Smart man. He knows the Twitter staff had a culture of hate toward him. He’s weeding out the underminers, the liabilities, and recreating the staff according to people who share ideals rather than having his own workforce fight against him both publicly and secretly while taking his paychecks.
Twitter has needed the poop cleaned out of the cage for a long time. Glad to see it finally happening.
Going to be a much better operation.
He also knows that Twitter is lossing money….so he has to do something to clean up the bleeding.
Smart man. He knows the Twitter staff had a culture of hate toward him. He’s weeding out the underminers, the liabilities, and recreating the staff according to people who share ideals rather than having his own workforce fight against him both publicly and secretly while taking his paychecks.
Twitter has needed the poop cleaned out of the cage for a long time. Glad to see it finally happening.
Going to be a much better operation.
He also knows that Twitter is lossing money….so he has to do something to clean up the bleeding.
Lol, Twitter’s financial losses have gone up since he has taken over and he added 13 billion of debt. I don’t know how you define “clean up” but to me it doesn’t mean “make the situation worse”.
He didn’t like the one sided biased and filtering of free speech. The old Twitter team likely though Sam Bankman-Fried and all of his donations to a certain D party made him a model Twitter citizen lol
He is simply cleaning out the people who made Twitter what it was, the exact reason he bought the company, to change it from what it was
Do you do that by keeping everything the same?
You can change the direction that a ship is going from the wheelhouse. There's no need to throw all of the engineers, stewards, and other crew overboard.
He didn’t like the one sided biased and filtering of free speech. The old Twitter team likely though Sam Bankman-Fried and all of his donations to a certain D party made him a model Twitter citizen lol
He is simply cleaning out the people who made Twitter what it was, the exact reason he bought the company, to change it from what it was
Do you do that by keeping everything the same?
Twitter quite literally set aside its own terms of use for the former president, allowing him and his sycophants to spread disinformation and outright lies up until and including the point when he triggered a violent attempted coup. It literally took an attempt to overthrow the world's oldest democracy for Twitter to uphold its own terms of service, and they only did that because the coup had turned violent but failed. Up until that point, the only restriction on "free speech" was -only in the latter part of 2020- the minimal correction or removal of egregious and demonstrably false information that was literally putting people's lives at risk. So Mr. Musk may think he's on some sort of free speech crusade, but he's misguided.
And once again, your description of who Musk is "cleaning out" fails to take into account the rapid and indiscriminate approach he's taken to accomplish that "cleaning out." No serious executive does that. What he's doing is intentionally or incompetently destroying the existing company. For far less money and none of the destruction of assets and reputation, Musk could've built a new platform from scratch the way he wanted it, then quietly bought Twitter at a much lower price, merged the companies, ported the users over to the new platform and kept the Twitter brand, but this way it would actually be intact and valuable. No, Musk blundered into this thing like a man with more money than sense, and lacking the capacity for humility, he compounds his mistakes and makes things worse instead of owning them, correcting them and making things better.
Wonder how long the website will work with nobody in the data center(s)… /s. It must be rough for anybody left there at twitter offices. Wish them well. Seems like a chaotic place at the moment.
Well, if the YouTube video of a day in the life of a Twitter engineer is accurate then he only needs about 1,000 workers to run the business. I love the way he is cleaning house and will rebuilt with engineers that really want to work and do not treat work like a social event with free everything. Those of us who have been in the profession for decades do not understand this millennial mindset and find it hard to believe it leads to long term success.
Well, if the YouTube video of a day in the life of a Twitter engineer is accurate then he only needs about 1,000 workers to run the business. I love the way he is cleaning house and will rebuilt with engineers that really want to work and do not treat work like a social event with free everything. Those of us who have been in the profession for decades do not understand this millennial mindset and find it hard to believe it leads to long term success.
