapter on his "algorithm": > [Step 2] Delete any part or process you can. You may

• ackbar03 2y ago
  I was going to mention this as well. This is pretty standard musk, delete large swaiths of stuff, see what breaks, and put the essential pieces back. It's supposed to be much faster than meticulous planning.
  • nobunaga 2y ago
    Yes all with no regard for the impact on people, families and their needs. Lets just make sure to focus on the need of a billionaire to create more wealth. The only reason you think like this is because you think it wont happen to you. Oh boy, I hope it does, then I hope you remember this comment. I so hope the people in here defending this bs end up on the street and impacted like the many innocent people are today. I love hearing the stories of regret from MAGA people, only more to come.
  • jimnotgym 2y ago
    Web company world 1) Delete a system 2) 404 error 3) add the system back with a simple git command Nuclear world 1) Delete a system 2) Nuclear meltdown causes the abandonment of the Atlantic coast 3) Add the system back over the next 20 years
• TZubiri 2y ago
  Move fast, break things. Didn't facebook end up changing that? There's some things you can't undo once they break.
  • bryanrasmussen 2y ago
    surely a nuclear arsenal isn't one of those things.
    • pantalaimon 2y ago
      It could also be the motto of an ICBM
      • AlecBG 2y ago
        If anything ICBMs are better at moving fast and breaking things than the tech industry
  • andy_ppp 2y ago
    Once at a certain size didn’t Facebook say move fast but don’t break the infrastructure. Maybe they learned something about being at a certain scale.
    • TZubiri 2y ago
      Infrastructure and countries if I recall
  • sureglymop 2y ago
    And also, what if a nation state is different than a tech startup and shouldn't be run quite the same?
    • alistairSH 2y ago
      Next you’ll tell us sovereign debt isn’t the same as personal debt!!! /s
      • TZubiri 2y ago
        It is if you have your own personal currency
• ben_w 2y ago
  > He thinks this is a feature, not a bug. Is he wrong? I don't think so. Twitter lost 84% of its revenue. Do you want the USA GDP to shrink that much over the next few years?
  • blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    The US's GDP isn't based on the amount of bloat in its government. Sure spending finds its way into the economy, but tax dollars saved also will. As for Twitter/X - the goal isn't revenue but profit, and Twitter was not in a good shape before Elon. Musk recently noted they are barely breaking even now, and the recent sale of X debt was just above original pricing. Considering big advertisers are coming back to X, that's probably only going to look better.
    • _fizz_buzz_ 2y ago
      The twitter deal kind of worked out for Musk because Trump won the presidency. It's a way to buy favors from the US government now. Basically a corruption vehicle. From a end user stand point, twitter is terrible now. Lots of bots, full of life hack and crypto scams and a lot of scientists and other interesting people completely abandoned the platform.
      • cr125rider 2y ago
        Control the media, control the narrative. A tale as old as time.
    • ben_w 2y ago
      > The US's GDP isn't based on the amount of bloat in its government. Sure spending finds its way into the economy, but tax dollars saved also will. "Bloat" presumes. "Tax dollars saved" would only be relevant — still incorrect, but relevant — if you were matching tax cuts with spending cuts, rather than trying to balance budgets. If the USA balances its budget in a way that *somehow* has no side-effects, the GDP shrinks 7% just from that cut alone — but these cuts do have side effects so it is worse than that. And doing using layoffs as a discovery mechanism is going to have Chesterton-fence type mistakes, where you only find what's wrong when the stuff you stop paying for is maintenance whose absence takes a while to become visible to non-domain experts. Dams will fail and flood valleys, bridges will fall into rivers, that kind of thing has gotten into the news in other countries when maintenance was forgotten. The infrastructure that your government is responsible for is the backbone upon which the wealth of the rest of your country is built. You can eliminate the entire Federal Highway Administration and Joe Average won't notice anything for nearly a year… but if and when you do hire them back, you may have to hire back a lot more than you fired just to catch up with the damage done. And so it goes for many other aspects of your country. CDC's also in the news now. OK, until you get your next pandemic… oh, wait, you're already having one. Nukes? You won't notice the problem until other governments no longer fear your nuclear deterrent. Armed forces in general? British didn't see any problem with shrinking their forces until the Russian invasion of Ukraine and realising how close they were to not being able to defend themselves if invaded. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration? Getting rid of that means a lot of companies can get away with skipping safety processes, so it might even seem like the economy goes up… until you get some equivalent of the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal. > As for Twitter/X - the goal isn't revenue but profit, and Twitter was not in a good shape before Elon. They made a profit in two of the years before he took over; an 84% revenue decline means that the company cannot even service the debt he saddled the company with during the purchase, even if he fired all remaining staff and reduced server, utility, real estate, and insurance, and all other costs to zero. > Musk recently noted they are barely breaking even now, and the recent sale of X debt was just above original pricing. Do you trust him? According to this link, they sold more of their debt than they were expecting to, for more than expected to, but it was still less than they paid for it. Going from $1b to $5.5b and from 90¢/$ to 97¢/$ is less bad rather than good. https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/morgan-stanley-set-to-sell-3-billion-of-x-debt-without-any-discount-125021300179_1.html https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/morgan-stanley-...
