I mean, Twitter has hardly innovated, it became a big tech company because it was in the right place at the right time, they haven't really done much to the platform or improved it in any way, what are those people doing? I can at least point to things Facebook has done that may or may not have worked, Twitter seems pretty stagnant.
The ongoing Elon Twitter saga: "insert demographic" melts down
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I mean, Twitter has hardly innovated, it became a big tech company because it was in the right place at the right time, they haven't really done much to the platform or improved it in any way, what are those people doing? I can at least point to things Facebook has done that may or may not have worked, Twitter seems pretty stagnant.
Soldato
You're 100 percent right. I wonder myself, other than moderation, wtf are the staff at these companies doing. The service kind ofnl runs itself.
Google is a prime example of a company that didn't rest on its laurels and its doing well because of that.
Twitter has rest on its laurels for far too long.
This is true, however the trouble Elon has is that he's Elon musked twitter. He hasn't come in with any decency, he's trolled left leaning politicians while ignore right leaning that are negative to him. He's spread ct nonsense. He's made twitter not neutral politically any more (has a major social media company ever publically had its ceo say how people should vote on the eve of an election). He's fired half the staff then asked some to come back. Then he takes actions that'll lead to more just leaving any way. He put in an offer so high and stupid he tried to pull out, but then couldn't so forced to buy twitter. I could go on.
And All done in 2 weeks.
This isn't how you should run a company.
Soldato
You know that plenty of mega rich and successful people have made huge mistakes in business and wrecked a company or product? When tech journalists, finance journalist and lawyers are questioning what the hell he is doing then there is a chance he is out of his depth here and could be in real trouble. He is telling his employees he doesn't know how much run rate the company has and bankruptcy isn't out of the question. Imagine what his employees are thinking, they are probably thinking they should be looking for new jobs. I doubt advertisers are hearing that and thinking paying up front for ads right now is a a good idea if the company might hit the wall.
Soldato
The fact that the chief privacy officer, chief information security officer and chief compliance officer all quit last night rather than signing off on changes because they fear the FTC is going to be all over Twitter and them, tells you he might not have considered everything. This is the man who said on Twitter he was taking Tesla private when he wasn't and got nailed by the SEC for it.
You'd do well to find any company that can turn over that amount of staff and be better off for it from an operational perspective.
Never mind when the figurehead is trashing the company, the better people will be the first to leave.
Also, firing or letting go and then re-hiring huge amounts of high paid roles is extremely expensive. Not great as a cost cutting exercise.
Never mind when the figurehead is trashing the company, the better people will be the first to leave.
Also, firing or letting go and then re-hiring huge amounts of high paid roles is extremely expensive. Not great as a cost cutting exercise.
Soldato
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If I had to guess what they've been working on it was trying to automate the ridiculous churn that comes from moderating the disgusting vices of millions of people. Then again Jack seems like he didn't really want Twitter anymore but wanted to maintain the workforce as much as the company could allow so maybe it was a bit like Valve with it's horizontal-ish structure where people generally did what they wanted.
You could say the same about Tesla in the EV industry. Essentially they make really ugly cars with a child's idea of design features, they just happened to get there first.
Now that the people who know how to make cars have started taking EV seriously, I wonder how long Tesla will stay relevant.
And how do you attract the best when they can see how you're running the place and treating your current staff...
Indeed, just think a bit more than the $44b could have purchase General Motors, a real asset.
Twitter has made a lost most years and it's best year profit was around $1.5b, now it's losing add revenue and has a massive multi $m settlement bill for all the sacked people.
He's taken on a lot for debt as it wasn't all paid via tesla share sell off. The Interest alone is around $1b a year. The $8 a month charge isn't gonna touch the sides.
Twitter has always been a **** show, left wing bias will now be replased with right win bias and/or real trending rather than some staffs personal preferences which seems to have been admitted to on the Japanese twitter.
Commissario
Most of what I'm saying is fairly common sense and looking at what experts, lawyers and people working in twitter and other companies have been saying...
I'm not that smart, and I'm certainly not rich, but I've spent much of the last 30 years reading about the tech world and being at times a bit too interested in how/why things failed, including companies, and so much of what is coming out of Twitter is classic failure in the making (and likely legal action incoming).
