Elon Musk

playing dumb is also a classic boss domination tactic

oh, is it?

ignorance is strength

yeah he's just going to stonewall this guy in litigation, I feel bad for him

― 龜, Tuesday, March 7, 2023 12:01 PM (forty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is true.

i had a tweet about the fact that twitter is still paging me do numbers over the weekend. lots of replies, as terrible as ever, but i also didn't see any ads.

i had to mute that conversation everyone was faving your cute reply to me, an innocent man

yeah that was rough sorry

if twitter could monetize people explaining each other's jokes in the comments they would have a winner

Halli is such a contrast to Elon Musk and the entire Silicon Valley model.

When he sold his company to Twitter, he took the payment as wages so he’d pay much more tax to give back to Iceland’s social system. Meanwhile, Musk fights higher taxes while taking billions in subsidies. https://t.co/zpHa6uA3Pb pic.twitter.com/dlVPYYkdZE

— Paris Marx (@parismarx) March 7, 2023

whooerps

wow. the guy, Halli, that Elon Musk has been mocking is not only a class act, but was literally on a list of "do not fire" VIPs because of how expensive his exit package was (likely because, if what Halli's other tweets say are true, Twitter acquired his company for a good price) https://t.co/H1skqNyiHI

— Dan Seljak (@anotherglassbox) March 7, 2023

he's not getting a penny.

lag∞n are you metal.txt?

no but im metal af haha

i never tweet out of character from my bot accounts i consider it a violation of the bot code

he's not getting a penny.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Tuesday, 7 March 2023 bookmarkflaglink

He'll be ok, he has a wife and children who like him.

obThread, this guy sucks so bad

Elon Musk is such a deeply terrible person even as a kid when another kid hospitalized him, his dad was like fair enough the kid almost killing my son had a point pic.twitter.com/6CZR6ecaRl

— Wild Geerters (@steinkobbe) March 7, 2023

Another very Trumpy thing about him, an absolute spoiled bully since childhood.

BBC has a little profile on the Icelandic dude... he actually does kind of need the money, or is going to need it at some point:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64871183

I would like to apologize to Halli for my misunderstanding of his situation. It was based on things I was told that were untrue or, in some cases, true, but not meaningful.

He is considering remaining at Twitter.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 7, 2023

POV: you just got a call from your lawyer.

betting now all of the tweet responses are variants of:

"see? Elon can admit when he's wrong, because that's the kind of quality man he is"

OR

"Weak. you didn't owe him an apology CANCEL CULTURE amirite"

lmao

That messed up, why would those people lie to you

— Dan Nguyen (@dancow) March 7, 2023

"based on things I was told that were untrue"

that very sentence is untrue

it was the pizza deliveryman

he passed on a false rumor and i only regret that i believed him

Fuck this guy forever. Obviously nothing he does isn't gross but secretly firing and publicly mocking someone with muscular dystrophy is ghoulish even by those low standards

if you read musk's tweets in the voice of a 13 year old who is being forced to apologize they're way better.

betting now all of the tweet responses are variants of:

"see? Elon can admit when he's wrong, because that's the kind of quality man he is"

OR

"Weak. you didn't owe him an apology CANCEL CULTURE amirite"

― hootenanny-soundtracking clusterfucks about milking cows (Neanderthal), Tuesday, March 7, 2023 4:20 PM

i'm cynical enough to believe that his public responses are a show and his actual response is to establish more bot accounts to post this exact sort of response.

I think experience informs us that you cannot in fact be too cynical about this guy.

I think when his Twitter bullying of a guy with muscular dystrophy started to get reported on cnn and bbc etc is about when that half baked apology got written

It's kind of astounding re: the subject of this thraed how quickly I've zipped from 'you are a person whose name and face I recognize and that's about it' to 'how soon can u do us all a favor and stop being alive'

he's not getting a penny.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Tuesday, 7 March 2023 bookmarkflaglink

*6 hours later* he might be?

god he embarrassed himself so thoroughly yesterday that nobody noticed he also spent a good part of the day retweeting Tucker Carlson's idiotic Jan 6 story

Hard Drive remains on his case, previously seen ratioing him repeatedly

well you're the expert on SNL's bad days pic.twitter.com/Ysb5oJsRBK

— Hard Drive (@HardDriveMag) May 30, 2022

reversing your charitable decision? for shame, Mr Musk https://t.co/lLnHSICJx9

— Hard Drive (@HardDriveMag) March 8, 2023

i think all this shows is that musk is maybe a little serious about trying to win advertisers back to twitter - publicly attacking a guy with muscular dystrophy who by all accounts sounds like he could play All Around Nice Guy in the next pixar movie is not going to assuage advertisers concerns with the platform.

