When I see someone flailing about wildly in the ocean who’s further out of his depth than the rest of the bathers, my first assumption isn’t that he wants to kill himself.
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I mean, that one’s really easy – because billionaires don’t care about the lives of kids but do care about their net worth. That’s how you get to be a billionaire. If it were otherwise, Musk could have kept his promise to fix Flint’s water and been a hero for basically pocket change. He doesn’t even seem to particularly care about his own kids.
For the record nobody’s disputing that he’s being petty and vindictive to individual employees. But the company is his now. The woke days are over, comedy is allowed again, and the advertisers shouldn’t be leaving. The only reason he should want to sink that is if he doesn’t think he can make it float – which he might be learning in real time, but it doesn’t look at all like he knew in advance, and I am not going to give him credit otherwise.
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Regarding the picture of The Joker, keep in mind that all these alt-right kleptocrats like to hear people calling them “villains”. It strokes their egos. They all seem to fancy envisioning themselves with a monocle, a Persian cat on the lap, and a push button for the trap door in front of their desk. Roger Stone seems to have styled himself as an over-the-top Penguin. Musk wants to be some kind of Bond villain, like Scaramonga or Blofeld.
What they hate is to be portrayed as a buffoon, someone nobody would respect.
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They would, but he fired the booth staff.
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Good ol’ “Your services are no longer required.” More effective magic words than “abracadabra.”
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Leave now and collect 3 months’ severance, or wait until you are ground down and get nothing because of the inevitable impending bankruptcy? I know if I were a Twitter employee, the choice would be easy.
I remember an engineer from Palm once saying the first rule of startups is never be the last one left holding the bag who has to turn the lights off and gets no severance.
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But there are different kinds of villains. Musk has gleefully compared himself to a Bond villain like you describe above but I chose that version of the Joker because he didn’t have any overarching genius plan other than a compulsion to create chaos and destroy everything. I’m not sure Musk would appreciate the comparison.
But of course that is still giving Musk far too much credit because I believe that in this case he’s destroying it mostly through incompetence rather than pure malice.
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Working insane hours and sacrificing your personal life (for a while) for something you deeply believe in and care about is one thing.
Doing so indefinitely for someone who doesn’t seem to have a coherent plan or even a very good understanding of the business he’s just bought his way into is quite another.
I suspect that many of the senior engineers at Twitter have come up through places that made them do death marches and have told themselves “Never again.”
I don’t think Musk’s latest gambit is going to work as well as he thinks it will.
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Why would anyone want to go along with this? It’s so obviously a bad position to be in. He’s clearly an asshole who is treating workers like shit, doesn’t understand anything and is generally a terrible manager. The job is going to be extremely high-stress, long hours, with not only no increase in compensation but likely a further decrease in benefits (at least), a high chance of being arbitrarily fired at any time anyways, and all for what? One wouldn’t even have the potential satisfaction of producing a product that you could be proud of, because a) it’s Twitter, and b) Musk is so clearly clueless, flailing and driving it over a cliff that Twitter is currently getting worse and odds are Twitter won’t survive, much less ultimately end up as a better product. You’d have to be the most delusional Musk fan-boy to even contemplate it, if you had an actual choice.
I’m sure that was one of the first things that got axed. I can’t imagine they’re even thinking about hiring, they’re just shedding workers, with no consideration as to whether they actually need them or not. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when they need to hire people (soon), because no one of any worth will want to work there, given how they’re treating people.
Yeah, this seems as legally iffy as all the other stuff Musk has been doing. “We’re unilaterally changing your employment contract, and no, you don’t get to know how.”
They’re already firing people for having said critical things about him at any point in the past.
Musk would probably love it. He already doesn’t care if they’re firing people they, you know, need to run things. He’ll be 
on Twitter until the company collapses in a few weeks.
And yet Musk has still managed to violate California labor laws in a number of ways so far. Given how few protections there are, it’s kind of impressive, really.
Now he’s playing “fuck around and find out” with EU GDPR laws, which will be fun. (Worst case scenario for Twitter: having to pay 108% of their annual global revenue in fines.)
From what I’ve read, that already happened based on the metric they were initially using to fire people. (Then they tried to hire people back, but I don’t know how successful that was.) Remaining workers were trying to contact someone on a vital team and discovering the team no longer existed.
