[V.Narayan]

Originally Posted by dragonfire

On one hand they are miffed with Musk buying Twitter. The next minute they are applauding Parag for forcing Musk to buy the company at an exorbitant price. So what did you actually want? For Musk to buy it or not to? Or simply want Musk to use his money to end world hunger?

Who is ' they ' .

Doesn't that align well with their left ideologies?

Addressing hunger or poverty or child mortality etc are humanitarian acts.Period. Supporting them has nothing to do with being a 'Leftist' . Clearly the term leftist is being used by you in a less than polite way.

[binand]

Originally Posted by dragonfire

On one hand they are miffed with Musk buying Twitter. The next minute they are applauding Parag for forcing Musk to buy the company at an exorbitant price. So what did you actually want?

Obviously these are different theys. I personally didn't want Musk to buy Twitter; and at no point did I applaud Parag for forcing Musk to buy it (I did derive some entertainment in watching Musk try to avoid buying it, though). Now I am just watching with rapt fascination what a number of people have described is a "slow motion train wreck".

Prof. Scott Galloway's prognosis: https://mobile.twitter.com/amanpour/...54247947374592

From the other side I don't see anything except "Musk-ji ne kiya hai to kuch soch-samajhkar hi kiya hoga". Maybe there is a grand plan / 5D chess / whatever. I am not ashamed to admit I don't see it.

In another 3 days one of the most intense periods for social media will start - the FIFA world cup. Let us see how Twitter holds up.

[SilentEngine]

Originally Posted by dragonfire

See, the kid bought his ice cream. He might eat it or drop it. If he drops it, it is his loss. We don't need a running commentary on that, do we?

If the kid just stuck to eating his ice cream in a quite corner, nobody would have bothered I guess. But then, the kid goes around the town telling how he is eating ice cream to help rest of the mankind…

I for one, is following this now only for the comedy value it provides. This like a reality show playing real-time in front of global audience.

[volkman10]

Hundreds of Twitter’s remaining employees have resigned ahead of Elon Musk’s “extremely hardcore” cultural reset of the company.

After the deadline hit, hundreds of employees quickly started posting farewell messages and salute emojis in Twitter’s Slack.

I’m not pressing the button,” one departing employee posted in Slack. “My watch ends with Twitter 1.0. I do not wish to be part of Twitter 2.0

Remaining and departing Twitter employees told The Verge that, given the scale of the resignations this week, they expect the platform to start breaking soon. One said that they’ve watched “legendary engineers” and others they look up to leave one by one.

It feels like all the people who made this place incredible are leaving,” the Twitter staffer said. “It will be extremely hard for Twitter to recover from here, no matter how hardcore the people who remain try to be.

Meanwhile, Twitter recruiters have already started reaching out to outside engineers to see if they want to join “Twitter 2.0 - an Elon company.”


Link

[deetee]

For the humanity sake, I wish Elon Musk fails in his twitter 2.0 attempt. If he somehow manages to pull of a successful stunt with all this arrogance and lack of empathy, this will set a very very bad example of leadership qualities for the next generations.
Edit: From the way he is aggressively making the company employee unfriendly, it appears Musk intentionally wants to bankrupt the company.

[V.Narayan]

Elon joins a long line of men and women who start thinking they are God. God however doesn't think He is them. Elon sought immortality and infinite power through purchase of Twitter. He will certainly get at least a Harvard case study that will be read for decades.

[sagarpadaki]

Originally Posted by V.Narayan

Elon joins a long line of men and women who start thinking they are God. God however doesn't think He is them. Elon sought immortality and infinite power through purchase of Twitter. He will certainly get at least a Harvard case study that will be read for decades.

Our amchi IIM's and B Schools will also have this as a case study on 'how not to......" .

[ajayc123]

Culture change is expected with change in leadership. Without beigh judgemental or wishful, I would be watching how this pans out. If this guy can pull off a Tesla, SpaceX with such culture, he should have a path for this adventure too. Let's see.

[DigitalOne]

Originally Posted by V.Narayan

Elon joins a long line of men and women who start thinking they are God.

And in that line, Elon Musk would find just in front of him, a very familiar person, the one who is literally building a parallel universe

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by ajayc123

If this guy can pull off a Tesla, SpaceX with such culture, he should have a path for this adventure too. Let's see.

It is not the same. Tesla/SpaceX are tech creating product companies, while Twitter/Facebook are tech enabled services companies. Tech creating companies can operate successfully irrespective of their political viewpoint. The inventor of transistor (1948) was openly racist and said it is for the white race only. Still the technology became successful, no one is refusing to use it.

Twitter is a tech enabled services company, it doesn't create any technology. They sell ADs, and help their customers manage their brand on the platform. Managing brand means avoiding any controversy or negative perception. Elon doesn't know how to do that. He needs to shutup and allow some socially savvy leader to handle all the messaging. Remember how Sheryl Sandberg handled this role for Facebook; Mark-Z couldn't not have done that.