In 2011, they supported 100 million users with under 1000 staff and the current number of users (300-400m) has been roughly the same since 2015:
Cutting employees when a company is losing money is pretty standard and a lot of companies increased hiring during the pandemic. Apple did it when Steve Jobs returned:
But the email Musk sent was completely the wrong thing to do. Employee morale everywhere is low due to the state of the economy and the Twitter employees already went through a mass cull. It's one thing to let low performing employees go but there's nothing to be gained in alienating the core staff that are needed to turn the company profitable.
With salaries in excess of $100k, they'll always manage to find employees to keep the services running but sending out ultimatums could only come with downsides and was totally unnecessary.
Would a great leader be in the position that Musk is in? when I got into IT years ago, I remember learning something interesting about IBM. That is, at IBM you can make mistakes with money but if you make mistakes with people they get rid of you. I really like that kind of thinking. I work for a large company and we just had our CEO leave after 5 years because of wear and tear with juggling travel, business and family. He was well respected and people loved working for him based on feedback I hear. I supported him directly on many occasions and was the best CEO I ever knew so far. I said I would stay with my company as long as he remains CEO. That kind of leadership is what builds a great company. I don’t know if Musk understands how important it is to deal with people. People are the soul of any company. They will give their love, respect and hard work to leadership that works for them instead of against them. That’s part of how you win in business.
Would a great leader be in the position that Musk is in? when I got into IT years ago, I remember learning something interesting about IBM. That is, at IBM you can make mistakes with money but if you make mistakes with people they get rid of you. I really like that kind of thinking. I work for a large company and we just had our CEO leave after 5 years because of wear and tear with juggling travel, business and family. He was well respected and people loved working for him based on feedback I hear. I supported him directly on many occasions and was the best CEO I ever knew so far. I said I would stay with my company as long as he remains CEO. That kind of leadership is what builds a great company. I don’t know if Musk understands how important it is to deal with people. People are the soul of any company. They will give their love, respect and hard work to leadership that works for them instead of against them. That’s part of how you win in business.
Would a great leader be in the position that Musk is in? when I got into IT years ago, I remember learning something interesting about IBM. That is, at IBM you can make mistakes with money but if you make mistakes with people they get rid of you. I really like that kind of thinking. I work for a large company and we just had our CEO leave after 5 years because of wear and tear with juggling travel, business and family. He was well respected and people loved working for him based on feedback I hear. I supported him directly on many occasions and was the best CEO I ever knew so far. I said I would stay with my company as long as he remains CEO. That kind of leadership is what builds a great company. I don’t know if Musk understands how important it is to deal with people. People are the soul of any company. They will give their love, respect and hard work to leadership that works for them instead of against them. That’s part of how you win in business.
Being that Elon Musk is the richest man in the world (and self made) and is the CEO of the worlds most successful electric car company and a few other extremely innovative companies I believed he has earned the right to be given the benefit of the doubt of his leadership skills.
Would a great leader be in the position that Musk is in? when I got into IT years ago, I remember learning something interesting about IBM. That is, at IBM you can make mistakes with money but if you make mistakes with people they get rid of you. I really like that kind of thinking. I work for a large company and we just had our CEO leave after 5 years because of wear and tear with juggling travel, business and family. He was well respected and people loved working for him based on feedback I hear. I supported him directly on many occasions and was the best CEO I ever knew so far. I said I would stay with my company as long as he remains CEO. That kind of leadership is what builds a great company. I don’t know if Musk understands how important it is to deal with people. People are the soul of any company. They will give their love, respect and hard work to leadership that works for them instead of against them. That’s part of how you win in business.
Would a great leader be in the position that Musk is in? when I got into IT years ago, I remember learning something interesting about IBM. That is, at IBM you can make mistakes with money but if you make mistakes with people they get rid of you. I really like that kind of thinking. I work for a large company and we just had our CEO leave after 5 years because of wear and tear with juggling travel, business and family. He was well respected and people loved working for him based on feedback I hear. I supported him directly on many occasions and was the best CEO I ever knew so far. I said I would stay with my company as long as he remains CEO. That kind of leadership is what builds a great company. I don’t know if Musk understands how important it is to deal with people. People are the soul of any company. They will give their love, respect and hard work to leadership that works for them instead of against them. That’s part of how you win in business.