For example going in and telling managers they have to explain what someone does and why they should be kept on, in a single sentence for each then sacking half your workforce within days is not a great idea, especially for a company where many of the jobs won't be simple to describe (as Musk was finding out within hours).
Getting rid of people like your legal team is a really good way for a company to get into trouble, especially if you're running operations in multiple jurisdictions (even just within the US there are employment laws that vary by state for example).
Getting rid of most of the companies "communications team"/PR is a great way to lose the ability to communicate/understand what is going on in specific areas outside the company, especially if as has apparently happened at Twitter they've got rid of most of those that were fluent in multiple languages, meaning they now apparently have no one whose job is to act as the interface between the company and various non English companies/governments in major markets, doing the same for the marketing team when you already have advertisers worrying about your policies is a great way to lose that income (as Musk has found).
For example Musk seems to think only prolific programmers who do a lot of lines of code are any good and should thus be able to other things, not seeming to understand for example you can be the best coder in the world, but if no one else can understand/follow your code there is going to be a huge problem later on down the road. Apparently Musk got rid of most of the "Technical writers" who won't write much if any code, but whose job is to document the systems and code so that when someone needs to make a change they can look back understand what it might do*.
Or the fact he's making changes that have seen the people whose job it is to ensure the company is acting in a legal manner leave rather than sign their names to documents is normally a huge red flag, and instead the company is now relying on staff who don't specialise in the law/compliance sign off on their own work and one of the first questions asked by a regulator will be "and who is in charge of making sure what you were doing complied with the law, regulations, and that court order from years ago?").
The fact he's the richest person in the world is almost certainly a large part of his problem, unless you are very careful and have the mindset to avoid it happening you can quite easily end up surrounded by people who'll always tell you how well you're doing and everyone else is wrong. IIRC Musk went through several sets of lawyers in his Twitter purchase, almost certainly because they were giving him correct legal advice and he didn't like that advice.
*tech writers are the people who can often end up having saved a company from a major issue by making sure that some obscure change was properly documented in a way that even if everyone involved in that change has left/been hit by a truck, someone can understand what that change was for, why it was done, why it was done in a specific way, how it affects everything else, and what problems a change might cause. A day spent writing such a document can save spending a far more time writing, then rewriting code when you find your initial "easy" fix doesn't work, or worse breaks something that is subtly different on the production system because for example it doesn't scale up how you expected (I used to chat to a tech writer who worked in Aus and learned a fair bit both about what the job was, and how to write instructions better/trouble shooting notes etc better, apparently most people who are familiar with something tend to forget steps in the process when writing it down for others).
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Commissario
Yarp
When you have a rep for laying off huge numbers of staff without proper warning, and without even bothering to understand what they did that's not something to encourage good people to sign up, and when you've got a rep for acting impulsively and on a whim changing working conditions in a significant way just because you can, is a way to discourage those that might have taken the job just for the money or because the working conditions fit well with their non work life.
Soldato
Seems to be going well for elon.
I doubt again that you could find an expert in any field who would claim this strategy is a good one.
HR/Recruitment/On boarding teams will take the hit first, only very poor companies are set up to turn over staff in that volume.
Its a massive bottleneck he's got to resolve if he keeps on this way.
Yup
I'm guessing they understand the legal risks for what is going on and have been ignored by Musk and don't want to have their names anywhere near what is likely to happen given that Musk seems to think it's hilarious that people are using his new worthless check mark to impersonate major (living) people and corporations with money and sharp lawyers, not to mention the potential criminal and regulatory issues.
I suspect they've made very sure to leave written reasons for why they're leaving and kept copies/sent copies of those reasons to their own lawyers to protect themselves, and are now getting whilst their reputations are still intact.
Who wants to start the betting on when the first GDPR or similar actions start to take place?
Thing is after all the compliance heads have walked out what kind of people are going to take or be given those jobs next.
I've seen it before where people supposedly enforcing compliance don't actually have any power and are forced to rubber stamp whatever the boss wants done.
Absolutely insane if a company the size of twitter is going to be run like that.
Forget his backers (plenty of them are die-hard Elon-loving VC types etc..) it's his bankers I'd be quite amused to see right now... they could have offloaded all the debt on their books by now if he hadn't pulled all those shenanigans with the court case/trying to back out and potentially get a lower price etc. instead they're now seeing comments like this:
And they're now supposed to organise a sale, pitch the debt to investors etc.. they're going to be absolutely fuming!