[V.Narayan]

It is easy to forget how much changes in a generation and how heroes turn to zeros be they companies or corporate czars or political giants. Some of us who believe that Musk has some mantra that he will chant to turn things around and his acts of immense self harm are part of some secret recipe.

To them and Musk I will say this -- in 1982 came the book , 'In Search of Excellence ' . The top dog companies of the Western world were covered extolling how they had the secrets to world dominance and were led by God's like Jack Welch, Thomas Watson etc. I read it cover to cover. Living in license Raj India they seemed enchanting to me. Certainly there was a lot to learn from their management practices. But today several of them have fallen by the wayside - IBM, GE, Kodak, Xerox, Wang, Ford etc. In all fairness a few retain their position in the firment.

The point I'm making is no one is God, no one, no matter how much of a winner is incapable of losing. Musk overpaid 2X at the very least for Twitter. At the rate he is going with a runaway narcissist style he looks like he's headed to the South Pole at least where Twitter goes. He has also destroyed his primary currency - Tesla stock.

[poloman]

I am HW guy all along my life. Have a query which has been in my mind for long. Please excuse if this is controversial.
Can some one from SW background throw light on why a social media company needs thousands of people in the technical roles (not talking about content moderation)? Twitter had close to 8000 employees, Meta 75K Google 130K. What the end customers see is an app or a website, which is same for years. What all these guys do on a day to day basis? Twitter has fired/lost 60% employees, still the app/site does not have any major performance issues or down time.
I see job description of some of these folks on LinkedIn and fail to understand what in real world that means.

Originally Posted by V.Narayan

The point I'm making is no one is God, no one, no matter how much of a winner is incapable of losing. Musk overpaid 2X at the very least for Twitter. At the rate he is going with a runaway narcissist style he looks like he's headed to the South Pole at least where Twitter goes. He has also destroyed his primary currency - Tesla stock.

With due respect, nothing is going to happen to Twitter. He overpaid for sure. It is almost a month now that he has taken over Twitter. Is there a exodus from platform? Is it down for extended periods? Has the active users decreased? I see a brighter future for Twitter than say a Meta. Any one uses FB now a days? But Twitter has a loyal following among the people in power and high places.
These guys can easily pay 8USD for the media/public attention they get for their tweets. We should not forget LinkedIn premium cost $29 a month and no one question that.

This is a clash of work cultures and ideologies which will settle down once Musk pushes his associates in to key roles.

TSLA stock is not doing anything different other than tech stocks. Please check the performance of other non Apple tech stocks. Many are performing worse.

[binand]

Originally Posted by poloman

why a social media company needs thousands of people in the technical roles (not talking about content moderation)? Twitter had close to 8000 employees, Meta 75K Google 130K. What the end customers see is an app or a website, which is same for years. What all these guys do on a day to day basis?

The reason for this confusion is that we don't see all the products these companies operate. Google for example, has not just their consumer-facing products - they also develop AOSP (Android), GCP (Cloud Computing) not to mention a number of hardware products (Pixel, Fitbit, Nest, Chromecast etc.) and their bread-and-butter ad platform. A list is here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products

Especially on the ad platforms, a large amount of software work goes into the backend systems that make the platforms appealing to advertisers - the segmentation engine & targeting options, cost controls, discovery of lookalike cohorts, ad efficacy tracking & analytics, ad space auctioning system etc.

[PreludeSH]

Originally Posted by binand

The reason for this confusion is that we don't see all the products these companies operate. Google for example, has not just their consumer-facing products - they also develop AOSP (Android), GCP (Cloud Computing) not to mention a number of hardware products (Pixel, Fitbit, Nest, Chromecast etc.) and their bread-and-butter ad platform. A list is here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products

Especially on the ad platforms, a large amount of software work goes into the backend systems that make the platforms appealing to advertisers - the segmentation engine & targeting options, cost controls, discovery of lookalike cohorts, ad efficacy tracking & analytics, ad space auctioning system etc.

To add some companies have their own hardware, amazon has its own ARM based processors they use in their servers which are then used to host their cloud platform. It will need HW engineers, platform engineers with OS and device driver/firmware engineers etc

Even twitter would need platform engineers who need to wring out performance, efficiency from hardware and platform software. Add to this testers who have to write their own tools to test, automate etc

Sometimes on same product there will be different feature teams that consist of duplicate roles across product for other features but are concentrating on that product version or feature to speed up the implementation and support.

[Venkatesh]

Someone is projecting multiple messages onto Twitter headquarters building in SF from a neighboring building - Link

This is being projected by someone across the street who calls himself a projection activist.

Video