The wild incompetence on display really undermines the “evil genius” vibe for me. I keep feeling like Elon Musk has been revealed to actually be a stack of toddlers in a trench coat.
Although it’s now clear that Musk, like Trump, doesn’t want the “best” people, he only wants sycophants and fan boys. We’ll see how that works out for him.
Unfortunately the only people left after this will be desperate H1-B holders and Musk fan boys. (And probably only for a matter of weeks - the company is unlikely to last long enough for anyone to go through the unionization process anyways.)
Actually I think events like this are exactly what is shifting opinion. I’ve been seeing more tech people talking about unions, even before this, not because of wage issues - which they previously thought was the only reason to have a union, and a reason to not join - but as a way of controlling asshole bosses (and generally having a process for dealing with grievances, firing, etc.).
Someone was making the argument that Musk was using Tesla stock as collateral, and the stock is in a bubble right now and the established car companies are going to eat Tesla’s lunch soon with their electric offerings, so Musk might be seeing the stock as funny money that he’s burning off while it still has some value. Seems plausible - I mean, he’s still wildly incompetent and got forced to buy Twitter, but he may not really care that much about losing what he (over-) paid for Twitter either.
Actually, my understanding is that he couldn’t. The deal he signed, apparently on a whim, was extremely bad for him. The billion dollar penalty was if he was in a position where he was unable to buy Twitter. Ultimately the contract he signed obligated him to buy Twitter, and the legal battle was both going to be futile and was going to cause him damages in various ways, directly and indirectly. It was cheaper to buy Twitter at that point, at the (inflated) price he pulled out of his ass.
Musk is very much like Trump - it’s hard to know where the incompetence leaves off and the personality disorder kicks in, but he’s got both going on. He rushes into incredibly bad decisions and then also lashes out and breaks things (both deliberately and accidentally) when people come into conflict with him, because of his ego. He wants things to be different, but no idea how to make them so (because he’s got no firm vision, much less a plan), so things just fail, instead. Elon wanted to replace Twitter with “his Twitter,” but he had no clear idea of what that actually was (and even his vaguest notions conflict with reality).
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One reason that’s been mentioned is work visas. I imagine it must be getting close to where the people who haven’t said no to Musk are the ones who can’t afford to. 
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The obvious thing for any half-way competent evil genius/idiot billionaire to do would have been to leave the executive management in place and say: “I want you to do [this, this and this] - now make it happen or I’ll find some executives who will” and let them get on with implementing his whims. Then he’d at least have found out who the lapdogs were, and stood some chance of retaining them along with any inside knowledge and competence they had in how that company and its technology and its commercial operations actually worked.
What he did instead was (of course) wildly over-exaggerate his own competence and knowledge and start to drive the company towards oblivion at a fair old lick of speed.
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What do you have against Vincent Adultman? He was a good listener, and could be pretty self-reflective about his mistakes. Not qualities that Elon has demonstrated.
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One exception being that if you achieve “whistle blower” status there are severe penalties if they go after you… I know this because we attempted to make a management union at the power plant I worked at, and after that was illegally crushed one of our organizers did become a whistle blower and was basically untouchable until he retired.
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Driving the company into bankruptcy to avoid it going bankrupt sounds like a great game plan, worthy of a genius industry leader like Musk.
This is like committing suicide because you’re afraid of death.
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Comment, links.
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And there were over 500 in Ireland and they definitely broke the law (and you can’t tell people to leave or work double shifts, that is constructive dismissal). Problem is they would have to go individually to the Workplace Relations Commission where they’d win and probably be awarded near a year’s salary or something like that or Twitter would have to engage with the government.
Which I can’t see happening. Not in anything like good faith anyway.
Be interesting if they barricaded themselves in the office for a bit and torched the company.
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Because nothing says “engineering-driven” like publicly firing an engineer who pointed out incorrect technical information, then explained what the actual issue was and a simple outline of what it would take to fix when asked - in the forum he was asked. (If Elon didn’t want to get shown up in public, he probably should have asked that kind of thing through internal channels - as the fired engineer also pointed out IIRC)
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“Fine! I will do it all myself! And it will be…”
[lights go out]
“…awesome.”
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Also, it takes way more than a year to form a union. They could organize a sick out or a slowdown, but that might conflict with their grandiose notion of rugged individualism.
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