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While I don't share the general admiration for Elon Musk, I have to admit, I think this is funny.
I don't know if Americans/non-British English speakers will quite get the joke about "Chief Twit" and it certainly seems a lot more self-aware than Musk has previously shown himself to be.
But I do find myself in need of The Idiot's Guide To What Is Going On Here. First, Musk said he would buy Twitter, and that was so terrible it had to be fought at all costs. Then he backed out, or tried to, and that was also so terrible that he needed to be forced to go through with it. Now it looks like the deal is back on, and this is now terrible again (possibly because he said he'd sack 75% of the workforce, which I don't believe is serious but has a lot of knickers in a twist).
So - good, bad, terrible, meh that he is (seemingly) going to buy Twitter?
So the whole raison d'etre of writing journalists is the ability to express themselves with brevity in text. It is not a suprise that the social media platform that is built for the ability for brevity in text(140/280 characters) like writing journalist they feel that it is their space. Any perceived threat to their power like Elon Musk buying Twitter is something they are willing to put in a bad light. And when Elon tried to pull out(or get a price adjustment of some of the people think) it was still a threat to the perceived power of the journalist that there is a disproportional amount of "fake" users there and the image that journalist have of Twitter of as a center of cultural and political power, that is another issue that they want to adjust the optics on. Elon stated to the employees at while visiting the twitter HQ that he doesn't know where the 75% sacking comes from! So maybe there is a lie there somewhere and it is either Elon that actually said it and it was truthfully reported or there is an anonymous source who is lying, possibly even made up by fear-mongering journalist. Because almost everything we know about this deal is through the journalist lens to adjust the optics to keep them in power in their favorite social media platform.
So in my view it has very little to do with the politics or social panics du jour, but everything with who the actual power brokers are on Twitter namely journalists.
The original source appears to just be cited as "interviews and documents obtained by The Washington Post". And even the denial is just from "people, who declined to be named because the information isn’t public."
I doubt there's any outright lie from either direct source, actually (is someone going to forge documents just to start a brief spicy rumor? is someone going to lie about the contents of an address that had thousands of witnesses?), but I wouldn't be surprised if something was twisted way out of proportion, like "fire 75%" was an interpretation of "here's how we could avoid prolonged downtime with only 25% of staff under contingency plan D if economic crisis scenario 3 occurs" and that got turned into "pink slip printers go brrrrr on Monday!", and/or "denied the previously reported number" was in some weasel-worded phrasing that would be technically accurate if only 74% got fired but the oversimplified version of that is "ha ha don't believe Bezos' rag's lies!" so that's what we're expected to take away from any paraphrased report.
Somewhere in the space of pure fabrication and twisting a verifiable fact to suit a narrative the truth ends and the lie starts. Is that splitting hairs and arguing semantics? Point still stands journalists that are drunk on their clout of their chosen echo chamber has the motive to outright lie and/or twist facts. Feel free to dismiss my analysis totally if you think it hinges on this claim. But my opinion on the matter is formed on the whole foreplay for the court case and found that the flexible relation with the truth that the journalists had. My conclusion is simple journalists feel that they have skin in the game with the Twitter deal and bias their reporting around it.
Just to point it out, I don't like Elon Musk, Twitter and Journalists either so I could be a bit biased. I couldn't care less what the outcome of this whole thing.
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In the world of social media, it feels like literal eons have passed in a single day ever since the acquisition. Now they're all gone, this feels like the first time right wing culture warriors finally scored a point. Whether this is a Hail Mary Pass as blackpillers like me believe or a sign of actual tilt away from the status quo remains to be seen.
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I think he's actually pretty self-aware. Remember that this is the guy who founded "The Boring Company".
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I don't think the hyper-progressive coalition was saying it would be terrible if Elon Musk didn't buy twitter. Only that the way he was trying to get out of it was dishonest.
