isn't he the obnoxious poster that was on a one man mission to give the middle finger to any covid restrictions through the pandemic?
The ongoing Elon Twitter saga: "insert demographic" melts down
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Soldato
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Why are you even in this thread then?
Loads of companies are sacking staff. Peleton are sacking 4000 people, Alibaba are sacking 10,000, Credit Suisse are sacking 5000. It's happening everywhere, the economic headwinds are dictating it. Same with advertisers, they are all pulling back on the money being spent. This hyper-politicisation is getting nauseating
The global ad spending slowdown is real as online media platforms brace for downturn
Cutbacks aren't just a problem for publishers and broadcasters, which is normal during economic slumps. Online media owners are now starting to feel the crunch too.digiday.com
The staff thing might be a bit overblown, especially w.r.t the team actively ditched, could be a bit of a blow if teams they want to retain leave though.
The more damaging thing is the activist factor, they drove away advertisers before he even bought the thing. He might well be able to replace those or indeed have them come back once all the hype has settled down a bit but that's where a big chunk of the risk is coming from, that and the fact he's likely overpaid for this deal too (thus his attempts to get out of it).
Apparently he ranked number of lines of code committed in the last 12 months and anyone less than X got sacked. Makes sense tbh. Lots of devs on £200k/year doing naff all.
Probably firing everyone in non critical roles.
Just keeping the hamster, the guy to feed the hamster and 10 people to mute users that upset elon.
Oh and probably kept 100% of the legal department.
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All sorts of areas.
From what i've seen Musk has gutted amongst others:
Content moderation.
Accessibility (making sure that people with say vision problems can use it*), a group that was apparently quite small but still required specialists in IOS and Android as every time the phones update the accessability features involved also update and you need to keep current with it.
All sorts of engineering and maintance teams including people involved in making sure the hardware and software back ends are working.
Security (should be fun for a GDPR fine or two once).
Legal
Compliance
Basically every part of the workforce seems to have been gutted, with a special view to those (usually small) groups that did specialist jobs that might not seem important to someone who runs a car software firm, but are very important when your product is human eyes on adverts in dozens of different jurisdictions.
*Something I'm sure some idiot on here will call "being woke", but given the number of people with various disabilities who use the internet these days it's an increasingly large part of the user base.
I think we can all agree that the demise of Twitter would be a favour to humanity though.
So you'd keep someone who just wrote thousands of lines of poor, inefficient, buggy code that didn't actually do much, but sack someone whose job was to fix code and might have spent 90% of their time reading the code and finding the bugs then writing maybe a very small amount of code that then fixed a problem or prevented one (and then spent the time documenting both the cause of the problem, what the problem was, and how it was fixed so that the next time someone needs to change the code they have that information to speed things up)...
Good code should be concise and work, hopefully whilst being documented, bad code often isn't.
It's an incredibly stupid metric to decide who to fire, if your boiler is playing up who would you prefer to fix it, a guy who replaces pretty much every part of it over the course of a day, or the guy who comes in, spends a couple of hours looking at the problem and thinking about it before replacing a £3 sensor. (that the problem in both cases) I mean the first guy is obviously working so much more efficiently and harder because he's got most of a boiler in replaced parts by his feet, whilst the other guy only has one part to throw in the bin.
It also ignores the fact that depending on what you're trying to do and the code involved you might spend 75% of your time thinking and planning it, then writing what might be a very small amount before you test it to make sure it works and doesn't break anything, whilst someone else might be using code that requires more lines to do something that is technically far simpler but more verbose.
It's like ranking authors purely by the number of books they've published, a metric that would make Barbara Cartland the best, highest quality author because she published something like 700 books, whilst Tolkien only did around 20 books, and Dickens is obviously terrible as he only managed 15.
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I get this, but if jack all happens in the next few weeks - it was all waste.
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Soldato
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And there it is. dowie has finally come out with the "its the activists fault". Surprised its taken you this long to jump on the latest Elon talking point to be honest.
Soldato
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My feed's full of decent folk eg the poet Ian McMillan, Rev Richard Coles, Paul Heaton (Housemartins etc), Ricky Gervais*, a variety of lovely farming/crafts folk, some great curators of artwork I wouldn't have discovered otherwise, and of course at the moment lots of Ukraine-related accounts. The first sniff of gender junk, Brexit ping-pong, or pointless political bickering and folk get muted.
*May stretch some people's idea of "decent"
Except that for many of those things you don't notice them for months because that's how long it could take for things to start to fall apart.
For example you probably won't notice anything with the accessibility side of twitter until say Apple or Google change one of the API's and something breaks, meanwhile features and improvements won't be made.
You might not notice that firing the security team is bad until it comes out in a 6 months that someone has been abusing a bug in the code for ages but no one was there to take the bug report or investigate it.
You might not notice that there are legal issues until suddenly it's announced that Twitter is in trouble for not following a law in the EU or India because the teams that made sure Twitter was compliant with those laws has long since gone.
I saw a comment by a guy whose job (in other companies) is to try and improve reliability of the services point out that if Musk has gutted enough of the staff, even if nothing major goes wrong they could start to run into increasing problems in as little as a few months simply due to hardware failing and eating into the planned redundancy level of the hardware, or staff not having time to do preventative work because they're dealing with "urgent" issues.
Meanwhile the advertisers are already taking note of the loss of the content moderation team and noping out of placing new adverts on twitter because they've seen exactly what happens without enough content moderation on other services and they really don't want their adverts next to things like people talking about killing part of their customer base.
Okay fair, what time frame do you want to set?
He's definitely overpaid, he bought at the top of all the bubbliness. But you zoom out and have a 10/20 year time horizon, it'll be fine. But he'll be ****** off that he could have bought it for 30/40% less than what he paid no doubt. I really don't know how activists can drive companies away, some of these companies are totally tone deaf though, first sign of someone getting annoyed and they bow down to every whim. Give it a couple of years and it'll all be back to normal. It's a nice excuse to cut ad money though..."its the activists" rather than the more depressing "the world economy is going to be ****** for the next 2 years"
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Suspended
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Getting away from Twitter I was quite surprised to see just how hard he blags about his products/ideas. I had assumed due to his wealth that most things he attempts he succeeds at but it seems that is far from the case and he literally lies all the time about his products and what they can do and when they will be ready. He's like that Nikola trucks guy turned up to 11, blag product demonstrations galore combined with comically optimistic completion dates. Maybe that's a little harsh comparing him to Nikola trucks guy as Musk has actually produced products and SpaceX is undoubtedly cool but his sales pitches definitely raise eyebrows in the same way.
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This is interesting re: the blue checkmarks:
It's not from an Elon talking point though, there was a big thread on Twitter from the CEO of the non-profit org media matters literally detailing how an activist group called stop the deal scuppered pre-booked ad revenue:
But of course, if you're unaware of that then you'll just go for your mindless "latest Elon talking point" rebuttal. Again, try to be a bit more objective, you don't need to keep on viewing the world in such a polarised way, take sides on everything and jump on anything that sounds like it may have come from the bad side etc..
It's not from an Elon talking point though, there was a big thread on Twitter from the CEO of the non-profit org media matters literally detailing how an activist group called stop the deal scuppered pre-booked ad revenue:
But of course, if you're unaware of that then you'll just go for your mindless "latest Elon talking point" rebuttal. Again, try to be a bit more objective, you don't need to keep on viewing the world in such a polarised way, take sides on everything and jump on anything that sounds like it may have come from the bad side etc..
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