"That didn’t stop multiple outlets, including CNBC and Bloomberg, from running headlines Friday saying that laid-off Twitter employees were leaving the building carrying boxes."
This is the part that scares me. It feels like a lot of news media outlets will publish just about anything. It feels like they have no interest at all in whether or not what they're saying is true, or even likely to be true. That's the part that worries me.
I don't know all the details, but so far this looks a good example of the opposite irrationality to blind news trust: Jumping at the chance to criticize the news. Hatred of journalists is the default position for a lot of people. In this case, it seems reasonable to report on people saying they were fired who are going so far as to physically act the part. I wouldn't have suspected they were lying. Also, it's not a particularly dramatic thing to get wrong, as long as they correct it. It's not as if they're reporting somebody's death.
Commenters are calling this "scary" and "illuminating". Some outlets report some pretty scarily big falsehoods, for sure, but this is not one of them. Another commenter even went so far as to imply that not knowing the word "ligma" is a joke counts as bad journalism. The tone is uncharitable, to put it lightly.
They both corrected the articles after 3 hours. Gotta give credit where credit is due. But it shouldn't scare you that peoples lies are taken at face value. We see it everyday. Hell some politicians are lying right your face.
Journalists are supposed to have more credibility than your friend's gossip though...
While retracting and/or correcting the articles is a step towards journalistic integrity, it should be very troubling these articles were published in the first place.
After all, how many people bother to go back and review past articles just on the off chance some piece of information was corrected? None...
Honestly it troubles me that anyone believes 'journalists' from any of the major corporations have _any_ credibility, even going back to the 1990s with censorship of stories have been rife within the corporate 'journalism' industry. There are very few journalists that deserve real credibility.
It has been an issue since the invention of the printing press. Benjamin Franklin himself published fake news about Indian tribes scalping the settlers in order to convince the colonists to take action against them.
Journalists should not be afforded legal protections for publishing un-verified, demonstrably false information.
We need a system where it's dangerous to not thoroughly vet your story before throwing it over the fence.
Currently, they just say "oops" and move on like it never happened... but the damages caused to the public and it's discourse are permanent. The past decade has shown us that much at a minimum.
Years from now folks will still howl about Musk marching loyal twitter employees out the front door with boxes full of their belongings... despite it being completely untrue. Heck, there are still folks that feverishly assert the "OK" sign is racist...
Journalists don't have any special protection under US federal law for publishing false information. Anyone can sue them for libel. Although it's difficult for plaintiffs to win such cases, regardless of whether the defendant is a journalist or anyone else.
It does not need to be libel to be permanently damaging to the public.
The "OK" sign as a symbol of "white power" is a great example - nobody's reputation was tarnished directly by the reporting... but the entire story was made up and never true. Yet, there's folks today that insist it truly is a symbol of "white power".
Libel is also notoriously difficult to establish grounds for, and be successful with a lawsuit. Intent is difficult to prove - yet I would assert a journalist that does not thoroughly vet their story before publishing has a malicious intent, even if it was indirect.
>The "OK" sign as a symbol of "white power" is a great example - nobody's reputation was tarnished directly by the reporting... but the entire story was made up and never true. Yet, there's folks today that insist it truly is a symbol of "white power".
This is strange - the OK symbol was definitely co-opted by white nationalists; it started as a "media troll", then people started to do it non-ironically. It served it's purpose and to say it was "never true" is at the very least controversial. I had personally seen it spread on /pol/ months before it got any mainstream coverage.
While I believe the story may have been overblown, I think it stands it would be very difficult to sue a journalist that this was libel or even untrue. At the very least the memes had to have started from somewhere and that posing with the ok symbol wasn't a particularly popular thing to do until after the memes were created.
It started on 4Chan as a deliberate "watch us make the media go nuts" joke... and it worked.
Today, here you are asserting it actually has an alternate, nefarious meaning. It doesn't, and never did.
It became a meme because of how ridiculous of an idea it was.
I think you're proving my point. Retractions and corrections do not work. Published stories have enormous weight, yet modern journalists don't seem to be aware of, or do not care about, the potential harm they can do. It's just a race to publish first - truth be damned.
>It started on 4Chan as a deliberate "watch us make the media go nuts" joke... and it worked.
The disagreement then you and I have is that just because it was an "epic troll" doesn't make it any less serious. To me the fact that it's supposed to be a "joke on the media" is the point - it provides plausible deniability. That's the entire point of using the OK sign; Plausible deniability.
You could go on 4chan and found hundreds of pictures of guys posing with the ok sign, but you'd have to be really naive to think they didn't know what they were doing. A bunch of open white nationalists all adopted the same symbolism at the same time, but I'm supposed to pretend that the symbolism isn't being co-opted?
To be fair, I don't think it was ever the case that Trump or many high ranking officials used the OK symbol as some dogwhistle (Trump has always spoken with his hands), but to pretend it was never true is completely false. May journalists have blown the thing out of proportion? Sure, but that isn't libel and you can't sue someone for mistaking the growth of a trend.
>I think you're proving my point. Retractions and corrections do not work.