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It's actually gonna happen...wow
https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/twitter-shares-be-suspended-nyse-musk-nears-takeover-2022-10-27/
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I'm confused, each of those stages the motivation was pretty obvious. People that do not like Musk were first concerned when was going to buy twitter, then gleeful when it seemed to be falling apart in a way that would hurt him and again concerned when it seemed like he's actually going to successfully buy it. These people both want bad things to happen to Elon musk and don't want him to own twitter.
Yeah, they wanted him to not buy it and then be forced to overpay which is somehow better than him not buying it
I think people were more thinking he'd have to eat the billion dollar hit to exit the deal or that if he way overpaid he wouldn't hold onto it.
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I think the middle stage was more "Hah, stupid Musk wasn't serious and is trying to back of a deal he can't afford, and he's going to get punished for being arrogant by being forced to overpay." Still cognitively dissonant, but not quite as obviously.
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Threatening to fire 75% is a great opening to firing 50%.
Is it? Standard doctrine for layoffs is that they need to be a surprise. If you say you're going to fire the least productive 25% of your staff, nobody's going to feel secure that, in your judgement, they aren't personally on the chopping block, so 100% of your staff is going to start looking for other jobs, just to be safe. The most productive ones are going to be the most likely to get better offers, and by the time you're ready to downsize you may discover that it's too late; for every one of the good people who left you need to retain two incompetents to try to do their job.
Is there some 4D chess here? Ideologues are more likely to quit in this case, and letting them self-select is actually more accurate than a newcomer's judgement? Getting lots of people to quit rather than firing them reduces unemployment insurance cost increases?? I'm stretching here.
I'm not sure I've ever seen them actually be a surprise, though. Every time I see layoffs at a company, it is preceded by tons of lying about "no we aren't going to do layoffs, we bought the company for its employees after all". I've never seen those lies actually fool anyone though, and nobody is the least bit surprised when layoffs start happening.
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It could be the case that people who are confident they are producing a lot of value and so wouldn't be let go also won't proactively quit.
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Probably 25% of employees are sacked but not 75%
Prominent users will be unbanned including Jordan Peterson, Trump, and Kanye
There will be no progress on bot problem though. I don't think anyone has the technical proficiency or cares enough to fix it. This has to do with people's accounts being hacked , fixing it would require a major overhaul of twitter security.
Ship physical pieces of paper to physical addresses with an authentication code for every user? Use the existing giftcard stands at Walmart to distribute them even cheaper? The bot problem is pretty easily fixed if the will is there.
So make membership paid?
If not that's just too stupid for it to be not.
No, literally just free physical letters to everyone who requests it, like all banks do. Twitter should have more than enough money to do this for all US users.
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I tend to prefer “twitlord,” for continuity with the old Tumblr dialect.
Regarding your summary, let’s see if I can clear anything up.
Musk made his offer, and I guess some people complained about how illiberal it would. I don’t know, I didn’t see much of that firsthand. There was a second, parallel debate on whether the offer was financially stupid/sound/5D chess on his part, and that’s what got more play around here.
Musk tried to back out, allegedly because of new information about bots. Of course, his own financial valuation and/or mental state may have changed, too. This was very upsetting to anyone who lost money when his public statements pushed the price around. It was also offensive to the state of Delaware, which let Twitter take Musk to court.
Musk is currently trying to obviate said court date by closing the deal. As usual, he is loudly broadcasting his intentions, whether or not that will actually benefit him. The employees he’s promised to lay off have engaged in the traditional response: hand wringing and asserting one’s necessity.
I predict Musk will buy, Musk will sack a large but <75% fraction of the workforce, and Twitter will continue operating more or less as it has for years. No bets on unbanning any prominent Republicans.
I predict that he will unban a few prominent people, but that trump does not return to twitter.
He'll say he won't return and he's sticking with Truth Social. But if Elon unbans him (as seems likely), he won't be able to resist for very long.
