Musk warns twitter may have to declare bankruptcy

[Taf the Ghost]

As a long time Twitter watcher, I do find this all funny. Elon might be going about it with his own personal brand approach, but it's all roughly in line with what's necessary. Twitter probably got hit worst by the VC Disease: a company get that stuck with hires that serve business relationships/political purposes and not actually making the company work. The problem is once those hires reach a critical mass, they eventually start to set the culture. And since the company became the Intelligence Agencies play toy & data collection hub in 2011, it's been a monumental mess. There's a reason the place kept making very stupid decisions at almost every turn, while making sure to ban anyone attempting to report *minor abuse* content. (Or going to court to defend leaving it up!) 

 

Twitter was worth probably closer to 5x revenue, around 25 Billion, though Elon was buying in a still overvalued market. The problem he ran into is once he actually dove deep into the numbers, he found out pretty quick how bad the bot problem is for the Monthly Active User numbers. They found ways to keep them in their numbers for the Ad Sales, even if it was known in that industry that Twitter RoI was horrible. (Paying an influencer to Tweet was far more valuable than paying Twitter.) If it wasn't for Modi's popularity, Twitter might have to actually changed course.

The one thing that did catch me off guard is that Twitter employees were actually taking a skim for verification. I knew about the Instagram Fake Notoriety stuff/agents, but I hadn't realized how wide spread the just paying for verification was. I would expect something like that to happen, yes, but I didn't expect it to be a widespread side hustle.

Like most tech companies, realistically the actual number of important employees is very small. For Twitter is probably 500-700, and you need about 1000 permanent staff around that. Unless they suddenly have their own Chip Design staff we didn't know about.

[wanderingfool2]

23 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

Like most tech companies, realistically the actual number of important employees is very small. For Twitter is probably 500-700, and you need about 1000 permanent staff around that. Unless they suddenly have their own Chip Design staff we didn't know about.

Well seems like one of the potential goals (but of course goals change) is becoming a payment processing place as well (honestly, I'm thinking he is hoping to turn it into like WeChat eventually).

 

2 hours ago, wseaton said:

 I frankly don't get why any upright mammal with an opposable thumb would give a holy flip about Twitter. The fact remains a lot of people are losing their jobs because Musk has an ideological grudge against c-suite political leanings in tech companies. 

Twitter can have it's place in consuming media, and staying up to day with certain things (like I used it to figure out that there was a shooting nearby my place before it was aired on news channels the day after).  In all fairness in regards to the "grudge", he donated the other way earlier...the "grudge" only began happening when it there was notions of taxing capital gains prior to those gains being realized...and when policies changed to specifically exclude Tesla due to not unionizing (and the support of an Union that was literally corrupt).

 

  

4 hours ago, Quackers101 said:

we might soon see more workplace situations around twitter, as musk stats about "work more or you are fired".

Completly neglecting workers and only want to fix his own failure "as quick as possible".

 

To the completely unprofessional behavior we have seen, as with previous drama around elon musk, when tesla and maybe spaceX had to force rules when elon was going wild. From the "let it sink in" memes when he bought and fired "accidently" a lot of twitter staff, and the chaos this leads to or lawsuits that could happen.

He's done similar things with Tesla and SpaceX.  It's not about "fixing his own failure" but about changing the workplace culture.  It's actually a pretty smart plan overall, as it's going to drastically change the workplace culture from people who are just there to clock in and out to people who are willing to invest time in hopes of making a better product.  Those who stay, I am pretty sure will also get justly rewarded (likely stock options).

 

Sadly there are only a few ways to fix workplace culture, and the quickest way is the way Musk is doing it.

 

Speaking on this, George Hotz is likely going to be working at Twitter for 12 weeks...which should be interesting to say the least.

 

 

[Taf the Ghost]

@wanderingfool2Fairly certain Musk actually has mentioned WeChat. Irony of course is that Jack left to found Square.

[Needfuldoer]

21 hours ago, Kisai said:

The reason billionaires siphon the money out to another business they own, the bankrupt the company to have the debts "reorganized" but usually by that time they sell the company. Vulture Capital.

Just look at what's been happening to Sears/Kmart over the last 20 years.

 

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

Like the comparison to Steve Jobs is somewhat apt. Steve Jobs basically upset the status Quo at Apple when he "came back", but he was the one saving the company and decided which products they shouldn't be in anymore. Jobs was also known for being a bit ... uh... personally involved in staff being let go from what I understand, but I don't feel like re-reading the book on him to fact check it.

Steve Jobs was as impulsive as he was charismatic. He had a knack for predicting what people would want, and he probably could've sold Frigidaires to penguins if he tried. Elon's just impulsive, and his reality distortion field only affects himself.