I am not someone who came to this conclusion from reading a New York Times article. I've spent a lot of time on 4chan in my teenage years and have kept the site at an arms distance. It was very clear to me what the gesture meant. I remember the threads, and I remember seeing the image the ADL now uses when it was first posted on there. To pretend that 4chan isn't full of white nationalists is bonkers. It's like saying the swatstika never meant anything other than spirituality. Their stated reasons for co-opting the symbol doesn't change the fact they co-opted it.
Jim says: Some people like to bathe in mayonnaise.
Bob says: It has been reported some people like to bathe in mayonnaise.
Is Bob wrong here? Yes, because Bob didn't verify the information as being factual. Bob might as well have just made it all up himself... it would be no worse. Quite a silly example, but I hope you see the point.
4Chan made up the "OK" symbol story. The media ran with it doing zero research or verification. Then, sometime later people starting meming the symbol because it's laughably absurd.
That does not make it a "co-opted" symbol and does not give it any additional meaning other than literally meaning "OK". It really does not matter if you can find some example of some full fledged level 47 paladin super dragon KKK guy in white robes that made that symbol once because it was funny - it still does not mean "white power" for crying out loud. There is no reality where there is a KKK meeting (or whatever) where they gather around and flash "OK" signs to one another. Real life isn't a corny 70's comedy.
You've been had, very badly, and are really hammering my point deeper and deeper. The media needs to be held accountable for publishing unverified and/or untrue stories because they are extremely damaging to the public.
What about the white nationalist that killed 49 people in cold blood flashing the symbol in court? Is that funny to you as well? At what point does it become an actual symbol used by white nationalists to signal white nationalism and racism?
>It really does not matter if you can find some example of some full fledged level 47 paladin super dragon KKK guy in white robes that made that symbol once because it was funny - it still does not mean "white power" for crying out loud.
You and I just have very different levels of tolerance when it comes to in-group signifiers. You can are carry water for these white nationalists, but the whole "it's just little joke" cover is on purpose. It provides a cover of plausible deniability. Wikipedia has a list of white nationalists using the symbol while shooting up mosques but I assume the bullets were made up by 4chan as well. How many white nationalists have to use the symbol while committing hate crimes before it's no longer media sensation?
>There is no reality where there is a KKK meeting (or whatever) where they gather around and flash "OK" signs to one another. Real life isn't a corny 70's comedy.
I never implied this and you trying to reduce racism to cartoony levels of seriousness that you might see in a film.
People say Twitter is not real life, then you proffer 4chan as real life.
Touch grass, my friend.
I went from pharma research (my degree) to tech to the restaurant world. We use lots of hand gestures because the environment is loud. The hispanic guys I work with give me the bird all the time (kitchen crew), and nobody takes offense.
you've been captured by the spin. as a sibling comment points out, it was a joke from the get go, and everyone was is on it except for those who wanted it to be true.
> Journalists should not be afforded legal protections
They have no special protection.
> need a system where it's dangerous
You want to destroy free speech, then. Any policy covering journalists would equally apply to everyone.
> assert the "OK" sign is racist
Are you asserting it wasn't used by trolling white nationalists? Or do you mean that the intent was trolling, rather than something "sincere"? Or something else?
Yes they do. How often are journalists successfully sued for damaging stories that turned out to be untrue and unverified?
> You want to destroy free speech, then
It has never been ok to harm someone else with your speech. People lose careers, lives and more over unverified stories.
> Are you asserting it wasn't used by trolling white nationalists? Or do you mean that the intent was trolling, rather than something "sincere"? Or something else?
There is no assertion, it is fact. This story was made up by 4Chan to provoke the exact response they got... and then young folks started meming with the sign because of how ridiculous it is.
There are still folks, however, that truly believe there were troves of actual white supremist roaming the streets flashing "secret" symbols to each other and giggling... Come on, say it out loud and try not to laugh.
Are people paying for credibility? Hate to break the news to you (ha!) but the news you’re going to see the most is the news that sells the best. It’s all about those Benjamins. You can’t expect good things from a society that has compromised all its ideals and prostrates itself for money. Certainly not journalistic integrity - unless it sells. Which it doesn’t.
For some reason many of these people that lose trust in traditional media immediately start trusting "independent media" on YouTube that happens to agrees with their views or ways of seeing the world.
Yes, because the education system failed them and taught them to blindly trust in the media and so when they lose that they go to the opposite end of the spectrum. Some of them will come around and find some middle ground, and others will be be content in spewing misinformation as long as it makes them feel better.
I trust broadly corroborated video evidence. For example I know that the “mostly peaceful protests” were anything but from watching videos filmed by diverse sources.
The Internet and ubiquitous cameras really have revolutionized our ability to see what’s actually going on.
Because they got caught. How long would those articles have remained up if nobody else had done the journalists' investigation jobs for them and then reported the incorrect story? Would the journalists who "broke" the story ever have bothered to verify it themselves? Would they have issued a correction at all if it didn't quickly become public knowledge that the story was fake?
It was obvious the guys were trolling. Last names "Ligma" and "Johnson" very over the top statement holding a Michelle Obama book.