• almog 2y ago
  If we take Twitter/X as an example of this process, my personal experience has been that it has been degraded to a spams and bot hell shortly after Musk took over. But my personal experience isn't quantifiable, what is quantifiable is X valuation which, according to Fidelity, has been depreciating and back in Oct. 2024 was estimated at nearly 20% of the original acquisition price.
  • blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    The Fidelity valuation is old news. All the most recent debt sales were either just below or just above 100% of the original price. Example article: https://www.afr.com/technology/banks-offload-8-8b-in-debt-linked-to-musk-s-twitter-takeover-20250206-p5la8o https://www.afr.com/technology/banks-offload-8-8b-in-debt-li...
    • XorNot 2y ago
      Ah yes, sold Feb 15 2025[1]...right as the CEO took over running the US government and raided the US treasury department. I'm sure this is a completely above board sale that definitely does not represent a legal-if-you-don't-look-at-it way to bribe the de facto head of the US government / the expectation of massive corruption (ala: Tesla's stock price rising on the news Elon Musk was running DOGE - weird right? The CEO is apparently going to be too busy to run the company because he's now running the government so the stock price goes up...to be fair, technically that's not a bad bet) Because we know the new administration definitely wouldn't take bribes in the form of financial instruments[2]. Definitely no history of it[3]. [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/banks-sell-down-more-x-debt-just-13bln-now-left-their-books-2025-02-14/ https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/banks-sell-down-mor... [2] https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/trumps-meme-coin-made-nearly-100-million-trading-fees-small-traders-lost-money-2025-02-03/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/trumps-meme-coin-... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2024/08/02/trump-campaign-egypt-investigation/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2024/08/02/tru...
      • mlindner 2y ago
• _fizz_buzz_ 2y ago
  I think there is a tiny difference if Twitter is not working or if the nuclear arsenal is malfunctioning.
  • adtac 2y ago
    Yes, so it's a good thing the first step is: > [Step 1] Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from "the legal department" or "the safety department." You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb.
    • operationcwal 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • adtac 2y ago
        I know that the US government is more complex than twitter lol. I just think it's stupid to automatically invalidate an idea because it was tried in a less complex system.
        • jimnotgym 2y ago
          ... and failed to turn that less complex system into a more profitable company
          • kelnos 2y ago
            Unfortunately Twitter is now a machine that allows people to buy favors from the US government, so I expect it to become profitable pretty quickly. Pretty messed up way for that to work out, though.
        • 2y ago
• risyachka 2y ago
  Yeah this works for processes. Doesn’t work in with people though. You will be deemed as unreliable. Alliances will form without you as no one needs a partner that can leave you standing at any moment. Running the company is the very opposite of running a country. The feedback loop is weeks vs years/decades.
• IndrekR 2y ago
  I have seen it before. This is the “Coffee is for closers” scene from Glengarry Glen Ross: https://youtu.be/elrnAl6ygeM https://youtu.be/elrnAl6ygeM
• suzzer99 2y ago
  If we fired 25% of the federal govt workforce, it would save 1% from the federal budget. This has nothing to do with trimming waste and everything to do with replacing the government with loyalists from top to bottom. What comes after that isn't going to be pretty.