It's not like they're all equal, he's getting rid of a lot of the more periphery stuff as part of this (though still slimming down the rest too) - he doesn't believe in PR, he's not exactly going to prioritize the accessibility team or the team responsible for the trending topics and explore tab etc.. so they've been axed. He wants the top engineers though and there is an obvious issue in that when you sack a load of people you also get the side effect of others you perhaps would like to retain deciding to quit... stuff like scrapping working from home isn't exactly helping there either!
Tech firms can definitely survive getting rid of a chunk of people, that isn't the issue, nor is all the nitpicking over the latest product changes and people pointing out the obvious pros/cons as if no one at Twitter has ever considered those things. He can do product, he's great at doing product as seen with his other ventures.
The big issue though is the ad revenue... that's what's needed to keep it all afloat in the long term (especially with additional debt) and that's what's taken a hit so far.. his other ventures haven't needed to rely on ads, innovating and shipping good products is what counted in his other ventures. In this case it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things if he reduces the visibility of spam, creates neat features etc.. his grand plans for a new WeChat etc.. can all come falling down if he doesn't get that ad revenue flowing again. He's not been too reckless, he hasn't come in and just unleashed Donald Trump and a bunch of other accounts right away, he's got to be mindful of the activists at the moment and also demonstrate that he's going to be responsible with the platform he probably needs to be told to tone down some of his nonsense a bit on his own account if someone close to him is feeling brave enough to have a word, they likely don't have any PR types left but if there is a head of sales or account management currently struggling with advertisers then they might as well turn around to him and tell it like it is - "stop being a douche on the timeline Elon, we can sell to these people again but you need to wind it in a bit" because he's just exacerbating an issue they've had related to fears about him since before he even took over now.
So the rules are, state clearly that you're a parody account or get banned forever.
www.dailydot.com
Actually you can state you're a parody account all you want. The rules don't mean spit.
It took a 19-year-old with $8 10 minutes to blow up Elon Musk's new blue check scheme
It didn't take long to show the whole thing was a farce.
www.dailydot.com
Actually you can state you're a parody account all you want. The rules don't mean spit.
Soldato
I'm not on Twitter and don't really want to be however my mate is a journalist with 300k followers so kind of needs to be, hes been sending me screenshots today of parody accounts with a blue check. Some really funny stuff. Probably shouldn't post them on here but some great stuff from people pretending to be George Bush and Rudy Giuliani. It's chaos.
He's a very left leaning journo so obviously hates Musk but it certainly seems like he doesn't know what he's doing and he makes a good point to me, assume a terrorist attack, a school shooter or natural disaster. Then you have a group of loser trolls on a message board who have $8 to spare pretending to be officials, police or whatever giving out terrible advice to concerned and worried citizens. What happens then?
To the uneducated and uninitiated (like me) it looks like a complete and total self sabotage. Couldn't really care if it went down and took Musks entire businesses with it.
He's a very left leaning journo so obviously hates Musk but it certainly seems like he doesn't know what he's doing and he makes a good point to me, assume a terrorist attack, a school shooter or natural disaster. Then you have a group of loser trolls on a message board who have $8 to spare pretending to be officials, police or whatever giving out terrible advice to concerned and worried citizens. What happens then?
To the uneducated and uninitiated (like me) it looks like a complete and total self sabotage. Couldn't really care if it went down and took Musks entire businesses with it.
I thought the person tweeting in imitation of a pharmaceutical company that insulin was now free was an excellent use of $8.
We know scummy things happen for money and now the company is forced to clear it up and clarify that no, it's still cripplingly expensive for americans who need it.
We know scummy things happen for money and now the company is forced to clear it up and clarify that no, it's still cripplingly expensive for americans who need it.
Commissario
From what I can tell some of those accounts imitating the likes of the pharma company, nintendo etc are still up 12+ hours later, because it seems no one at twitter is looking for them, and no one at twitter can be contacted by the company reps including those that would book advertising etc to get it removed.
It seems almost like another example of very much expected concequncies of getting rid of huge numbers of staff whose job was to deal with that sort of thing, whilst making massive changes that any idiot could tell would result in this sort of nonsense.
I saw one lawyer point out that because Musk charges for the verified mark there is a good chance that Twitter won't have the normal section 230 protections (something a specialist lawyer such as the ones he got rid off could have pointed out).
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