The journalists were either too focused on getting the scoop and fooled themselves into believing what is clearly a ruse or they knew and went along with it because it generated views/clicks.
I don’t think they are really due any credit for correcting misinformation that they shouldn’t have published in the first place.
I understand news outlets are all in a rush to be among the first to cover these trending stories, but in my opinion that is not a valid excuse for failing to verify basic facts prior to publication.
People still think that police were murdered by the protesters on Jan 6 two years after being told that every police officer who died on that day died from causes that had nothing to do with the protestors and everything to do with going up a flight of stairs under the influence of donuts.
It's not good enough to print a retraction which no one sees and pretend it's solved the problem of spreading lies.
One thing to remember here is that Twitter is disproportionately popular with journalists and other media figures. The idea of major changes where they spend a lot of time is going to cause concern, much as HN would freak out over major changes at GitHub.
Now imagine what happens when anyone, anywhere has explicit endorsement from the owner of a public Internet forum to post completely unfactual claims on that forum, under the specious guise of "free speech". Or when "reputable" "news" outlets get to use forum posts as sources for their breaking news (they already do). Imagine how this might revise societal norms also around specious, unfactual claims about racial groups or other segments of the population, to the point where instances of "hate speech" are adjudicated only in the court of public opinion (on a private platform no less, ha, ha).
The best outcome for society is for people to stop blindly trusting, or at least be much more skeptical of, what they read on the Internet. This is probably unlikely to happen.
You should remove this altogether; it's definitely a prank. These two people didn't actually work at Twitter, and as of right now there haven't been any layoffs (outside of 4 executives being fired).
It's a real story that CNBC reported a fake story, and that's all the updated title says.
(Actually, I don't know what the title says because I see two different titles. In Feedly it says "CNBC reporting that..." but here on this page it says "Departing Twitter employees...". If the title was updated to be correct, I'd expect the Feedly copy to be old and this copy to be current. I'd also generally expect an aggregator (Feedly) to be less authoritative and less current than the source (HNn), yet in this case the Feedly title is correct and what I see right here in my browser on a phone is incorrect, or rather, not updated anyway. So, thanks to the existence of editing and unknown caching in unknown places/layers, I have no way to say what the title even is, and so no way to say if it's correct or not.)
It's not; the title says CNBC reported layoffs have started; not that CNBC fell for a hoax.
There is literally zero other backing for "layoffs have started"; not anonymous sources, not official sources, not CNBC investigations. The entire basis for this was that hoax. @dang should delete this. The entire article is false and will need to be retracted.
The tweet by @Anthony was deleted within a few minutes of me responding (could be coincidental of course) [1]
The disturbing part is how the retweet chain between the reporters on Twitter changed the story: The original Tweet was "Entire team of data engineers let go." That became "Twitter data engineering team..." That became "Twitter's entire data engineering team let go"
Needless to say "Entire team of data engineers" is much smaller in scope than "Twitter's entire data engineering team." The WSJ reporter who posted this tweet made an egregious error (even before the hoax was revealed).
Wow, so CNBC potentially put up a front page story based on the word of a guy on the street, no verification? I don't know how normal that is but it doesn't sound good.
I was always under the impression the common journalistic standard was two independent verifications in general and three for super serious, potentially litigation inducing stuff.
It's likely deleted because the author realized it's almost definitely fake. There's no way only two people were laid off, and wanted to stand outside and give interviews. Their boxes are mostly empty, and it's such a cliche to "get fired" with a box of your stuff.
He didn’t pay due to what Twitter currently is, he bought because of what he thinks he can make it. That obviously means a detour from their current direction, otherwise he would have just leaned back with his investment let things continue as they are and wait for them to become more valuable.
> he bought because of what he thinks he can make it.
He bought because it is his favorite place to be, he said he would as a joke, decided why not and made an offer right before a massive valuation drop, and then was forced to by the courts if he wanted to avoid disclosing a lot of personal information. I don't think that he actually fantasizes about it making money.
The value generated by employes determines the market capitalization, not the delta between market cap and acquisition bid.
Whether you pay "above market price" or not has nothing to do with the value employees provide, but with how friendly or hostile the board and shareholders may be, or how willing to sell they are.
False. The value generated by employees only loosely determine the market capitalization. Market cap is driven primarily by perceptions of future market cap.
Employees don't suddenly become less productive because the stock market has a bad day.
Unless he thinks Twitter doesn't need data engineers at all, they now have to staff an entire department from scratch, with zero handoff of institutional and tribal knowledge. Maybe on a long enough time horizon, they're really that bad that it's worth it anyway, but realistically, I doubt Twitter has just been hiring nothing but worthless shitheads. Whatever you think you can achieve with a new team could have been achieved with at least some of these people. It's like sacking the entire Los Angeles Lakers. Yeah, they suck and they're an embarrassment, but there aren't literally zero salvageable personnel and you can't hope to field a better team from scratch within a few seasons, and you'll have to overpay just to try. At least there is no salary cap for tech firms, so they're legally allowed to overpay, but seeing the company is a mess and you risk being fired en masse just to put on a show for the press as far as I can tell, you're going to have to overpay even more now.