Being that Elon Musk is the richest man in the world (and self made) and is the CEO of the worlds most successful electric car company and a few other extremely innovative companies I believed he has earned the right to be given the benefit of the doubt of his leadership skills.
He lays off half the workforce and then becomes the worst boss ever, to the extent that 1/3 of the remaining employees CHOOSE to leave. That's leadership?
I never took Business 101 but pretty sure what Musk is doing to Twitter isn't part of basic business growth.
Oh, forgot to mention his income (advertisers) are leaving. Smells like leadership to me! /s
I hope Musk appreciates how great SJ was turning around Apple with its dated OS, hardware, software, then hiring the right people, disrupting industries, and hitting one home run after another without the drama.
Life sucks when you one day are very important, sitting moderate what the whole world can say. The next day you realize that you are not so important anymore.
A lot of Tech people is facing a new reality, one that many non Tech people have faced for a long time. -you are not that important and jobs don't comes easy.
I feel for all the people who have to leave the Tech companies, as life will be very tough times for many.
Smart man. He knows the Twitter staff had a culture of hate toward him. He’s weeding out the underminers, the liabilities, and recreating the staff according to people who share ideals rather than having his own workforce fight against him both publicly and secretly while taking his paychecks.
Twitter has needed the poop cleaned out of the cage for a long time. Glad to see it finally happening.
Going to be a much better operation.
if you wrap your lips any tighter around his member you'll snap it off
I wonder how Larry Ellison is gonna feel about Elon lighting his $1B on fire.
A Saudi prince handed over 35M Twitter shares to aid the deal. Wouldn't it be delightful if Musk ended up getting the Kashoggi treatment? Sadly, it won't happen... but a boy can dream
It is really entertaining to see so many comments in blind support of Elon and his actions.
Twitter got over 90% of it's revenue from advertising! Advertisers want to attract customers, not insult or alienate them. Twitter is a communication network that needs to offend as few people as possible while keeping information available to as many people as possible. It has become a source of news and entertainment for millions of people worldwide and with that comes a tremendous amount of responsibility to try and ensure that it is as accurate as possible. It also needs to protect peoples private information and try to eliminate scams, con artists, etc. It is under the watch of numerous governments agencies around the world and has direct legal responsibilities. Twitter is not "free speech" it is more "civil discord".
Elon has absolutely no clue as to the responsibilities and obligations that Twitter has to various regulation agencies around the world. He also has demonstrated that he has no clue on how to run the business, nor does he have any magical plans on how to make it more profitable. Elon got mad at Twitter because he got in trouble for tweeting false and irresponsible claims about Tesla and some of his other companies (claiming Tesla was going bankrupt or going private causing stock prices to fall). He also got mad because he got push back on some of his off the wall tweets criticizing rescuers of trapped miners or the SEC because he had to follow the same rules as everyone else.
Elon let his ego get the better of himself and made an "I will show you" statement by making a legally binding offer for Twitter at a ridiculously high price. He then tried to back out by trash talking Twitter. He was then forced to complete the deal and then claimed he was going to relax most of the content guidelines. This caused half of the advertisers to halt spending during a wait and see period. Twitter revenue dropped in half the day Elon walked into Twitter all because of the Elon's actions and comments. He started by digging a very deep hole.
Elon then immediately cut half of the work force without any knowledge of the work those people did and without any understanding of the government labor laws. This is substantiated by the fact that Twitter had to ask many to come back to work. All major changes in management/culture deal with changes in the workforce, but typically it is done methodically by order of importance and hope that some will voluntarily leaves (much cheaper than severance and unemployment expenses).
Elon came in with a blind iron fist and such an ignorance of the business that it created a toxic work environment. Elon's immediate failure of the verified/sponsored check marks shows just how naive he is about the Twitter business and how he does not have any real ideas on how to improve profits. He didn't really want to own Twitter and he is just throwing things at the wall hoping he gets lucky. Twitter had financial issues before Elon got involved, but he has made it much worse.