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If he does not unban trump it will be a major disappointment for Trump and Elon's fans and also hurt Elon's investment. Unbanning Trump would presumably increase twitter's value by boosting engagement. Of course, Trump may not choose to return if unbanned, but I think he will.
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He was going to pay for Twitter by selling/borrowing against Tesla stock. After he made the offer there was a market downturn. Both Twitter and Tesla stock were trading lower, however, the price he would pay for Twitter was locked in beforehand at a higher price. So, to complete the deal, he would both have to overpay for Twitter and sell a greater share of his Tesla stake to complete the deal: a double whammy to his personal balance sheet.
At the minimum he alleged the bs about bots and go to court to try to renegotiate the deal, but the judge seemed pretty unsympathetic so he decided to skip the risks of being deposed and ruled against and closed after all.
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I continue to maintain the funniest outcome is Musk buying and then Twitter pulling a Tumblr. It would have been best if a court had to order him to go through with the deal HE PROPOSED, but him voluntarily buying it to get out of a deposition in which he would have had to either (1) lie under oath or (2) admit lying in a previous affidavit is pretty funny too.
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I expect him to fire close to 75%. He couldn’t get the funding he needed. Running twitter lean will be essential to paying off acquisition debt. And a lot of people think these tech shops are bloated.
The really hard part is figuring out which 75% to fire. Twitter can certainly be run very lean if you clear all the deadwood and you keep everyone who actually has the implicit knowledge required to run the whole thing, but all the employees are trying to convince you that they're the ones who are very important, we'll have to see if Musk manages to correctly pick the people to keep. It doesn't help that social media companies are especially vulnerable to downtime. If your fishing company gets a 2-month period of downtime while they figure out how to slim down, no problem, you just lose 2 month's revenue, the fish will still be there waiting, but twitter's users will move on to other things after any sort of prolonged downtime.
there is absolutely no way twitter would have downtime. I am sure a transition plan is already in place and there is enough redundancy that the site will still be up even if important people quit. The last people to be fired would be those whose job it is to keep the site up.
Two months won't happen. But there's probably zero people at Twitter that know the entire stack, and probably about 1-2 people per team that know their team's domain well enough to quickly diagnose and recover from outages.
Some of those teams manage things that the entire rest of the site depends on to stay up. What may have been a 10 minute outage with the right people available to fix the issue could become an hours long outage as people with less skill and experience struggle to even root cause the problem.
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It's weird to remember the before time when Twitter was still on Rails and hours long outages would happen every couple of months or so.
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I don't have insider knowledge on Twitter, but I do know that Facebook spends a bonkers amount of money on what it calls Site Integrity. Thousands of engineers work on it, hundreds or perhaps thousands of people are involved in creating policy, and many thousands of people are employed to enforce policy with manual reviews of potentially violating content.
If you scaled back Twitter Trust and Safety to only act on Tweets that violate the law, you'd wind up with a whole lot of jobs that have little or no work to do.
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He could be planning on culling the twitter workforce then hiring on more compliant devs to replace them.
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IMO FTX has shown that a cast of thousands is not necessary for big and fast product development. A small crew, properly motivated, is much more effective. I think the Silicon Valley approach of hiring engineers by the thousand has not borne fruit. Coordination is hard, so five hard working engineers are probably more productive than 20 engineers who are spending an hour per day at the company massage room, yoga classes and so on.
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Yes I agree below turnarounds need to force optimize/efficiency and then new initiatives. Especially since twitter doesn’t have the cash and balance sheet of fb which can just spend silly.
Twitter now has a lot of debt and high cash flow to interest costs. They need to rationalize there before growth.
Honestly sometimes needing to be rational is better or you end up like fb spending money everywhere with no direction, twitters lack of financial power means whatever they do will be focused and critical to the company.
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Gotta clear out the deadwood first.
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"Twit" is used commonly in American English. I've made the same joke myself.
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