[HenrySalayne]

47 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

It's actually a pretty smart plan overall, as it's going to drastically change the workplace culture from people who are just there to clock in and out to people who are willing to invest time in hopes of making a better product. 

Are you seriously describing a call to fanaticism "smart"? I'm sorry, but it seems like you're intertwined in Elon's cult of personality.

"I don't need people working at Twitter, I need people dying for Twitter!" - 2022, Elon Musk, probably

 

[Quackers101]

Seems like maybe more of the top people of twitter are resigning and elon trying to close down, or so it seems like it could go.

Still very unsure what elon really wants to do currently, some desperation.

[mr moose]

2 hours ago, Quackers101 said:

Seems like maybe more of the top people of twitter are resigning and elon trying to close down, or so it seems like it could go.

Still very unsure what elon really wants to do currently, some desperation.

Sounds like he's dealing with ideologies, the best thing to do with shit staff and management that has gone off the rails is to lock them out or fire them.  Once cancerous ideologies get a hold of the quorum in any organization it is a death sentence for that organization and the only way to save it is to cut out the cancer and hope you get it all.

 

 

[HenrySalayne]

10 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Sounds like he's dealing with ideologies, the best thing to do with shit staff and management that has gone off the rails is to lock them out or fire them.  Once cancerous ideologies get a hold of the quorum in any organization it is a death sentence for that organization and the only way to save it is to cut out the cancer and hope you get it all.

???

Since when is not being a corporate slave an ideology? How dire is this time that we succumb to blaming people for wanting a work-life balance?

It's long been proven that people are more productive and work safer if they don't work long hours. The four-day workweek keeps or even improves productivity.

[mr moose]

2 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

???

Since when is not being a corporate slave an ideology? How dire is this time that we succumb to blaming people for wanting a work-life balance?

It's long been proven that people are more productive and work safer if they don't work long hours. The four-day workweek keeps or even improves productivity.

 

You are confusing too many things.  No one said anything about work life balance or being a corporate slave.  Do you know what an ideology is?  It is a doctrine or belief that can and does motivate people to do things to ensure specific outcomes.

 

Wanting a good work/life balance is not an ideology.

 

 

 

 

[Needfuldoer]

10 minutes ago, mr moose said:

No one said anything about work life balance or being a corporate slave.

 

 

Quote

Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.

Sources:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/16/elon-musk-demands-twitter-staff-commit-to-long-hours-or-leave.html
https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-gives-twitter-staff-an-ultimatum-work-long-hours-at-high-intensity-or-leave-11668608923
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63648505

[mr moose]

14 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

 

 

Sources:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/16/elon-musk-demands-twitter-staff-commit-to-long-hours-or-leave.html
https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-gives-twitter-staff-an-ultimatum-work-long-hours-at-high-intensity-or-leave-11668608923
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63648505

and?  Long hours in my last full time job was 9 a day and 5 on the weekend. not only does everyone have a different concept of "long", but as my response clearly indicated, it sounds to me like he is simply dealing with ideologies. My response did not say people should be corporate slaves.  

 

Also, you don't think it's weird that depending on which news report you read the email says different things?

 

BBC says the email contains a reminder not discuss this on social media while the CNBC report that claims to have the full email does not have that bit included.  WSJ is behind a paywall.   I wonder what else is missing.

 

 

[RealBACONATOR2]

Hope everyone can chill, Twitter isn't going away, worst case is that Elon sells it to some other rich asshole at a loss. It's not like the website will turn off.

[RealBACONATOR2]

4 hours ago, mr moose said:

Sounds like he's dealing with ideologies, the best thing to do with shit staff and management that has gone off the rails is to lock them out or fire them.  Once cancerous ideologies get a hold of the quorum in any organization it is a death sentence for that organization and the only way to save it is to cut out the cancer and hope you get it all.

 

 

What a ridiculous statement. From a management perspective, Elon has fired or lost a TON of critical staff, and he's not about to learn how to maintain servers himself. His own toxic ideology lost significant manpower from the company he runs, and the lights may not stay on. Every company has a culture to create so that people have a healthy and productive environment. Elon has failed to create a productive environment by acting like a child throwing a fit. It's an incredibly competitive job market right now, and for some reason Musk must have thought his employees had nowhere else to go when.... they do. lol.

[solado]

15 minutes ago, RealBACONATOR2 said:

Hope everyone can chill, Twitter isn't going away,

I won't chill knowing that twitter isn't going away, I NEED it to go away before I can chill.

 

The website is a cess pool of mental illness.

[Donut417]

42 minutes ago, solado said:

The website is a cess pool of mental illness.

The internet is a cess pool of mental illness. There are worst sites than Twitter. Maybe you should check out /b over at 4chan, now that’s the cess pool of cess pools. 