i don't think the threat of litigation over his contract was the deterrent here, there's already hundreds of millions in comp that he's not paying to the former twitter c-suite iirc, among others.

yeah agree it was prob more of a pr issue, it was getting coverage on tv, thats not great lol

Halli isn't another dev though. It's a different contract. Apologizing after that roasting was humiliating, so there must be more to it

xps

yeah, the salary seemed symbolic and not actually linked to him doing a lot of work at twitter. just the payment for buying out his company, in installments

wasn't there an episode of Silicon Valley where the dudes who were coasting as employees were just hanging on a rooftop on the corporate campus screwing around because they weren't assigned work and were running out the clock? obviously not the case here, but it's not unknown

wild to buy a digital shop for $100m not something you see everyday

i wasn't talking about devs, i was talking about the c-suites' golden parachutes, which he is not paying xp

acquihire at $2m per head and a bunch of those are prob admin bizdev type people that twitter doesnt care about perhttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-06/twitter-acquires-design-firm-ueno-adding-about-50-employees

If he's still actually working there (?) then I guess he's getting his monthly cash salary (although if he had to ask if he was still working there then maybe he's not even getting that).

But salaries are mostly irrelevant for senior leadership. They're <10% of their compensation. He's not getting any of the millions of dollars of accelerated vest stock he's entitled to if/when he gets fired "for cause" (ha) or leaves voluntarily.

We know this because neither has any VP+ or acquisition exec. I guess some of them might eventually. Seems unlikely. But the "uh oh elon really screwed up firing this person" stories that have come with every wave of layoffs have big "i'd like to see him wriggle his way out of this jam" energy.

my assumption was that the novel "pay me for my company as salary" would mean he'd have an abnormally large salary unless he spread it out over a very long term, which seems goofy because it'd be odd to assume any social media company's going to exist for twenty years

so as a line item Elon would probably see he had the top salary and be like "fire this guy he costs way too much" without bothering to find out why

SOP is that he (and esther crawford) would have had pro forma cash salaries similar to SWEs, i.e. maybe $200k in the US, presumably much less in iceland. the real ~$Xm acquisition money would have vested as stock (or now cash at $54.20) quarterly over four years, with a rider saying "you get all of it immediately if we fire you without cause" (which is not being honored).

i don't get the impression he made much of an effort to fire people with high total comp *in particular*. these people would have gone in the first wave otherwise. they probably earn 10x what everyone else at their level earns.

I haven’t been following the Tesla stock price since it mysteriously rallied but I see it’s now dropped from around $200 to $184 in two days? Keep it going king

fwiw I'm going off this source: https://www.icelandreview.com/news/haraldur-thorleifsson-sweeps-person-of-the-year-awards/

it might have been a one-time payout as wages, not clear

tbf, i don't know if his contract would have had a 'for cause' out. if he was the owner of the company he sold and actively chose to take his payment as salary instead of as a payment (whether in stock or cash) I doubt they would have included a for cause out. that would not be equivalent to taking his consideration as a one-time payout with no strings attached.

where musk could have stonewalled him I think is just dragging out the process by which he sues and tries to get the money he's owed under the contract. like, if he sues in iceland and wins a judgment, musk could simply choose to not pay. i doubt twitter actually sends any money through iceland as part of normal operations, so it'd be hard to enforce in iceland. which means he'd probably have to go to the US and get a US court to recognize the judgment and then to garnish revenue from twitter's bank accounts or something. but imagine the headlines - musk is making the guy with muscular atrophy who can't go to the bathroom without assistance actually get on a plane and fly all the way to the US to appear in a courthouse to get the money he was owed under the contract. that would not be a great headline for someone who is trying to convince advertisers that twitter is not a lightning rod of controversy and is safe to advertise on!

i would guess the vesting schedule was the normal one, even if he took it in cash rather than stock.

Normally in such large sales, the payment comes in the form of stock or other financial instruments, which categorize the sale as capital gains

this is not true in the US and UK and it would surprise my if it were true in iceland. stock compensation is taxed as ordinary income. if it wasn't then companies could save money by paying their employees in 100% stock.

anyway, musk could have picked a less sympathetic guy to get into a fight with. twitter is full of them.

is calacanis still there?

that appears to be the m.o. here, just fire everyone and not pay for anything and then drag things out in court to the point where the different parties will take a much smaller settlement

not sure how that applies to the rent situation where they could just get evicted, though

yet another trump parallel

xp it was an acquihire? i assume they paid ~$0 for the company, and the value was in tying up good people with golden handcuffs. and surely an exec wouldn't accept golden handcuffs without an accelerated vesting clause? that seems nuts.