  • BLKNSLVR 2y ago
    Absolutely. The effects are going to be felt for a good couple of decades to follow.
  • physicsguy 2y ago
    Is that staff costs only? Or including the things those staff would spend money on too?
    • rcxdude 2y ago
      Overhead for staff isn't that much more. And even one person can spend money like it's going out of style if they have a budget that says they can and the implicit threat it'll be cut if they don't. They'll just spend it in dumber ways.
  • somenameforme 2y ago
    The "federal budget" is something people often mention, but it's quite misleading. At least in terms of what we think of. The reason is that the overwhelming majority of the budget is spent automatically - pensions, medicare, social security, and all of these expenses are unavoidable and in a mandatory expenses category. The remainder of the budget, including military, is considered discretionary. That discretionary spending is the thousands of pages that Congress creates (and fails to read) each year. And it's in that budget that most of the things we associate with government came from - everything from education, to roads, to infrastructure, and also the military. So by the numbers in 2024 the discretionary budget was "only" $1.7 trillion and after military spending "only" $900 billion was left. "Only" obviously needs to be in quotes but that's indeed only about 13% of the e.g. $6.7 trillion total budget in 2024. And so each time you cut something the amount of money left for the things we generally associate with government skyrockets. So for instance USAID was "only" $50 billion, but that was more than 5% of the entire discretionary budget! US Federal Workers cost $293 billion [1], and contractors amounted to $760 billion. This is excluding secondary costs/benefits, which are extremely high for government workers, and only direct payments. It also excludes budgeted expenditures that would have been performed by those employees. So that's already $1.05 trillion and we're clearly substantially lowballing the figure. Yet that's already more than the entire discretionary budget excluding military, and certainly far more than 4% of the entire budget (as would be required for cutting 25% to only result in a 1% cost saving, as proposed). [1] - https://www.afge.org/article/afge-continues-to-debunk-misconceptions-about-federal-workers/ https://www.afge.org/article/afge-continues-to-debunk-miscon...
• toofy 2y ago
  i run into this problem often when building teams, people who fail to understand that the real world is not an algorithm. the very first people i release are those incapable of seeing beyond math. their failure to see wider context, their failures to understand that massive chaotic fractal tier contexts interplay will forever be these people’s downfalls. sisyphean masochists.
• vkou 2y ago
  By that logic, perhaps we should trim 10% of his wealth. And then we can stop and check - if he is still fine after it, then maybe we didn't trim enough. It's easy to trim other people when you are completely insulated from the consequences.
• nobunaga 2y ago
  The only reason you think he isnt wrong is because you think it wont impact you. I hope one day you find yourself in the same situation, even worse, then I hope you remember this comment.
  • adtac 2y ago
    If I do, whether or not I remember my comment, I'll certainly remember yours :(
    • nobunaga 2y ago
      Sometimes people like you need to go through what others do to realise how wrong you were. Some people have empathy to know. You seem like the former. Its not too late to see that Elon is nothing but a fraud though if you wish to.
• pipes 2y ago
  Yeah I'd heard this and I think he is right. I'm about to use the approach in a coding task in work. However this is people's livelihoods, mortgages, kids etc. being on the receiving end of it through no fault of your own must be awful.
• jimnotgym 2y ago
  This sounds like a software developers take. I think it is an algorithm that can work well in non critical systems. I think it is naive in the extreme to apply it to critical systems.
• kelnos 2y ago
  I don't want to live in a world where it's right. Treating people like this, toying with their livelihoods, is wrong, full stop. It might "work" for certain definitions of "work", but it's morally repugnant.
• JKCalhoun 2y ago
  You could apply the same reasoning to parts of the human body. Or maybe not.
• insane_dreamer 2y ago
  > Is he wrong? When it comes to government, yes.
• johnnyanmac 2y ago
  >Is he wrong? I don't think so. He's assuming everyone will grovel back to him and that this can be undone. That's the wrong part. Layoffs will often cost you your best employees. Either because you laid them off, because they saw the signs and jumped before the layoffs, or because you end up overworking the post layoffs and they leave over the bad balance. You're never paying 10xer 10x the salary, so the attritiion is usually a matter of when, not if. people aren't machines. They have their own interests and very few want to feel like they are one step away from being let go.