[solado]

17 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

The internet is a cess pool of mental illness. There are worst sites than Twitter. Maybe you should check out /b over at 4chan, now that’s the cess pool of cess pools. 

Yeah but cleansing one cess pool even if A is worse than B isn't a bad thing for society as a whole.

[Majinhoju]

https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-payroll-finance-department-resigns-en-masse-under-elon-musk-2022-11

 

Wow, he's doing a fantastic job cosplaying as a social media ceo.

[wanderingfool2]

8 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

Are you seriously describing a call to fanaticism "smart"? I'm sorry, but it seems like you're intertwined in Elon's cult of personality.

"I don't need people working at Twitter, I need people dying for Twitter!" - 2022, Elon Musk, probably

 

You obviously haven't seen a company where there is a bad workplace culture.  I notice you went silent after claiming I had no idea of finance or economics after I quoted the source (which the article implied the experts used...despite them ignoring that about half the loan was bridge financing, implying they assume a 17% interest rate without a source)

 

How would you supposedly fix a bad workplace culture, especially one where it's overstaffed?  And don't try even claiming it's overstaffed.  The amount of software engineers outnumber per $ revenue made of pretty much every other major company.  Their expenses for revenue are ridiculous given the amount of nature of the business they are trying to run.  That's a glaring issue.

 

I've seen a workplace culture where efficiency ruled (and those "long hours"/"goals" came into play).  I've also seen what happens when the company merges and the workplace culture changed to the here's your minimum quota.  Productivity dropped, higher wages were demanded, and profits became loses.

 

Telling people it's going to be a lot of long hours ahead to change the platform is just good business sense in that you only keep people around that are passionate about the job or agree in the vision they see.  It's also something that Musk does himself, working as long as the teams are working.  Is it stressful?  Sometimes, do you get a lot accomplished?  Yes.  Do you additional time off once things settle down?  Probably.  Do you get compensated for when you are working more?  Yes

 

To put it more bluntly as an example.  Imagine if you are working 9 to 5 as a bus driver.  At 4:30 you come across heavy traffic due to an accident blocking the bridge.  An hour passes, and finally get moving again.  At the next bus stop you pull over, and tell everyone your shift ended and to get on the next bus, instead of finishing off the loop which is about another 30 minutes. [Actual real life example].

 

What you are is the type of person who claims Linus is stupid for not going with a commercial MSP to build out a proper system for the vault or even worse telling Linus to do cloud storage as a solution, without understanding the business aspect of doing it.

 

5 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

Since when is not being a corporate slave an ideology? How dire is this time that we succumb to blaming people for wanting a work-life balance?

It's long been proven that people are more productive and work safer if they don't work long hours. The four-day workweek keeps or even improves productivity.

Who said anything that you had to be a corporate slave?  It's about finding people who have a passion for the work, where they are willing to spend extra hours working when needed.  When I was working on an inhouse program before, I genuinely was happy doing so and as a result (despite being salaried, thus no overtime), I sometimes worked an extra hour - hour and a half extra so that I could finish off what I was working on.  It didn't bother me in the slightest because I was enjoying what I was doing, and I knew if I stopped then the next morning I would have to take at least half an hour extra to get back into the groove I was in (as the details wouldn't be fresh in my mind).  The other people in the IT department were all the same way.  We didn't mind staying extra time when it meant finishing something off what we were working on (and occasionally we would also jump in to help each other finish up a project at the end of the day).

 

The above mentality doesn't work if you have people who are 9-5 work to rule type of people.  Would some people hate working longer?  Yea, but we weren't those types of people.  We have a perfectly good work-life balance, my supervisor even had a full month off work before after a particular difficult project.  Work-life balance can be achieved.  To put what I heard from a friend who is now a millionaire, the western culture breeds the give me more while I do less attitude.

 

Also, 4 day workweeks wiki is just like the whole report you showed before...i.e. it makes assumptions (or rather it relies on news articles that make assumptions).

e.g. Their major trials section.

Iceland, fails to mention that the "4 day work weeks" was actually just reduced working hours and more importantly meeting times were reduce and break times were reduced (as per the original study).  Who would have though, reducing essentially useless meetings and long break times would increase productivity.

Microsoft Japan, even in the wiki article it talks about shortened meeting.  Honestly, useless meetings burns a lot of employee time.

"UK employers", not going to spend time going through all...but at least the first employer where I found a link to heavily implies they switched to a 4-day work week but still working the same amount of hours.  So yea, it's not a surprise that productivity never dropped if they worked still the same amount of time a week.

Utah state, again switched from 8 hour days to 10 hour days...such a surprise productivity never dropped

k-12, well the article itself said 4 day work weeks for teachers showed lower test scores in reading and math.  Kind of an obvious result really

Rest don't really mention productivity.

