Elon Musk

what a fn dickhole

Here it is: Twitter engineers were told today to *print out* their last 30 to 60 days of code, so they could show it to Elon Musk himself.

Then they were told wait, no, actually, please shred all that code you just printed out.

Subscribe to read ➡️https://t.co/ad9XTdVQhJ pic.twitter.com/sbO8tD8hGN

— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) October 28, 2022

learn to shred

Here are some examples: you can write as many polite letters to advertisers as you want, but you cannot reasonably expect to collect any meaningful advertising revenue if you do not promise those advertisers “brand safety.” That means you have to ban racism, sexism, transphobia, and all kinds of other speech that is totally legal in the United States but reveals people to be total assholes. So you can make all the promises about “free speech” you want, but the dull reality is that you still have to ban a bunch of legal speech if you want to make money. And when you start doing that, your creepy new right-wing fanboys are going to viciously turn on you, just like they turn on every other social network that realizes the same essential truth.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitter-acquisition-problems-speech-moderation

This isn’t the worst strategy to find terrible engineering managers and Twitter is supposedly filled with terrible engineering managers.

Without personal knowledge of Twitter infrastructure, I’d bet Musk is right that it’s a mess and over-staffed. Do I think he can fix that? Nope!

Wiki Foundation, for reference, spends about 100m annually.

Musk doesn’t even know how to read code, as has been shown repeatedly.

Like, he’s had to have people walk him through installing and running stuff off GitHub.

some sort of stunt to keep the troops on their toes type of thing youd see in a movie im sure it went over well in real life and the workers arent say brazenly posting your code to twitter cause they dont give a shit

Happy Friday all. pic.twitter.com/Rk9m1v1hmu

— Leah Culver (@leahculver) October 28, 2022

a social network with constantly shifting functionality would be cool, you always have to figure out whats going on like a game, of course no one would use it and it would fail

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FgPXv2mXgAAIlky?format=jpg&name=medium

isnt it already this?

i mean it already fails lol but assuming we're not talking the kinds of multiple outage-dysfunction that accelerated livejournal's shift into the twilight

just had a vision of the revenant failwhale as moorcock's GHANH (aka the key denizen of a sharknado) returned from the chamber of the dead by corum's hideous jewelled eye

elric musk 😔

Can't believe @elonmusk bought Teletext. pic.twitter.com/HPE6EDBY3F

— Mr Biffo (@mrbiffo) October 28, 2022

isnt it already this?

― mark s, Saturday, October 29, 2022 9:39 AM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

to an extent, but change is too slow and iterative, ai will solve this

or blockchain will solve this

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey's new Bluesky Social app is now accepting users for beta testing, and is set to launch "soon". https://t.co/e6LUiprjQV

— RELENTLESSLY Gay (@queertardo) October 28, 2022

til jack dorsey was an ilxor viz poster blueski

🐦[Can’t believe @elonmusk🕸 bought Teletext. pic.twitter.com/HPE6EDBY3F🕸
— Mr Biffo (@mrbiffo) October 28, 2022🕸]🐦

Is Elon Musk that much worse than Jack Dorsey? I mean they are both the same ballpark of absolute cunts.

richer = worse is how i break it down to an extent

Is Elon Musk that much worse than Jack Dorsey? I mean they are both the same ballpark of absolute cunts.

― link.exposing.politically (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Saturday, October 29, 2022 10:11 AM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

they seem pretty similar even beyond being horrible rich guys tbh, tho musk personally owning twitter is a pretty different set up than jack running it as ceo of a public company, guess well see how it plays out

Musk is imo worse because he's a troll.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitter-acquisition-problems-speech-moderation?fbclid=IwAR1SQ1aNpojt6ChZKgHlW1h3qGF5OOZu_oLC4DXMSJZeOccWcxnkPvHMQbw

musk doesn't seem like a genius and the fact that he's operating in bad faith makes him worse/more dangerous than jack. but but jack dorsey is an actual moron. he reminds me of peter sellers in being there.

This isn’t the worst strategy to find terrible engineering managers and Twitter is supposedly filled with terrible engineering managers.

― Allen (etaeoe), Friday, October 28, 2022 10:34 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

i don't think this is true. the average manager of ICs or manager of managers at twitter is not unusually bad. the problem is 1) there are too many of them. the average number of reports for a line manager is low relative to the industry. you could fire half of them and not make much operational difference. 2) there's a culture of incompetence and extreme slowness among *their* managers, right the way to the top. can't imagine where that came from. (it came from jack.)

how do i become this clever?

Ok. It’s hitting me like a rock. Twitter is the social operating system for tesla. Hence tesla engineers already working with the code. It’s the software that can run communication and commerce through the tesla. Ok wow. $twtr $tsla

— Ross Gerber (@GerberKawasaki) October 29, 2022

get hit with a rock?

Nah, it's gonna take at least a falling air conditioner.

it's hard for a disruptive technology, the system is stifling it. it has stuffed this one with middle management and ~feelings~ and shit.