People in these tech companies know how to work hard and put in extra hours, but they will only do it for something they really believe in and have a passion to make it work. Elon insulted all of the Twitter employees with his arrogance, ignorance and ultimatum. Report are that about 75% of the employees did not agree to the ultimatum. Most of the remaining employees either have working Visa issues or are being cautious about leaving before they have another job. In other words, all of the ambitious, confident and top achieving employees have left. I can't imagine how anyone that excels in their job could stay in such a toxic environment. Those that say these people are leaving because they do not want to work hard is totally clueless and doesn't know what motivates brilliant people.
Elon's only hope is if he can fire sale the remains of Twitter to another company that can resurrect it back from the dead, hire back a good portion of the workforce and bring back the advertisers. Elon would lose his $44 billion and be able to wash his hands of the whole ordeal. As it stands, he is at risk of losing his control over Tesla and SpaceX! Twitter has the assets and structure to build back quickly and then gradually add more revenue sources, but not under Elon.
Quitting is not a option. The asshole would have to fire me, that way there would probably be unemployment benefits. I wouldn't throw those away if eligible. It would be a small victory but one with a little more cash in my pocket. It'll be fun to see how Ahab handles this.
I’ll give Musk an opportunity to redeem himself only because of his track record. For me, it comes down to what he does next and whether it ties up all the loose ends on the total chaos he’s created. However, there is one glaring thing that he’s done that is a major WTF from my perspective - his assertion that this is an engineering problem that needs to be solved. He’s basically said that the only employees he values right now are engineers.
I’m a big fan of engineers and engineering, but I don’t see Twitter as an engineering company. It’s a company that uses technology and engineering to power its platform, but it’s not selling engineered products or even in the engineering domain, unless you’re talking human engineering. Engineers are great at the “how to solve a problem” part, but you need people who clearly know “what problems need to be solved.” If you don’t nail the “what” part the “how” part is irrelevant.
Quitting is not an option. The asshole would have to fire me, that way there would probably be unemployment benefits. I wouldn't throw those away if eligible. It would be a small victory but one with a little more cash in my pocket. It'll be fun to see how Ahab handles this.
They aren’t quitting, they are being laid off. They are just volunteering for the layoff. So they qualify for unemployment benefits. If you are fired for cause you don’t qualify for unemployment. Your strategy is here is a little backward.
Quitting is not a option. The asshole would have to fire me, that way there would probably be unemployment benefits. I wouldn't throw those away if eligible. It would be a small victory but one with a little more cash in my pocket. It'll be fun to see how Ahab handles this.
If they leave now they get three months severance pay, plus unemployment. If they get fired, they get nothing but a cardboard box for the contents of their desk. There is a major incentive to walk now.
Comments
And once again, your description of who Musk is "cleaning out" fails to take into account the rapid and indiscriminate approach he's taken to accomplish that "cleaning out." No serious executive does that. What he's doing is intentionally or incompetently destroying the existing company. For far less money and none of the destruction of assets and reputation, Musk could've built a new platform from scratch the way he wanted it, then quietly bought Twitter at a much lower price, merged the companies, ported the users over to the new platform and kept the Twitter brand, but this way it would actually be intact and valuable. No, Musk blundered into this thing like a man with more money than sense, and lacking the capacity for humility, he compounds his mistakes and makes things worse instead of owning them, correcting them and making things better.
Cutting employees when a company is losing money is pretty standard and a lot of companies increased hiring during the pandemic. Apple did it when Steve Jobs returned:
https://world.hey.com/dhh/apple-fired-4-100-when-steve-jobs-returned-in-1997-57ed6bc6
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=90_Hours_A_Week_And_Loving_It.txt
But the email Musk sent was completely the wrong thing to do. Employee morale everywhere is low due to the state of the economy and the Twitter employees already went through a mass cull. It's one thing to let low performing employees go but there's nothing to be gained in alienating the core staff that are needed to turn the company profitable.
With salaries in excess of $100k, they'll always manage to find employees to keep the services running but sending out ultimatums could only come with downsides and was totally unnecessary.
