4 ms·

Linus Torvalds thinks Elon Musk is 'too stupid' to be working at a tech company

79 points by bundie 11mo ago

tonyedgecombe 11mo ago
For all the criticism about the Twitter downsizing they have managed to keep the service running on a much smaller staff count.
- spiderfarmer 11mo ago
  Smaller staff and smaller user base.
  - Zigurd 11mo ago
    Smaller ad customer base, too, and qualitatively less demanding.
  - red-iron-pine 11mo ago
    if bots count as user base they're thriving
  - oskarkk 11mo ago
    How much smaller user base? Looking at some recent data, which may not be accurate (but they're required to publish user numbers in the EU at least), it looks like the user base may be only 0-20% smaller compared to 2022. https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/social-media-news/x-traffic-peak-deactivations/ https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/social-media-news/x... https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-formerly-twitter-continues-to-lose-eu-users/746539/ https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-formerly-twitter-con... https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/threads-is-nearing-xs-daily-app-users-new-data-shows/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/threads-is-nearing-xs-dail... https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/
- Craighead 11mo ago
  [dead]
- array_key_first 11mo ago
  Running is a very low bar, you could theoretically fire everyone except operations and keep it running. But software and networks rot. Twitter has been rotting, it's no secret. It pretty much sucks major balls.
nephihaha 11mo ago
Musk is not as intelligent as he claims to be. He is happy to take the credit for others' work.
- Suzuran 11mo ago
  That's just what management does.
- beardyw 11mo ago
  > Musk is not as intelligent as he claims to be. It is a characteristic of those who claim to be intelligent.
- Zigurd 11mo ago
  If only it stopped at taking credit. That's not half as ego gratifying as stamping your vision of the future <cough>cybertruck</cough> on the roads where monstrosities with deadly edges assault our eyes.
  - nephihaha 11mo ago
    We haven't got those cybertrucks over here yet, but yes, they are extremely ugly.
    - mrlonglong 10mo ago
      The Cybertruck is banned in the UK.Thankfully.
damnitbuilds 11mo ago
Like many people on both political extremes, Linus Torvalds confuses people who disagree with him with people who are stupid. Elon Musk is the best engineering manager this century. And a dickhead. Edit: Just re-read the story. Going by the quote there, the interviewer lied about what Musk did and the story lies about what Torvalds actually said about him.
- spiderfarmer 11mo ago
  “The richest” !== “The best”.
  - damnitbuilds 11mo ago
    Okay, to be explicit: The best engineering manager in terms of getting things done. I have read that Musk was a complete cunt to the people working for him, long before he took over Twitter.
    - rsynnott 11mo ago
      > The best engineering manager in terms of getting things done. Beyond the joke truck thing, his car company hasn't released a new car in almost seven years. Twitter doesn't appear to have done much beyond release a few previously gated features (longer tweets, tweet editing, and the birdwatch/community notes thing were all things they were previously testing) since acquisition. Like, I dunno, I'm not seeing it.
      - damnitbuilds 10mo ago
        Erm, heard of Spacex ? Twitter sacked a large %age of staff and kept going fine. The Cybertruck failed because of marketing, not engineering, and I think we can assume Tesla will bring out some new products soon.
        rsynnott 10mo ago
        > Erm, heard of Spacex ? Yes; they have yet to have a proper orbital launch with their new product; it's substantially behind schedule. The best engineering manager in terms of getting things done could surely do better. > Twitter sacked a large %age of staff and kept going fine. I mean, I'd hope "the best engineering manager in terms of getting things done" would add up to more than "the service hasn't substantially changed in three years, except in that it is rather more unreliable and that the spam prevention, never wonderful, seems to have broken down entirely". That seems extremely unambitious. Wasn't it meant to be "the everything app" by now? > The Cybertruck failed because of marketing, not engineering Fundamentally it failed because it was ill-conceived, but it also had fairly severe quality and design defects. No amount of _marketing_ would have saved it. Again, I'm just not seeing anything that makes me think "bestest engineering manager ever". Actually, I see no reason to think that he has any recent experience as any sort of engineering manager _at all_; he appears to spend most of his time spouting nonsense on Twitter and failing at ill-conceived joint ventures with Donald Trump. Neither of these are generally considered to be part of the core skill set for engineering managers.