What a guy. @elonmusk is making sure to fire people at Twitter before part of their year-end compensation *kicks in on Tuesday.* https://t.co/sEclZozKV5 pic.twitter.com/inw3vF0kIL

— Eric Umansky (@ericuman) October 29, 2022

Not surprising! I personally and anecdotally know of a ton of companies at the very least dropping contract employees right before a fiscal reporting deadline. Dropping off all contractors in software at the end of Q3 to pump up Q4 numbers, etc

might result in a big hiring spree Jan1, maybe not

he's also apparently firing senior staff for cause so he doesn't have to pay their golden parachutes. congratulations to the lawyers.

sounds like he really is going to try to fire ~50% of people before tuesday. absolutely nuts, almost certainly in violation of the WARN act.

When’s he ever had to suffer consequences for breaking the law before?

Elon Musk is now sharing conspiracy theory blog posts about the attack on Paul Pelosi. pic.twitter.com/XKolS7ogYd

— Matt Novak (@paleofuture) October 30, 2022

They should ban him from ... oh.

Dumb question: He owns Twitter now, which is a private company, so if he fails to foster a safe workspace, or actively does stuff to make it unsafe by promoting, I dunno, homophobic conspiracy theories or whatever, are there any legal ramifications, or is he just free to fuck around all he wants? Does a worker have any recourse besides quitting? (Assuming any workers will be left.)

no lawyer but does seem like someone could have a claim

When’s he ever had to suffer consequences for breaking the law before?

I know the last 5–10 years have made people extremely cynical about the law but this guy was forced to buy twitter against his will by the courts.

Will be interesting to see if advertisers still want to spend money on a site whose owner uses it to post homophobic conspiracy theories in Hilary Clinton’s mentions.

IANAL but i believe that it could very easily constitute creating a "hostile work environment" under civil rights and workplace harassment law. there must be a lot of case law by now where awful stuff the boss posted/shared on social media, right? i don't know, but you'd usually think someone with Musk's familiarity with right-wing online awfulness would focus very much on staying obnoxiously, trollishly on JUST the 'legal' side of things. (perhaps he will make the attempt, but totally fail because he is an egomaniacal moron, as this week has reminded everyone but his two million most sycophantic worldwide followers.)

anyone who's spent time reading abt the great fraudsters (bottomley, ponzi, madoff etc)* will discover that for all the time they spend as outrageous scofflaws getting away with everything all the time they are often very active under the surface (like a swans feet) compounding the fraud more and more incoherently to support the earlier fast-toppling stages = they get away with it until suddenly they don't, the very epitome of "how do you go bankrupt? first slowly, then quickly"

musk is extremely streeeeeeetched right now and increasingly hemmed in legally -- and maybe he'll get away with it! he's nominally (if not actually) the richest man in the world and has a tone of ppl who will still shill for him at any price, but he's also a massively dumb ecogmaniac who no one ever says no to

*(obviously the ones who quietly got away with much worse are nowhere listed as "great fraudsters")

is this something: black swans feet

musk Trump is extremely streeeeeeetched right now and increasingly hemmed in legally -- and maybe he'll get away with it! he's nominally (if not actually) the richest man in the world and has a tone of ppl who will still shill for him at any price, but he's also a massively dumb ecogmaniac who no one ever says no to

trump deep in the brain stem

re elon as fraudster have wondered for a while if there isnt major accounting fraud somewhere in his business

Pretty sure some business columnists have tried to hint that without making outright accusations. His reliance on government subsidies and possible misuse of them, for example.

re elon as fraudster have wondered for a while if there isnt major accounting fraud somewhere in his business

I'm sure they'll charge him ... in 25 years.

Mike, what’s Twitter’s Blind look like right now?

In re: Josh. Even private companies legally have to respect a variety of worker's rights, as laid down in state and federal law. It's just that the worker usually must go to the trouble of hiring a lawyer and filing a complaint. obv, the top management people he fired can easily afford going down this avenue. lesser & non-unionized employees have a harder time drawing attention to their grievances, but the amount of publicity around this buyout and mass firing will assist them in that.

everything going perfectly

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FgVx2fZWIAAG6hY?format=jpg&name=medium

Mike, what’s Twitter’s Blind look like right now?

― Allen (etaeoe), Sunday, October 30, 2022 1:57 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

dunno right now. i got banned from blind this morning for calling musk a messy bitch.

but the last couple days have been intense. the 75% story was i think the first time a lot of people realized it was more likely than not they would lose their job. and then the story about the c-suite getting shitcanned without severance yesterday and the apparent rush to get stuff done before nov 1 finally made people realise not only are they losing their job: he's not going to honor any aspect of the unenforceable gentleman's agreement about comp/severance/benefits. the code review thing is the icing on the cake.

there was a great "i was excited about musk getting rid of the libs but now i'm shocked to see him firing the very people who can help him" post this morning. real never though leopards would eat my face stuff.