Maybe his plan is to automate it all? Full self data engineering within 5 years?
Let's posit that he didn't buy twitter for the potential profits on twitter revenues, since there are any number of equal/better options for that, some of which he's already involved in.
Perhaps he bought it because he's interested its capacity to shape (dare I say manipulate) public discourse, which he's utilized heavily, and may have taken umbrage when that was limited in any way.
Now, perhaps, he plans to manipulate it further, in the way a singularly-minded owner can. One possible problem with that plan is if internal staff see what's happening, don't like it, and tell the world.
Data engineering is the staff likely in the best position to see what's really happening on the platform and potentially tell others. So an owner motivated by wanting to manipulate the platform without pesky whistleblowers might want to fire them all and replace them with people selected for loyalty and/or buy-in on the motivations for manipulating twitter as a platform.
> Perhaps he bought it because he's interested its capacity to shape (dare I say manipulate) public discourse, which he's utilized heavily, and may have taken umbrage when that was limited in any way.
So interested he tried to get out of it multiple times.
Any potential displays of buyer's regret are ultimately framed by the much more weighty evidence that he made an offer in the first place.
Certainly no one forced him to do that.
"He didn't really want it" just doesn't fly given that context. We don't know why he indicated at some points he wanted to back out. Maybe he just thought he could renegotiate a better deal. Maybe he really did have second thoughts about whatever his reasons were for making the offer in the first place.
But he was, at some point, at least $44B or on the order of "one fifth his net worth" interested. Which seems pretty interested to me.
One important thing to remember is that Elon had access to Twitter data for quite some time and you can be certain his team has built tooling to do whatever Elon wanted. It won't be a mature system, surely, but it will be in place.
I don't have a reference for it. I simply went to LinkedIn and searched for Data Engineers at Twitter, and looked at their bulleted lists of what they do in the role.
I got the impression that it was a relatively small team, but someone close to Twitter could tell me I'm 100% wrong about that, and I wouldn't be shocked.
I would guess he wants to fire the entire team handling the data so he can more easily cook the books, and pretend like he's making a killing on Twitter - and try to flip it to some even more egotistical Billionaire.
This comment strikes me being rooted in a limited and almost comical understanding of business finance, especially at this scale. This isn't Hollywood. Since neither of us are privy to twitter's books (and Musk is, btw) it is equally (and more likely) that he's dumping positions that are double and triple redundant - a common occurrence in bloated bureaucratic teams of large companies that are poorly run and/or structured. I fully expect Musk to lay off most of Twitter's existing team and cycle through most staff in the next six months. He still has to weed out bad actors and saboteurs, as well. I also find it irresponsible for you to assume his motivations and intentions when you've been given none that reflect your supposition.
Thinking you can cycle "most of Twitter's existing team" with new employees in just 6 months without any impact to service availability or velocity also shows a "limited and almost comical understanding of" the importance of organizational knowledge, operations management, and recruiting.
I actually work in finance reporting, as a data engineer, at FAANG.
Interesting that you think the entire data team is double & triple redundant.
It's almost as if you're the one lacking knowledge.
Speaking as someone who previously worked at a company blatantly committing fraud, the CEO hand-picking the entire data team was instrumental to said fraud.
Maybe that's just my past causing the suspicion. If he laid off 75% of the data team, I'd be less skeptical. Maybe he thinks they're double and triple redundant, as you say. 100% is extremely suspect, though.
As someone who runs Tesla, which has a large data eng team, he knows the entire team isn't useless.
Your entire first comment was an assumption of bad faith on the part of Musk. Given that Twitter is now a private entity, there's no motivation to act fraudulently. I think Musk's track record merits at least a few quarters of actions before everyone jumps to conclusions?
Do you know long it takes to staff and train an entire data engineering department? It'll be minimum a year until its staffed to appropriate levels given the sheer amount of data Twitter generates every day, and another year for that team to reach any level of competence. He's driving Twitter into the ground.
It's going to be especially hard to restaff the team with the implicit threat of "and if you don't tell Elon what he wants to hear, he'll fire the entire team again" hanging over it.
LOL @ the person that thinks it's not hard to hire experienced data engineers. There's tons of junior folks around but hiring someone that has experience with working with complex data at the scale twitter has is not easy at all.
It's not that hard if they have access to sufficient training, organizational knowledge, and mentorship. That was just wiped out entirely. Every new data engineering hire for the next year will be figuring it out from scratch.
Yeah, good luck with that. I guess if you pay enough they will come but they need to settle in and figure out a plan. It won’t happen immediately. I certainly wouldn’t sign up to work for a company that just fires entire orgs without a real plan.
To be fair, he tried pretty hard to not do it. He ran his mouth, now he's dealing with it as he sees fit since he bought it. He can throw a tantrum all he wants. He's never going to see the repercussions of his knee jerk reactions, but all of the people on the receiving end are now rethinking their holiday plans.
I honestly hope he ends up killing Twitter. Maybe we can convince him to buy the next social platform and then lather, rinse, repeat until he becomes the savior we didn't want but the savior we needed in eliminating the cancer that social has become.