throw310822 11mo ago
"How many lines of code did you write in the past <timespan>" is not a good metric but replaced with a more generic "what did you actually _produce_ recently" I can understand the spirit.
onetokeoverthe 11mo ago
[dead]
mbac32768 11mo ago
I'm impressed Torvalds managed to not know what he was referring to (the Twitter firings). The missing context whenever this comes up is the fact that it was a surprise one off. If developers have no idea they're going to be graded by lines of code at some random future date that's a much different situation than saying you're going to give bonuses away every month based on how many lines of code were written. Everyone knows the second is bad, it'll be gamed massively. The first one could be useful though. And yes doing it as a one off is still problematic and you can think of all kinds of exceptions, but if you think the organization is full of dead weight in general and overhired massively, a crude stack ranking by lines of code is a pretty good metric for figuring out which (e.g.) 50% is the bottom.
- red-iron-pine 11mo ago
  Torvalds talking out of his ass? impossible
- rsynnott 11mo ago
  > I'm impressed Torvalds managed to not know what he was referring to (the Twitter firings). I mean, naughty old Mr Car didn't _invent_ this nonsense; IBM was fairly notorious for it in the 80s, say. He's probably the most prominent recent example. > The first one could be useful though. How? > a crude stack ranking by lines of code is a pretty good metric for figuring out which (e.g.) 50% is the bottom. No. It's really not. For a start, you probably lose basically everyone very senior by that mechanism. But also you lose the troubleshooters.
- NekkoDroid 10mo ago
  > a crude stack ranking by lines of code is a pretty good metric for figuring out which (e.g.) 50% is the bottom. I can write you an efficient algorithm in 2 lines or an inefficient one in 50. The metric is about as useful as a doctor checking how often someone picked up a bottle to figure out how much they drink.
IcePic 11mo ago
If you are writing HelloWorld-webscale daemon from scratch, then counting +lines is probably "ok", but considering some existing large project like Linux (for instance), you would be well off keeping people who has managed to retain functionality while removing lines. Old projects have a tendency to get a lot of old cruft in which tends to stick (chestertons fence and all that) but someone clever enough to rewrite and remove old useless code is a net win for you, so I agree that if you fire some percentage on most-committed-lines you either had a very recent project from scratch or the measurement is stupid.
rsynnott 11mo ago
> Linus Torvalds recently appeared in a YouTube video hosted by the popular Linus Tech Tips (LTT) channel - run by a 'separate' Linus Sebastian ... Wait, does the author think that they are _actually_ the same person? If not, why the scare quotes?
constantcrying 11mo ago
Much respect to Torvalds, but all available evidence points to the fact that people that stupid (and some even dumber) do in fact work at tech companies.
mortsnort 11mo ago
Stupid and smart are stupid terms. There are many, many dimensions to intelligence and a lot of tech elite are too "stupid" to not recognize that being a really "smart" at coding doesn't mean they're really "smart" at everything. I'd guess Elon and Linus's character sheets are more closely aligned on the same dimensions of intelligence than Linus would like to admit.
lunias 11mo ago
Lines of code written, in isolation, is a strange metric to determine if someone keeps their job or not. I simply don't think this was the only metric. People love jumping to conclusions about divisive characters.
- Zigurd 10mo ago
  Sometimes there's nothing redemptive behind the appearance. It can be like looking for hidden beauty in the cybertruck.
andrewmcwatters 11mo ago
[dead]
clot27 11mo ago
based
GuB-42 11mo ago
