Assuming the severance offer is real, I can’t imagine NOT wanting to take it, knowing that you’ll almost definitely get fired at the end of crunch time even if you stay.
At this point, is there any reasonable doubt that this isn’t intentional? I don’t pretend to understand all the financial implications, but it seems to me that he’s decided he’s never getting his 20B back, his friends who invested are out their money as well, and his best bet is to take the company to bankruptcy as soon as possible with as few remaining employees (who might be creditors depending on what contracts they might have) as possible, and hope that he can sell off the user data for more than the 13B the company owes and pocket what’s left.
Unfortunately, far too many white collar tech workers still buy into the neo-liberal dogma of individualism and think that unions are pointless. If all the decades of exploitation by tech companies hasn’t convinced them that unions are necessary, I doubt one ego-maniacal bully will.
A huge part of the “At Will” conundrum is California employers are not allowed to say they are racist, sexist, or bigots of any sort but can fire anyone because they want to. Provides built-in legal cover.
Calif has its version of the Warn Act, which is when a company as a RIF of some number of employees all at once (don’t recall what hte formula is). Most states and I think there are federal laws that are similar. In practice, the company has to give 60 days notice of the last day of work, but the employees are effectively shown the door on the day of the announcement, though they are still on the payroll for hte 60 days.
I’m not sure how this pledge-of-allegiance works wrt that Warn Act since this isn’t technically a mass layoff.
Seems to me that the NLRB deals mostly with organized labor, ie, unions. Is Twitter a union shop? Probably not. This might be more like the EDD or the state DoJ in California.
For me, just my own personal opinion, and I don’t know whether it’s likely what’s happening or not, but it is where I stand.
Elon’s made it clear that he isn’t going to give his money away to charity or to his apparently many children. He’s got no real next of kin. I suspect his will will place everything into LLCs or Trusts far away from everyone and that his goal is to spend it all before he dies, likely on himself.
He’s also tied in with investors who would really be happier if twitter ceased to be. My personal opinion (and this may just be me seeking patterns where there are none) is that he and a number of people wanted to send a message to technology that if you fuck with the wrong people you will pay for it. That this is a warning to other companies that if you’re publicly traded, you’re not safe from what Cory calls the “zotta rich”. That they will fuck you up and they have enough money and clout and power to do it without damaging themselves at all.
At least that’s what I think’s going on. All this talk about this “buying twitter” and what not only started in earnest and eagerness after Trump got exited from the platform, and there was an absolutely horrific stink raised about “go woke, go broke”, and I think that people like Elon, the Zotta Rich, are absolutely petty enough to send a message like this.
I’ve seen several comments elsewhere that Elon had largely succeeded in convincing young engineers to sacrifice their personal lives and work ridiculous long hours at SpaceX and Tesla because they were folks who shared his vision of remaking the space or automotive industries, and (in their opinion) changing the world for the better in the process. But in this case we’re talking about freakin’ Twitter, which is a lot less of an ambitious project than sending people to Mars, and he hasn’t even articulated any kind of well defined vision of where he wants to take the company other than finding ways to monetize it to avoid bankruptcy. So it certainly seems like he’ll have a harder time finding a lot of true-believers to work for him.
Except Musk tried to get out if buying Twitter and when he couldn’t, sold shares of Tesla to put more money into it. Everything he has done just happens to look exactly like the flailing of someone who took something on beyond their abilities, rather than any clear approach to shutting it down.
We can make the rich out to be heroes or make them villains, but for some reason we can’t accept that they might be stupid, no matter how much they show us.
it probably is. one of the things with severance is that, to accept it, you sign a contract. it usually has non compete clauses and importantly: you give up your right to sue
companies don’t offer severance out of the goodness of their heart. it’s entirely to protect themselves.
maybe it’s just a rick roll, with a face swapped musk
That’s the point. He could have broken the contract for far less than what he’s paid to get into this, and he’s a petty, shitty man , whose total outlay for twitter is less than half of what he thought he was getting from Tesla. And even that , much of that debt is now on twitter being serviced by twitter to repay Elon.
I absolutely believe he’s petty enough to take half his first major payday from Tesla (he’s due a couple others too) and destroy the place that fucked with him and his buddies. I totally believe he’s that kind of person.
Why can’t you believe he has no real plan or idea of what he’s doing, though? That’s where all the evidence points to me, and yet people keep talking about his plans to destroy Twitter based solely on incredulity that a man like him might do that without intending to.
Because I believe a person’s actions show their motives, and his actions are showing the actions of someone who is trying to destroy the service. He shut off 80% of all the microservices. He violated federal law that he absolutely knows about. He’s intentionally gotten into fights on twitter with engis and fired them. His own words are clear that he’s punishing people for the slightest “crimes.” He’s banned advertisers who disagreed with him from twitter.
Everything he’s done so far can be chalked up to petty malfeasance or ignorance, and I’ve watched this man be petty and angry enough to suggest which way this is. This is a man who tried to destroy someone wanting to rescue children from a submerged cave ACTIVELY, while the person was trying to rescue the children. He’s absolutely a shitty, petty enough person to do this.
I absolutely can buy ignorance. But I’ve seen enough of malfeasance from this man that looks EXACTLY LIKE THIS to believe that this is solely ignorance. He has a history of behaving in this manner when he’s exacting vengence on people.
Edit to add:
The corollary holds true too. This man was willing to condemn 12 children to death publicly because of his ego. Why is dropping 10-15% of his net worth to destroy something that made him angry outside the norm of someone who was willing to have 12 kids die?
There are about a thousand ways Musk and his financial backers could have dismantled Twitter as we know it without blowing so much money and personal credibility along the way if that was their true goal.
Musk isn’t just blowing his fortune here, he’s completely blowing his reputation. He’s become a walking punchline, the living embodiment of gross incompetence even among most of the techies who once worshipped him. Even if you think he’d be willing to intentionally destroy such a huge fortune just to satisfy a petty grudge we’re talking about a guy with a planet-sized ego, so there’s no way he’d intentionally lead the world to think he’s a huge fucking idiot.
Just because that is the result of his actions doesn’t mean it was the intent of his actions.