Elon Musk's plan _literally_ 3 weeks ago was to complain to the judge that too many bots were on Twitter, and therefore Elon Musk doesn't have to buy Twitter.
Some of us have more memory than a goldfish ya know? It wasn't even a month ago that Elon Musk was 100% full tilt "too many bots on Twitter / Twitter not worth this money".
We get that Musk has to _pretend_ that he likes the company now. But we all know its the judge who forced him to do this.
Makes sense to fire the team that is in charge of measuring things since he is going to make up his own numbers anyways.
Six months from now he will announce that the fake account problem is solved. His supporters will laud him as a genius. Did he actually remove bots? No one will know, and no one will care.
So, if Elon turns Twitter into 4Chan, does anyone have any idea how he expects to make money? Big brands will run, and Twitter will be left with ad revenue from boner pill manufacturers. Or, is making money even the plan? Maybe controlling info is the plan and the purchase price for Twitter is just an expense toward that end?
That's the beauty of private ownership - the owner can derive use-value in any way they wish. A private owner could fire everyone, close up shop, and still be perfectly inline with the use-value they expected to achieve with their purchase. That's market realism in action. Who are we to say what's good or bad of it. That's what the market is for - to transmute money into value and vice versa.
SpaceX is private and is dependent on government contracts that come with numerous strings attached.
Similarly, Musk at Twitter is beholden to the big boys that actually put up the majority financing for this absurd purchase. He cannot just do whatever he wants, only what his consortium will be on board with.
He's said from the start his intention is to make Twitter a universal platform for everyone. Currently it's a cesspool echo chamber of the same bad takes from people who are overly online. It has a lot of room to grow and if he's successful, the valuation will up a ton.
It is quite common in LBOs to terminate entire departments, what is unusual is the speed this is being executed.
Elon maintains he purchased Twitter to preserve free and open communication, indicating this wouldn’t have been possible with the now previous leadership. Maybe he also purchased it because, at one time, he thought it was undervalued. Either way, the solutions to realize either goals would be like any other LBO, downsizing and restructuring. This scale of layoffs shouldn't be a surprise.
"Age-old" may depend on your definition of age. I am in my upper sixties, and thought that I had a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of vulgar humor, but I had not encountered this one.
I suspect confirmation bias, and a desperate desire for these events to be true (the Musk takeover of Twitter must be bad) led to overlooking an obvious prank seemingly designed to invoke this very reaction from the media.
Hook, line and sinker.
However, the real damage is done. How many people saw the headlines and now will forever assume this event actually transpired?
Well Musk also said he'll layoff 75% of staff so it wouldn't be too surprising that he'd layoff staff. He's backtracked on that but he's still laying off staff.
It was the right mix of knowing when to be serious and when to throw in deadpan ridiculousness.
The clip I saw was about a minute and ended with one of the two saying he "needs to go check on his husband and wife"... while there are throuple relationships, I don't yet think they are possible in a legal marriage.
Firing everyone the moment you pick up a company without knowing whose important or having that institutional knowledge transfer occur is a really good way to just completely destroy it. Never mind that no one with a sane mind is gonna work for Twitter knowing they'll have to pick up the pieces.
I think people shouldn't jump to conclusions that the firings were completely uninformed. People seem to be under the assumption that 100% of the executives and management would be against Elon. There's going to be quite a few who will talk to Elon and give opinions on what changes need to be made, probably people who were out of favor with existing management and executives. These may be people he has been talking to for quite some time, even before the deal went through.
Also the tweet doesn't say if it was just the data engineering team, more than that, or a subset of people and the people fired think it's the entire team.
Having gone through a layoff before, you're generally not told what subset of people were let go, just that you have been.
Edit:
The linked tweet in question has also been deleted...
This would be my preferred approach as an employee… get in, move quickly, then announce layoffs are done. From the beginning his investment thesis was that the headcount is extremely bloated (and from my perspective it’s hard to disagree), so this isn’t a surprise or news to anyone.
The alternative approach is to do what CNN is doing by announcing significant structural changes are coming and let employees spend the next 6 months wondering if they will have a job. The psychological toll of this approach seems horrible to me.
I don't believe this. Only two people? This is "performance art" by two pro-Elon people.
There's no way Twitter laid off two people on Elon's first day; layoffs take planning. It's just two guys with mostly empty boxes. I doubt most employees would even be in the office on a Friday. I dislike Elon and am pretty sure big layoffs are coming, but they won't be reported by two guys on a sidewalk claiming to be "data engineers".
EDIT: It's confirmed these two people didn't work at Twitter. One went by "Rahul Ligma", which is a joke setup ("lick my ...").
What's your source for these people being pro-Elon? What is the logic behind looking like you've either been fired or are quitting as soon as Elon is controlling the company, and that somehow making him look good?
The "joke" is that they're trolling "liberal snowflakes" who dislike Elon taking over and now are afraid of losing their jobs. The empty box had a copy of Michelle Obama's book, for example, is a good indication of this.
