I’ve never paid attention to Musk’s management style, but I predict that he’s the type to show up minty fresh 12 hours into a 16 hour day, and randomly shoulder-surf people, like a pinball machine with a wrecking ball.
Workers: Tired, deep into the work, and having to reply carefully, to avoid sending him off on a weird tangent. (i.e. never say “we can’t meet the deadline, the QA tests still have to be run.”)
Honestly, I imagine everyone started looking the moment his takeover bid looked liked it was serious. Anyone still there probably hasn’t been able to find something else yet. I’ve worked at a lot of different tech companies and I can’t think of a coworker at a single one of them who would stay under these conditions who didn’t have to. There’s always a few folks who have no choice (reliant on specific benefits or a commuting situation with kids in school, etc) but everyone else will be gone soon, I’m sure.
100% this. It’s like he’s never been an actual manager of anything before. He’s making all the wrong moves, alienating his staff publicly, and personally overseeing things way way below where his attention as CEO should be. If I worked at any of his other companies and saw all this, I’d probably be sending out resumes right now. Knowing that the man at the top is not just a childish edgelord, but actually also incompetent as a CEO would be the final straw for sure. Most CEOs are monsters if you examine them too closely, but they are at least good at their jobs so you can ignore it as an employee.
I’ve worked at companies where the man (and it’s always a man) at the top is an idiot and it never ends well for anyone below C-suite manager level. Sooner or later the place crashes and burns (possibly literally for SpaceX) taking all the stock options, potential severance, and promises of future profit sharing with it. The rich get richer and everyone else gets nothing for their years of 80 hour weeks. I hope everyone working at a Musk company is able to leave while they can on good terms.
I think you’re underestimating his ego and him thinking he can do no wrong, and will always be the richest man on earth.
Sure, but he doesn’t believe that, and thinks everything he does is going to benefit him in some way. When you live your entire life failing up, it’s easy to believe you are hypercompetent when you’re not…
I was responding to the hypothesis in the linked tweet that he’s doing all this because he’s trying to destroy Twitter. That it was his intent all along. I don’t see a motivation from him for doing that, particularly because of his ego.
I don’t know for sure, but that could be the case, I’d argue. He seems to hate criticism, and he got a fair amount of criticism on twitter. But it could all be incompetence brought on by his ego… It could be a combination of those… I’m also not sure we can rule out him seeking to take it over to make sure particular voices were re-platformed to continue the right wing take over of the country. He grew up with a segregated society that benefited him, I could see him wanting to rebuild that society again, because he firmly believes that that kind of society is best.
I think we can all agree, he sucks!
People on Twitter were mean to him would be sufficient motivation for his ego.
His motivation is not to destroy Twitter but to mould it in his own image, so to speak.
And he is achieving it, sort of…
Too bad his image of himself is so far off from who and what he really is.
And/or they have an H1B visa, which IIRC is held by/belongs to the employer. (Was this already mentioned?)
Oh I firmly agree this is probably why he took it over. I don’t think he wants to destroy it, I think he wants to keep it and weaponize it, but then got in over his head.
Yes, visas are definitely something that hold people at a job. I was on a few H1Bs in the US and it’s no fun knowing you’ll be deported if you lose your job. Fortunately that’s not usually too much of a barrier of new employers in tech (who can usually get new visas pretty easily) but it takes time. I was unemployed for six months once because I got laid off, lost the visa, then lived undocumented while waiting for the new job to get my visa. Once they did, I had to leave the country and “officially” re-enter again. This was all a long time ago though, when tech was red hot, employers would do anything to hire you, and H1Bs were plentiful. I don’t know what the employment and visa landscape looks like these days.
Hm… I think that’s where I disagree with you a bit… I think it’s a possibility on his end. He’s time and again shown himself to be a petty asshole, so I think it’s possible he wants to do destroy the platform. The biggest bit of evidence against that hypothesis is that he’s really not that clever (though as I’ve argued on other issues, it really does not take great smarts to destroy something - just a willingness to skirt the rules/norms, and be a bully).
I think we ALL agree he’s a dumbass jerkface, tho!
I am going to stand by what I said on the other thread. At this point the idea that Musk was out to destroy Twitter is basically a conspiracy theory – the only evidence is the assumption is he couldn’t possibly be so bad at his job that he’s doing it by accident. It’s like for the first few months of the war in Ukraine where people were like “I don’t know, guys, maybe this is just what Putin wanted” while all his materiel got destroyed.
Musk repeatedly told us why he wanted Twitter, to bring right wing style “free speech” to the place, because apparently he’s bought into that ideology. Then he tried hard to get out of buying it, which gives you some idea of how deliberate any of this is. And then he’s also an idiotic charlatan who has shown us before that he doesn’t really understand how much works.
Combine all that and this seems pretty much the predictable result, if a little faster than expected. I don’t see why he deserves any more credit than that. When people show you who they are, believe them.
I gather it is (or, was) easy to move around but this depends on someone at the old company playing ball, or at least answering the phone & opening emails. This was a problem for my former coworkers where we used to work. (Much smaller problem but we all had to file our own subst. W2s, as well.) I don’t see Twitter making the process easy for its employees but I hope that I’m wrong.
If his goal was to shut down the platform he could do so immediately, no need to make himself look like an incompetent jackass in the process. The ongoing debacle isn’t just bad for Twitter, it’s hurting all his business and financial interests.
Could there be a possible (or perceived) advantage in making a takedown look inadvertent rather than simply turning it off?
Yah, if transferring a visa is the goal, it takes coordination between old employer and new. That’s much quicker than getting a new one, so it’s going to be the ideal option. As you say though, Twitter may not play ball, and in that case a new visa can be obtained from scratch, but it takes longer (my six month example was the latter case).
Advantage for whom?
I mean, given who bankrolled this I’m all for pissing them off, but I doubt this is the plan.
Not that he actually has a plan, but this isn’t it.
“Purposely sabotaging one’s own business/financial interests in the service of some long-term Machiavellian goal” has been a staple of comedy movie plots for decades but I don’t see any way that could explain what’s been going on here.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing the rich and powerful always know what they are doing because the alternative is accepting the terrifying reality that yes, the people running the show really ARE that petty and stupid.
Oh, I think what’s going on is incompetence, too. I just wondered if simply turning Twitter off would be practical for Musk, if that’s what he wanted to do.