I never took Business 101 but pretty sure what Musk is doing to Twitter isn't part of basic business growth.
Oh, forgot to mention his income (advertisers) are leaving. Smells like leadership to me! /s
A lot of Tech people is facing a new reality, one that many non Tech people have faced for a long time. -you are not that important and jobs don't comes easy.
I feel for all the people who have to leave the Tech companies, as life will be very tough times for many.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/10/28/how-elon-musk-financed-his-twitter-takeover
Twitter got over 90% of it's revenue from advertising! Advertisers want to attract customers, not insult or alienate them. Twitter is a communication network that needs to offend as few people as possible while keeping information available to as many people as possible. It has become a source of news and entertainment for millions of people worldwide and with that comes a tremendous amount of responsibility to try and ensure that it is as accurate as possible. It also needs to protect peoples private information and try to eliminate scams, con artists, etc. It is under the watch of numerous governments agencies around the world and has direct legal responsibilities. Twitter is not "free speech" it is more "civil discord".
Elon has absolutely no clue as to the responsibilities and obligations that Twitter has to various regulation agencies around the world. He also has demonstrated that he has no clue on how to run the business, nor does he have any magical plans on how to make it more profitable. Elon got mad at Twitter because he got in trouble for tweeting false and irresponsible claims about Tesla and some of his other companies (claiming Tesla was going bankrupt or going private causing stock prices to fall). He also got mad because he got push back on some of his off the wall tweets criticizing rescuers of trapped miners or the SEC because he had to follow the same rules as everyone else.
Elon let his ego get the better of himself and made an "I will show you" statement by making a legally binding offer for Twitter at a ridiculously high price. He then tried to back out by trash talking Twitter. He was then forced to complete the deal and then claimed he was going to relax most of the content guidelines. This caused half of the advertisers to halt spending during a wait and see period. Twitter revenue dropped in half the day Elon walked into Twitter all because of the Elon's actions and comments. He started by digging a very deep hole.
Elon then immediately cut half of the work force without any knowledge of the work those people did and without any understanding of the government labor laws. This is substantiated by the fact that Twitter had to ask many to come back to work. All major changes in management/culture deal with changes in the workforce, but typically it is done methodically by order of importance and hope that some will voluntarily leaves (much cheaper than severance and unemployment expenses).
Elon came in with a blind iron fist and such an ignorance of the business that it created a toxic work environment. Elon's immediate failure of the verified/sponsored check marks shows just how naive he is about the Twitter business and how he does not have any real ideas on how to improve profits. He didn't really want to own Twitter and he is just throwing things at the wall hoping he gets lucky. Twitter had financial issues before Elon got involved, but he has made it much worse.
People in these tech companies know how to work hard and put in extra hours, but they will only do it for something they really believe in and have a passion to make it work. Elon insulted all of the Twitter employees with his arrogance, ignorance and ultimatum. Report are that about 75% of the employees did not agree to the ultimatum. Most of the remaining employees either have working Visa issues or are being cautious about leaving before they have another job. In other words, all of the ambitious, confident and top achieving employees have left. I can't imagine how anyone that excels in their job could stay in such a toxic environment. Those that say these people are leaving because they do not want to work hard is totally clueless and doesn't know what motivates brilliant people.
Elon's only hope is if he can fire sale the remains of Twitter to another company that can resurrect it back from the dead, hire back a good portion of the workforce and bring back the advertisers. Elon would lose his $44 billion and be able to wash his hands of the whole ordeal. As it stands, he is at risk of losing his control over Tesla and SpaceX! Twitter has the assets and structure to build back quickly and then gradually add more revenue sources, but not under Elon.
I’m a big fan of engineers and engineering, but I don’t see Twitter as an engineering company. It’s a company that uses technology and engineering to power its platform, but it’s not selling engineered products or even in the engineering domain, unless you’re talking human engineering. Engineers are great at the “how to solve a problem” part, but you need people who clearly know “what problems need to be solved.” If you don’t nail the “what” part the “how” part is irrelevant.