Considering Elon's business decisions in the past, i don't think this will break twitter. He'll likely re-hire a new team with more experience with leads from Tesla or Spacex.
Without Musk’s reasoning, and full disclosure I am not a data engineer, but as a role it strikes me as unnecessarily distinct (as in everyone should have these skills to pull and analyze data)
Second, just musing here, but I have noticed data engineers are a more diverse crowd than software engineers. Perhaps it has less of a stigma that keeps people away from software engineering
Twitter is old enough to alienate users if non trivial changes are made, but it has also not gone anywhere for years in terms of product development. I'm curious about Musk's plan to escape that complicated vicious cycle. I wouldn't be surprised if the first phase involves firing a bunch of quiet quitters and people who add no value to the business.
From an engineering point of view I can think of a few things I would like to play with if I worked for Twitter, Elixir Liveview being one of them. There is a lot of nice tech that would suit Twitter 2.0 and simply didn't exist at old Twitter's peak.
Twitter acquired and shutdown Vine, Periscope, and Posterous (what could've been substack) among many others. They seemed rather complacent and uninterested in innovation, or even profits. I have no sane explanations for the management of the business side of their operation.
All posts about the topic are being flagged, to the great confusion of many of us. I've seen over a dozen posts come and go since yesterday's announcement.
Tesla Autopilot discussions still have good content, but the Musk-Twitter deal is far more political than technological, and, when you combine that with the (small minority) of rabid anti-Musk sentiment, I don't doubt HN is capable of discussing the topic properly. Besides, it's hard to go beyond "free speech!" vs "worse harassment!", there isn't much more to say.
It is a little surprising but honestly a lot of people here just don't use Twitter at all. It's like the platonic ideal of a bubble. I know it's the primary communication platform for a lot of important politicians and corporations and whatnot but I genuinely don't believe my life would be impacted in any way if Twitter collapsed tomorrow. Those people will find somewhere else to post.
That is totally fair and I don't have an explanation. I've probably just been tuning out the other Twitter stories so I didn't notice the inconsistency.
There are plenty of upper-middle-class people who live in a high cost-of-living area and are spending 50% on rent. Rich people additionally will have most of their cash tied up in business deals that won't resolve until way later.
The definition of financial irresponsibility is not being poor.
The average home price is over a million bucks there. Renting a 1 bedroom apartment is like $1500 or more a month. The poverty line for a family of 4 is something in the low six figures last I looked. The cost of living in SF/San Jose area is astronomical.
People getting paid well learn how to spend it. Also, some of the "getting paid well" by FAANGS is in options, so it's not like those pay the bills now
Half a year ago there would've been recruiters trying to swoop these guys. Imagine it, you're a jobless programmer, you hear about the Elon assimilation, you get a box, put some stuff in it, drive to the Twitter HQ, loiter around outside, and get a job offer.
But nowadays the recruiters would probably also be scammers...
I'm not sure if its anything in particular quite yet.
Note that this is a leveraged buyout, where Twitter has taken on $13,000,000,000 in debt to support the buyout. A lot of this debt (at least $3 Billion) is unsecured-loans expected to be rated CCC or worse... a rating that yields 16% APY.
Overall, the debt is estimated to cost 10% and getting worse (as interest rates rise), suggesting a ~$1.3 Billion/year hole in Twitters finances right now.
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For better or worse, Elon Musk's only sane financial option is to fire huge swaths of the company. He's gotta find $1.3 Billion/year in costs and fix that. Firing thousands of engineers will get him... partially there.
Of course, Elon should have been trying to grow the company, but that seems a lot harder than just firing a ton of people.
I'm sure Elon is also a vindictive asshole, so he also probably wants to get back at the team who brought up Twitter's arguments for mDAU numbers in court. It doesn't matter if the team was right or wrong, they were against Elon and therefore are to be terminated. IMO anyway, that's my read on his psyche right now.
The fact that Elon can also "rationalize" it as a good business move is icing on the cake. He's really gotta cut costs to have any hopes of making this work.
Clearly you don't know anyone at Twitter. This company is known for having the least productive workforce of any major techco. We're talking people pulling 10 hour work weeks. Additionally, cost cutting isn't the sole province of MBA bros. It's a basic reality of operating a company. Silicon Valley has really lost its mind during the free money era. Some of us don't even understand the basic realities of a business anymore.
Twitter owns the debt. Elon owns Twitter, but can let Twitter go bankrupt on its own and cut his losses.
As far as I can tell, Elon Musk is just invested at "getting back" at everyone who forced him to buy this company at way overpriced values. He's fired the CEO, CFO, Legal Team, and now the data-engineers who supported the legal team's arguments.
Without digging, I'm guessing you thought Musk was just doing a 'pump and dump' when the news broke in April, and that he would never acquire the company.
This assumption of bad faith is just terrible for HN, and the fact that you can't substantiate your argument doesn't breed much confidence in your assertions.
Musk's reputation is on the line without a doubt, and we can all point and say, "ha ha" if he fails. Otherwise...
Thank the lord the Google Founders have withdrawn but still have ultimate control and appointed competent managers in their stead - pity the folks who ponied up some of the $$$ for this deal.