The idea of firing people based on the number of lines of code they wrote makes sense if you think like a psychopath. On average, more productive developers write more lines of code. Of course, writing more lines of code doesn't mean you are actually more productive, but the trend is there. Elon Musk wanted to lay off 3/4 of a workforce of thousands because he thought 1/4 was enough, it is going to be disruptive no matter what and no matter how you chose, it is hard to predict the outcome. So, the general idea is to pick people randomly. But you want to bias that randomness towards keeping the best and laying off the rest, and so he picked up the number of lines of code as a criteria. It is semi-random and likely to be biased towards better productivity. It is thinking in terms of statistics, not individual people. He is likely to be the kind of person who would have no problem banning black people from communities if it wasn't illegal. Indeed, there is more crime where there are more black people, so to lower crime, eliminate black people. And it will probably work if you ignore the fact that they are people and not just points on a chart.
- rsynnott 11mo ago
  I mean, you also likely lose the troubleshooters. Many completely indispensable engineers don't write a lot of code; if a month-long investigation leads to a hundred lines of code being changed and a 10% cut in machine costs, well, is that not useful work? This would be particularly on Torvalds' mind, I assume; people who fix bugs in the Linux kernel (generally not a lot of lines of code) are generally more valuable to the project than people who contribute device drivers for obscure hardware (many lines, much productive, wow!)
  - GuB-42 10mo ago
    You can't lay of 3/4 of your workforce without removing indispensable people. And looking at the state of X/Twitter, I would say it shows... It is never obvious who is really important. There are the troubleshooters, as you say, and also the coordinators. They are not really management, not really developers, not really sales. No one really knows what their job is but remove them and things stop working. Laying off people may have unintended ripple effects too. The not-so-productive guy you let go may be very good friends with your best engineers, and he may take them with him as he gets hired by a competitor. The best employees are the ones who can quit the most easily, as they will have no problem finding another job. In fact, the reason they are working for a company may just be because they are comfortable in there and don't bother looking elsewhere. Shaking things up too much may just be the motivation they need to find something better.
cookiengineer 11mo ago
Tomorrow: Grokipedia entry about how Linus Torvalds is a rapist and baby child eater and also used the word pizza a lot of times in his email. You're doubting this now, but deep down you know I'll be right. Elon Musk wants to win the race not because he believes in AI, but because he wants to be in control of the perpetual present.
- dzhiurgis 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - cookiengineer 10mo ago
    Read about what's going on with lung cancer in memphis right now. Then about how many gas turbines are actually used 24/7 because of grok AI's data center :)
more_corn 11mo ago
He didn’t directly call Elon stupid. He said that a certain behavior is so stupid it indicates someone shouldn’t be at a tech company. The next step is causal inference. I’m sure Elon is familiar with the nuances of slander laws after he baselessly accused a hero rescue worker of a terrible crime and then hid behind his lawyers.
- dzhiurgis 10mo ago
  > I’m sure Elon is familiar with the nuances of slander laws after he baselessly accused a hero rescue worker of a terrible crime and then hid behind his lawyers. Funny how people remember this. Hero rescue worker he was not. He just was one of the hundreds divers in the area, while total 10,000 people were involved ("The rescue effort involved as many as 10,000 people, including more than 100 divers, scores of rescue workers, representatives from about 100 governmental agencies, 900 police officers and 2,000 soldiers." [0]). There were teams from 11 countries, Musk included. No one was asked out as per his made-up story during interview. Essentially he was slandering Musk... 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tham_Luang_cave_rescue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tham_Luang_cave_rescue
  - flykespice 10mo ago
    It doesn't makes him less a hero rescuer if many others were still involved, in fact, every diver who volunteered on the rescue effort is a hero on my book. > There were teams from 11 countries, Musk included. What did Musk help exactly, other than coming up with an impractical solution, then calling the hero rescuer a "pedo guy" after getting his big ego bruised?
    - dzhiurgis 10mo ago
      What did remaining 10k people help exactly? Ego's has been bruised for sure. Fact is pedo guy started this first, got called out, tried to sue and lost.
randykblack 10mo ago
40 Million lines of code in Linux kernel because they want to hide NSA backdoor from you