 

In essence it boils back down to, less meetings and less things to waste time on = more productivity which is counterbalanced by working less hours

[ravenshrike]

6 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

 

 

Sources:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/16/elon-musk-demands-twitter-staff-commit-to-long-hours-or-leave.html
https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-gives-twitter-staff-an-ultimatum-work-long-hours-at-high-intensity-or-leave-11668608923
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63648505

It's almost like pulling Twitter out of the grave it's dug over the past 9 years is going to be a major fucking endeavor.

[Majinhoju]

6 minutes ago, ravenshrike said:

It's almost like pulling Twitter out of the grave it's dug over the past 9 years is going to be a major fucking endeavor.

I'd agree in principle but he's further damaged the company severely in both value and reputation.

 

He's basically dug that whole 10x further in a week then told his team to start digging up.

[ravenshrike]

1 minute ago, Majinhoju said:

I'd agree in principle but he's further damaged the company severely in both value and reputation.

 

Ripping out the drywall to expose the corporate equivalent of termite rotted beams and black mold isn't damaging the company.

[Majinhoju]

2 minutes ago, ravenshrike said:

Ripping out the drywall to expose the corporate equivalent of termite rotted beams and black mold isn't damaging the company.

Advertisers and users started bailing on twitter day 1 when he took over. Employees who haven't been fired are fleeing the company. Twitter's reputation is now a dumpster fire. I'd be amazed if they recover from this.

 

Elon isn't just ripping out the drywall, he's smashing through with a wrecking ball without thinking of the consequences.

[spartaman64]

idk when you say the company only needs a few hundred people but then you need those people to work 12 hours a day or else the company is going bankrupt then it sounds to me like the company needs more than that amount of people. 

on top of expecting them to work 12 hours a day elon demonstrated he has no respect for the engineers or what they do and would fire them if they disagree with him so sounds like hes the one bringing in a toxic workplace

[dalekphalm]

13 minutes ago, ravenshrike said:

Ripping out the drywall to expose the corporate equivalent of termite rotted beams and black mold isn't damaging the company.

That's not really what happened.

 

More like, he ripped out the drywall to expose the rotted beams, then he decided to take the perfectly good concrete foundation that needed a bit of maintenance and smash it into little bits.

 

Some of the things he's done are not in the best interests of the company, even if he might be able to recover from these mistakes.

[wanderingfool2]

25 minutes ago, spartaman64 said:

idk when you say the company only needs a few hundred people but then you need those people to work 12 hours a day or else the company is going bankrupt then it sounds to me like the company needs more than that amount of people. 

on top of expecting them to work 12 hours a day elon demonstrated he has no respect for the engineers or what they do and would fire them if they disagree with him so sounds like hes the one bringing in a toxic workplace

There are some things which benefit from smaller teams who work longer hours.  The concept being that some problems can't be tackled by throwing massive amount of employee power at it.  (Too many cooks in the kitchen mentality).  It's a similar concept to why I was in charge of the design and implementation of an in house program before, and my supervisor was in charge of a different in house program.  Sure, when he was away I could hope in and fix some bugs that arose and troubleshoot it as I was familiar with the code-base but in general we developed large chunks of it on our own (but of course we shared code for areas that had overlap so we weren't reinventing the wheel).

 

A good example of this is OpenPilot (from Comma AI).  They had a team of 10 people who effectively wrote the code for their self driving platform.  You could do the approach of having hundreds of employees, but then OpenPilot wouldn't be anywhere as good.  Again it boils down to too many cooks in the kitchen.

 

I still remember the last time I was in a company that merged...it meant working with the new IT staff for so many extra hours as we attempted to merge things together and get everything running correctly.  It was literally those "12 hour days" for 2 weeks to get things running as quickly as possible (because half the employees now needed computers with specialized software installed and credentials created and trained on each), and even after that it like 2 months before we managed to setup/wire the offices where people were literally working out of the lunch room or 2 people per desk.

 

 

I'd also like to point out, there is a difference between firing someone you are disagreeing with than firing someone who you are disagreeing with who isn't really providing solutions.

 

It was actually stated before I think by Musk, he is okay with people disagreeing with him but if you disagree you must offer the alternative.  Then you have the case of the engineer that "corrected" him, that everyone is gloming into...but really think of it from the other perspective.

 

Person A: There is an issue with XYZ and I've been told it's because of M.

Person B: Person A is wrong, it's not M and I know since I've worked on solving the XYZ issue.

Person A fires person B

 

Everyone picks up on the fact that Person B is fired for "correcting" but no one seems to care that Person B literally admitted to working on the issue at hand (and given that issue XYZ still exists failed at it)