I like the thing where people assume everybody working at Twitter is a computer science PhD slinging 5000 lines of code daily with stacks of job offers for Silicon Valley headhunters, and not a small army of 27-year old cat lady hall monitors
Now that we know this was a hoax, it's sad that some people took this "news" and ran with it, with wild criticisms of Musk (even trying to psychoanalyze him).
I hope people take some time to reflect on their personal bias here.
One billionaire replaced another billionaire at the helm of a major company, and proceeded to restructure the company. That happens all the time, and no one hears about it or cares. The only reason this is front page news is the anticipated changes in censorship policy.
Not really. It's not just 1 billionaire replacing another billionaire.
Twitter was public and is now private. That's a huge difference.
It's not just any billionaire. It's literally the richest person in the world. That also makes a difference.
The idea that the only reason this is in front page news is changes in censorship policy does not seem to follow considering nearly every other major purchase makes it to the front news. Michael Dell taking Dell private was heavily in the front page news. There were no censorship policy concerns there.
Space man has direct impact on my agency; I need to believe in money and wealth for him to be rich.
I really don’t get the general public deflating the value of their self agency for dedication to Elon and Co todo list. We’ll except the copious amounts of government backed nation state scrip they command. But government bad too mmmk
Public talks a game about freedom and democracy while reciting a curated set of acceptable language regarding business, and bending their agency to the idea using the environment like an open sewer is optimizing for self.
But yeah flippant sarcasm about space man covers if. Yer so smert
It is difficult to take comments like this seriously. Are you serious?
Do you really believe that Elon Musk's role in the U.S. is akin to people like Roman Abramovich or Mikhail Prokhorov who literally robbed Russia of state owned assets during the market reform period? Does he compare to China's princelings, whose insane power over 1 billion+ people is derived almost solely from their being born to the Chinese communist political elite?
Those are examples of real oligarchy. Musk is an example of an outsized success story in a free country. He bought Twitter using the assets he gained in the building of Tesla and SpaceX–two companies of crazy high importance and utility to society.
The people fired are in an at-will employment arrangement in the most lavishly compensated industry in the world, at a company that has dramatically underperformed against its potential and (former) peers for years.
Twitter has long been seen as the worst example of unproductive, entitled employees that has become emblematic of the rot-from-riches that is rife within tech.
These people will be just fine, and they will (freely) find other jobs.
Twitter users contribute to Twitter's capital by virtue of reified social relations(capital) and the content they create. Yet, the users who create this capital have no say in the handling of the value they create. Instead it's a single person. Any analysis that doesn't take this into account is fundamentally flawed and willfully neglectful to the point of absurdity.
I guess you're right. But only if we redefine the term "capital" in defiance of hundreds of years of usage and practice.
Do you expect this kind of "capital" from all businesses you patronize? Do you think you should help decide strategy at McDonald's if you buy an Egg McMuffin?
You can come up with a novel idea like radically defining capital, but that doesn't mean you're correct or that anyone will agree with you.
I don't think it's terribly controversial. Consider two Twitters: the present one, and another devoid of all users and their content. Does one have less value than the other?
We're already engaged in dialog which respects content as capital. Consider Ben Lee (legal counsel to Twitter) who said, "Twitter users own their Tweets." How is it that a tweet is ontologically capable of being owned? Well, it's intellectual property and as such an object capable being owned. Moreoever, it's owned by author, not Twitter. If you answered in the affirmative above, then it's even participating in the circuit of value creation. Yet, the production of tweets contributing to Twitter's value happens largely for free. It's quite simply benefiting on the backs of free labor.
Anticipating your next point, yes, Twitter users willfully choose to participate, but this doesn't negate the process that's taking place. Free labor creates capital.
This process is markedly different from your McDonald's example. It would be akin to people voluntarily supplying McD with beef patties for free. Happy to discuss that though. I'm fairly certain it would be a fruitful discussion.
But, for the sake of argument, let's take your notion of "Free labor creates capital". This implies a one-way exchange/robbery. That is not factual. People use Twitter and are not required to pay for it. This is an app requiring huge costs to build and maintain at scale. Again, they are using it for free. Users are getting the tools for creation and the (mass) distribution of the created objects for free. Moreover, users agree to TOS as part of that. Nowhere in the TOS will you find the notion of "owning your tweet" or being a capital creator/owner.
Again, you're radically redefining terms in a hand wavy, because-this-is-what-I-believe manner while also overlooking the basic facts of the situation and 100s of years of convention. Which is fine. Just don't expect the rest of us to get on board.
I don't think it necessarily implies a one-way trade. Users supply twitter with content-capital(and their time in attention) and in exchange they get the benefit of access to other users and socio-digital engagement. Yes, it's for free - there's no money being exchanged, but it isn't a one-way process by any means.
As far as re-definining terms, you can guess I'm not in agreement. But also know that my analysis isn't some idiosyncratic redefinition. In fact, my analysis sits staunchly after the historical development of Ricardianism, but prior to the marginal revolution. To claim that it isn't based in fact is a nod to the implicit assumption of the orthodoxy of marginal-realism. It's funny. HN will claim that the world could use more heterodox thinkers, but when it's presented with them fiercely holds to orthodoxy.