79 points by bundie 11mo ago

For all the criticism about the Twitter downsizing they have managed to keep the service running on a much smaller staff count.

spiderfarmer 11mo ago
Smaller staff and smaller user base.
- Zigurd 11mo ago
  Smaller ad customer base, too, and qualitatively less demanding.
- red-iron-pine 11mo ago
  if bots count as user base they're thriving
- oskarkk 11mo ago
  How much smaller user base? Looking at some recent data, which may not be accurate (but they're required to publish user numbers in the EU at least), it looks like the user base may be only 0-20% smaller compared to 2022. https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/social-media-news/x-traffic-peak-deactivations/ https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/social-media-news/x... https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-formerly-twitter-continues-to-lose-eu-users/746539/ https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-formerly-twitter-con... https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/threads-is-nearing-xs-daily-app-users-new-data-shows/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/threads-is-nearing-xs-dail... https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/
Craighead 11mo ago
[dead]
array_key_first 11mo ago
Running is a very low bar, you could theoretically fire everyone except operations and keep it running. But software and networks rot. Twitter has been rotting, it's no secret. It pretty much sucks major balls.

nephihaha 11mo ago

Musk is not as intelligent as he claims to be. He is happy to take the credit for others' work.

Suzuran 11mo ago
That's just what management does.
beardyw 11mo ago
> Musk is not as intelligent as he claims to be. It is a characteristic of those who claim to be intelligent.
Zigurd 11mo ago
If only it stopped at taking credit. That's not half as ego gratifying as stamping your vision of the future <cough>cybertruck</cough> on the roads where monstrosities with deadly edges assault our eyes.
- nephihaha 11mo ago
  We haven't got those cybertrucks over here yet, but yes, they are extremely ugly.
  - mrlonglong 10mo ago
    The Cybertruck is banned in the UK.Thankfully.

damnitbuilds 11mo ago

Like many people on both political extremes, Linus Torvalds confuses people who disagree with him with people who are stupid. Elon Musk is the best engineering manager this century. And a dickhead. Edit: Just re-read the story. Going by the quote there, the interviewer lied about what Musk did and the story lies about what Torvalds actually said about him.

spiderfarmer 11mo ago
“The richest” !== “The best”.
- damnitbuilds 11mo ago
  Okay, to be explicit: The best engineering manager in terms of getting things done. I have read that Musk was a complete cunt to the people working for him, long before he took over Twitter.
  - rsynnott 11mo ago
    > The best engineering manager in terms of getting things done. Beyond the joke truck thing, his car company hasn't released a new car in almost seven years. Twitter doesn't appear to have done much beyond release a few previously gated features (longer tweets, tweet editing, and the birdwatch/community notes thing were all things they were previously testing) since acquisition. Like, I dunno, I'm not seeing it.
    - damnitbuilds 10mo ago
      Erm, heard of Spacex ? Twitter sacked a large %age of staff and kept going fine. The Cybertruck failed because of marketing, not engineering, and I think we can assume Tesla will bring out some new products soon.
      - rsynnott 10mo ago
        > Erm, heard of Spacex ? Yes; they have yet to have a proper orbital launch with their new product; it's substantially behind schedule. The best engineering manager in terms of getting things done could surely do better. > Twitter sacked a large %age of staff and kept going fine. I mean, I'd hope "the best engineering manager in terms of getting things done" would add up to more than "the service hasn't substantially changed in three years, except in that it is rather more unreliable and that the spam prevention, never wonderful, seems to have broken down entirely". That seems extremely unambitious. Wasn't it meant to be "the everything app" by now? > The Cybertruck failed because of marketing, not engineering Fundamentally it failed because it was ill-conceived, but it also had fairly severe quality and design defects. No amount of _marketing_ would have saved it. Again, I'm just not seeing anything that makes me think "bestest engineering manager ever". Actually, I see no reason to think that he has any recent experience as any sort of engineering manager _at all_; he appears to spend most of his time spouting nonsense on Twitter and failing at ill-conceived joint ventures with Donald Trump. Neither of these are generally considered to be part of the core skill set for engineering managers.

