The recent New York Times article “Two Weeks of Chaos: Inside Elon Musk’s Takeover of Twitter” is quite something, too. Musk stomps in, says he wants people fired before they can get their bonuses on Nov 1. Twitter staff tell him that would be illegal and in violation of employment contracts. Musk says he doesn’t give a shit, he’s used to legal battles. Everyone goes away, crunches the numbers and proves to him that it would cost him more to fire the employees before the 1st, and only then does he relent. (Except he wants them to prove the employees are “real humans” and not “ghost employees.” The chief accounting officer does an audit, proves they’re all actual employees… and then is immediately fired.) Musk demands that certain features be implemented in a few days - threatening the team with being fired if they fail. They fired a bunch of critical people and then tried to hire them back when they realized how much they were needed. Musk brought people from his other companies to advise him (such as insisting on more layoffs), and no one at Twitter likes them, either - they call them his “goons.”
Yeah, Musk sounds incredibly toxic, as do the people around him. They’re trying their best to make things impossible for the people left at Twitter, and I can’t see why anyone would stay (especially now that increasingly they don’t have access to the staff and tools they need to do basic maintenance, much less build new features, which Musk has ever-shifting ideas about).
My wife works in safety systems and QA. Even the sane, balanced companies often hate what she has to tell them and it requires a lot of patience for her to keep repeating calmly “Yes, really, here’s the relevant statute / standard required by your insurer / whatever.”
For a long time in tech, the “Musk” rule applied as a kind of unwritten rule at almost every place I worked at or contracted for. If you caught a resume with someone who had somehow survived at SpaceX or Tesla for longer than a year, that person wasn’t nailed out for the stack ranking and had the wherewithall to survive in Musk’s political hellscape. It was considered the sign that you would have a person who both survived quarterly layoffs of the lower 20% and who knew how to say and do the right things to a hatefull, confrontational manager.
But I haven’t been involved in hiring for awhile now, so I have no idea if that’s still in play or now if they consider sticking around a place like that for a length of time to be a sign of madness.
He seems like a distinctly “work like you own the company; I’ll pay you as if that’s its own reward” sort of guy.
If he actually tries that line on anyone I can only hope they send a bonesaw and an anonymous note to the effect that there’s only one person who has any reason to work like he owns the company; and if he’s wasting time reading this he’d better get back to the office.
MB asked for a raise. E told her that if she was truly critical to SpaceX, it should not be able to operate in her absence (or something to that effect).
Ironically the events of the past two weeks have shown that Elon’s absence is absolutely critical to the success of the companies he ostensibly runs. The only company he’s actually paying attention to is the one losing billions of dollars in value by the day.
I love footage of him in board rooms, because it’s just these scared toadies laughing at his lame jokes. He surrounded himself with yes men; I certainly wouldn’t want to work closely with him
To anybody here that works at Twitter, I won’t ask that you out yourselves, but as a fellow tech worker I really feel for you all and I can totally empathize with what you must be going through right now.
I’m sorry your boss is an egomaniacal sociopath exploiting your work as some sort of twisted vanity exercise all while running it straight into the ground.
The job market sucks right now with other tech companies laying off employees or freezing hiring and I’m sure it’s stressful waking up each morning not knowing if you’ll have a job or even a company to go to. None of you signed up for this kind of bullshit.