He’s riding on the coattails of his family’s mining business with a suspect ethical history.
I love these “don’t punch down the people who started at the top.” Why do you hate yourself so much you would deflate your own worth by idly idolizing the idea Musk is “with billions.”
We live in a carefully managed memory that deifies the figurative identity of a minority and aims our agency at protecting it.
It isn’t just Twitter; what of real human value has IBM offered to the masses except hype? Oracle?
The entire tech industry is an agency capturing religion, spouting the equivalent of catechisms. It’s not lost on me their leaders were raised in a far more religious era. They probably are true believes in the “greater good” gibberish despite being normal humans by all scientific measures.
These normal human engineers will freely go work for another “outsized” winner in order to maintain their grift.
> He’s riding on the coattails of his family’s mining business with a suspect ethical history.
There is no good source for how much money Elon got from his family, but it's fair to assume it was probably 7 digits. Turning a few million dollars into being the most wealthy man on the planet is riding his family's coattails? He founded Zip2 in 1995 with $200k in funding and sold it for $300 million in 1999. Even if he had millions of dollars to start with, he made more for himself than his family ever did by the age of 28.
But making a lot of money in a market that’s organically interested in tech the last few decades still does not make Musk literally the most valuable person alive except when measuring in politically correct fiat currency terms.
He’s literally one man in a society with a history of teaching idle idolatry.
Society follows the demands of a minority of wealth holders. Science minded engineers who prattle on about doing for science not “story mode”.
There is no science that suggests the leaders we have are infallible. It’s all politically correct story-mode based drivel to follow these “leaders”.
The technology changes but human agency has not moved on from being captured by high minded empty promises of forced expansion and growth for humanity; we’ll be long dead and never able to verify.
Their past success is leveraged to prop up caricature of who we should aspire to. Meanwhile their success is traditional political corruption.
The level of narcissism here is astounding. The notion you can step in on day one to a complex organization and immediately have all the answers is psychotic.
Different companies get bought for different reasons. Sometimes you’ll see manufacturing companies bought and everyone fired because the buyer wanted the machines and material and the real estate and brand etc, but didn’t care about the organization itself.
Musk clearly didn’t buy Twitter to aquhire their data engineering department, so cleaning the slate and bringing on a new team might
Be the fastest way to get where he wants to go.
Not a fan of Musk, but.. it is officially his business. Why do you assume he was not spending that time getting re-org plan in place? It is not narcissism. It is "I bought something and I want to make it look the way I want to."
That would have been true, if he had been working towards closing in a good-faith way instead of claiming repeatedly to have canceled the deal and fighting it in court.
Honestly: snarkiness. Not a particularly high quality post, I admit, but it is a bit grating to see people being very reactionary in all the Twitter-related threads.
Elon financed the deal, so presumably the bank that loaned him all this money could demand information from Elon, or demand that Elon recollateralize the loan[0] if he were to destroy Twitter's value.
That's of course assuming the bank asked for any of this when negotiating financing.
You can see this in his recent statements walking back the whole "free speech extremist" thing. Putting aside the fact that Elon does not practice what he preaches, and my personal belief that free speech should not be afforded to censorious political ideologies[1], you simply cannot run a 100% unrestricted free-for-all and expect to make money off of it. Users don't want to use a platform full of spam, advertisers do not want to be on the same platform as Nazis, etc.
If Elon had self-financed everything then none of the above would apply and he could do anything he wants with it. Unban everyone, ban everyone, shut the whole thing down, etc.
[0] Repay the loan immediately to compensate for the loss in value of the property - in this case, Twitter's potential sale value.
[1] Nazis and tankies[2]. No freedom for dictators.
[2] Authoritarian-left on the political compass. The people who deny the holodomor, cheered for the Soviet Union crushing Yugoslavia in the 70s, think Ukraine is actually run by neo-Nazis (it's not), etc.
Tech stocks have been getting slammed over the past year. Amazon, Alphabet, Netflix, Meta, Microsoft, Tesla, Snapchat, and Uber are all down 25-81%. Apple seems to be doing okay though.
zuck literally said in earnings that headcount is going to stay the same, and that 2023 costs are going to be the same if not a slight increase. These articles lack any substance, I doubt the company would go against what he just said was the plan 2 days ago.
That would be my gut - he felt like they weren't getting the data they needed. If he's doing layoffs/firing that quickly, he's most certainly doing it to make a point to the rest of the company. That's the only reason you would do something like that that fast. Not endorsing it or weighing either way. Just stating the facts.
And here come the many comments from people who have not led several highly successful businesses, with complete ignorance of what Musk may know, pontificate as to why they know better.
If you object to the very concept of a forum why do you have an account here? What are your qualifications to comment on how qualified others are to comment on Musk and his activities?
This is the part that scares me. It feels like a lot of news media outlets will publish just about anything. It feels like they have no interest at all in whether or not what they're saying is true, or even likely to be true. That's the part that worries me.