throw310822 11mo ago

"How many lines of code did you write in the past <timespan>" is not a good metric but replaced with a more generic "what did you actually _produce_ recently" I can understand the spirit.

onetokeoverthe 11mo ago

[dead]

mbac32768 11mo ago

I'm impressed Torvalds managed to not know what he was referring to (the Twitter firings). The missing context whenever this comes up is the fact that it was a surprise one off. If developers have no idea they're going to be graded by lines of code at some random future date that's a much different situation than saying you're going to give bonuses away every month based on how many lines of code were written. Everyone knows the second is bad, it'll be gamed massively. The first one could be useful though. And yes doing it as a one off is still problematic and you can think of all kinds of exceptions, but if you think the organization is full of dead weight in general and overhired massively, a crude stack ranking by lines of code is a pretty good metric for figuring out which (e.g.) 50% is the bottom.

red-iron-pine 11mo ago
Torvalds talking out of his ass? impossible
rsynnott 11mo ago
> I'm impressed Torvalds managed to not know what he was referring to (the Twitter firings). I mean, naughty old Mr Car didn't _invent_ this nonsense; IBM was fairly notorious for it in the 80s, say. He's probably the most prominent recent example. > The first one could be useful though. How? > a crude stack ranking by lines of code is a pretty good metric for figuring out which (e.g.) 50% is the bottom. No. It's really not. For a start, you probably lose basically everyone very senior by that mechanism. But also you lose the troubleshooters.
NekkoDroid 10mo ago
> a crude stack ranking by lines of code is a pretty good metric for figuring out which (e.g.) 50% is the bottom. I can write you an efficient algorithm in 2 lines or an inefficient one in 50. The metric is about as useful as a doctor checking how often someone picked up a bottle to figure out how much they drink.

IcePic 11mo ago

If you are writing HelloWorld-webscale daemon from scratch, then counting +lines is probably "ok", but considering some existing large project like Linux (for instance), you would be well off keeping people who has managed to retain functionality while removing lines. Old projects have a tendency to get a lot of old cruft in which tends to stick (chestertons fence and all that) but someone clever enough to rewrite and remove old useless code is a net win for you, so I agree that if you fire some percentage on most-committed-lines you either had a very recent project from scratch or the measurement is stupid.

rsynnott 11mo ago

> Linus Torvalds recently appeared in a YouTube video hosted by the popular Linus Tech Tips (LTT) channel - run by a 'separate' Linus Sebastian ... Wait, does the author think that they are _actually_ the same person? If not, why the scare quotes?

constantcrying 11mo ago

Much respect to Torvalds, but all available evidence points to the fact that people that stupid (and some even dumber) do in fact work at tech companies.

mortsnort 11mo ago

Stupid and smart are stupid terms. There are many, many dimensions to intelligence and a lot of tech elite are too "stupid" to not recognize that being a really "smart" at coding doesn't mean they're really "smart" at everything. I'd guess Elon and Linus's character sheets are more closely aligned on the same dimensions of intelligence than Linus would like to admit.

lunias 11mo ago

Lines of code written, in isolation, is a strange metric to determine if someone keeps their job or not. I simply don't think this was the only metric. People love jumping to conclusions about divisive characters.

Zigurd 10mo ago
Sometimes there's nothing redemptive behind the appearance. It can be like looking for hidden beauty in the cybertruck.

andrewmcwatters 11mo ago

[dead]

clot27 11mo ago

based

GuB-42 11mo ago

The idea of firing people based on the number of lines of code they wrote makes sense if you think like a psychopath. On average, more productive developers write more lines of code. Of course, writing more lines of code doesn't mean you are actually more productive, but the trend is there. Elon Musk wanted to lay off 3/4 of a workforce of thousands because he thought 1/4 was enough, it is going to be disruptive no matter what and no matter how you chose, it is hard to predict the outcome. So, the general idea is to pick people randomly. But you want to bias that randomness towards keeping the best and laying off the rest, and so he picked up the number of lines of code as a criteria. It is semi-random and likely to be biased towards better productivity. It is thinking in terms of statistics, not individual people. He is likely to be the kind of person who would have no problem banning black people from communities if it wasn't illegal. Indeed, there is more crime where there are more black people, so to lower crime, eliminate black people. And it will probably work if you ignore the fact that they are people and not just points on a chart.

rsynnott 11mo ago
I mean, you also likely lose the troubleshooters. Many completely indispensable engineers don't write a lot of code; if a month-long investigation leads to a hundred lines of code being changed and a 10% cut in machine costs, well, is that not useful work? This would be particularly on Torvalds' mind, I assume; people who fix bugs in the Linux kernel (generally not a lot of lines of code) are generally more valuable to the project than people who contribute device drivers for obscure hardware (many lines, much productive, wow!)
- GuB-42 10mo ago
  You can't lay of 3/4 of your workforce without removing indispensable people. And looking at the state of X/Twitter, I would say it shows... It is never obvious who is really important. There are the troubleshooters, as you say, and also the coordinators. They are not really management, not really developers, not really sales. No one really knows what their job is but remove them and things stop working. Laying off people may have unintended ripple effects too. The not-so-productive guy you let go may be very good friends with your best engineers, and he may take them with him as he gets hired by a competitor. The best employees are the ones who can quit the most easily, as they will have no problem finding another job. In fact, the reason they are working for a company may just be because they are comfortable in there and don't bother looking elsewhere. Shaking things up too much may just be the motivation they need to find something better.

cookiengineer 11mo ago

Tomorrow: Grokipedia entry about how Linus Torvalds is a rapist and baby child eater and also used the word pizza a lot of times in his email. You're doubting this now, but deep down you know I'll be right. Elon Musk wants to win the race not because he believes in AI, but because he wants to be in control of the perpetual present.

dzhiurgis 10mo ago
[flagged]
- cookiengineer 10mo ago
  Read about what's going on with lung cancer in memphis right now. Then about how many gas turbines are actually used 24/7 because of grok AI's data center :)

more_corn 11mo ago

He didn’t directly call Elon stupid. He said that a certain behavior is so stupid it indicates someone shouldn’t be at a tech company. The next step is causal inference. I’m sure Elon is familiar with the nuances of slander laws after he baselessly accused a hero rescue worker of a terrible crime and then hid behind his lawyers.

dzhiurgis 10mo ago
> I’m sure Elon is familiar with the nuances of slander laws after he baselessly accused a hero rescue worker of a terrible crime and then hid behind his lawyers. Funny how people remember this. Hero rescue worker he was not. He just was one of the hundreds divers in the area, while total 10,000 people were involved ("The rescue effort involved as many as 10,000 people, including more than 100 divers, scores of rescue workers, representatives from about 100 governmental agencies, 900 police officers and 2,000 soldiers." [0]). There were teams from 11 countries, Musk included. No one was asked out as per his made-up story during interview. Essentially he was slandering Musk... 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tham_Luang_cave_rescue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tham_Luang_cave_rescue
- flykespice 10mo ago
  It doesn't makes him less a hero rescuer if many others were still involved, in fact, every diver who volunteered on the rescue effort is a hero on my book. > There were teams from 11 countries, Musk included. What did Musk help exactly, other than coming up with an impractical solution, then calling the hero rescuer a "pedo guy" after getting his big ego bruised?
  - dzhiurgis 10mo ago
    What did remaining 10k people help exactly? Ego's has been bruised for sure. Fact is pedo guy started this first, got called out, tried to sue and lost.

randykblack 10mo ago

40 Million lines of code in Linux kernel because they want to hide NSA backdoor from you