Elon Musk | Doer of things on X and sad little man

[unchanged_lineup]

The work force was bloated clearly (not just Twitter the entire industry). They will make mistakes and iterate quickly rather than suffer from paralysis and ship nothing (what has Twitter shipped in the last few years)

There are literally threads this week of the people who've left Twitter recently explaining the features they've launched recently that they're most proud of. Alt text for images was a recent one that made Twitter more accessible to a huge proportion of internet users. They have made constant improvements.

On the "smaller more motivated team" point... Why on earth would they be more motivated? They've just been told to work harder for zero benefit and seen all of the most talented and experienced people leave. Morale will be in the basement there.

 

[Cassidy]

There are literally thread this week of the people who've left Twitter recently explaining the features they've launched recently that they're most proud of. Alt text for images was a recent one that made Twitter more accessible to a huge proportion of internet users. They have made constant improvements.

Small iterative improvements yes. Thats not what Twitter needs (I’m talking from a business perspective here)

 

[MadMike]

The work force was bloated clearly (not just Twitter the entire industry). They will make mistakes and iterate quickly rather than suffer from paralysis and ship nothing (what has Twitter shipped in the last few years)

A lot of companies suffer bloat, across different sectors. I'd love to see any precedent where 90% of the work force is deemed bloat though.

As for what Twitter has shipped:
https://twitter.com/i/release_notes

Fail fast and iterate with a smaller more engaged team. I think what comes out at the end of that will be interesting.

Fail fast and iterate is a good agile process especially around the product discovery and prototyping of something new. It's the mantra for start-ups with a reason. But an established $44bn business is not a start-up. Twitter is a company with 50,000+ in-house servers. Firing 90% of their infra puts them at risk of catastrophic failure. There's a good reason large companies are not that agile.

I think the industry is going to get a shake up top once PE sees what happens at Twitter.

We'll see I guess. It will either be a wake up call to the industry, or to Musk.

 

[unchanged_lineup]

Small iterative improvements yes. Thats not what Twitter needs (I’m talking from a business perspective here)

You asked what they've shipped in the last few years. "Nothing" is clearly totally wrong.

 

[slyadams]

The work force was bloated clearly (not just Twitter the entire industry). They will make mistakes and iterate quickly rather than suffer from paralysis and ship nothing (what has Twitter shipped in the last few years)

I don't think that's clear at all. Its incredibly easy to look and say "what can 7000 people possibly do" without realizing the complexity of some operations. They are likely releasing features a lot of stuff people don't know about including scale, performance and required security updates. I would suspect for a company like twitter a huge portion of engineering time is on the scale side, their feature set is small but their scale is enourmous.

Then you have line management, product managment, project management, finance, HR, legal, moderators, facilities, regional legal expertize and operations, sales and marketting and so on.

 

[Cassidy]

You asked what they've shipped in the last few years. "Nothing" is clearly totally wrong.

From an investor perspective its not wrong at all.

 

[Cassidy]

I don't think that's clear at all. Its incredibly easy to look and say "what can 7000 people possibly do" without realizing the complexity of some operations. They are likely releasing features a lot of stuff people don't know about including scale, performance and required security updates. I would suspect for a company like twitter a huge portion of engineering time is on the scale side, their feature set is small but their scale is enourmous.

Then you have line management, product managment, project management, finance, HR, legal, moderators, facilities, regional legal expertize and operations, sales and marketting and so on.

Its clear from all the job cuts in the last few weeks

 

[Cassidy]

Anyway its just my 2 cents. Im not a fan of Musk.

But I think Twitter needed drastic change and Im not convinced the narrative around whats happening at the moment is objective at all (especially given its Musk and how publicly he is doing things)

Saying that though we shall see. I would be more worried about Meta if Im honest

 

[slyadams]

Its clear from all the job cuts in the last few weeks

Its not at all clear, you can't tell the impact of job cuts after week. Its also worth noting 2FA stopped working in that time. So a critical feature that has always worked broke during the cuts. Let's see over the next few months if we get more outages, less moderation, more operational issues etc.

 

[nimic]

I personally use Twitter very sporadically, only log in once in a while to scroll through and see what people I follow have said, and there's no direction or plan to it. So that part I can easily do without, and have for years at a time.

The thing that might actually be a problem is that a lot of the CE discussion and information is directly centered around tweets. Like, almost all of it. Reddit is a good replacement for football news (except that embedded reddit posts have a habit of violating the no-autoplay setting) but not political stuff. Reddit isn't good with breaking news either, since it's designed around few posts with many comments - and if we ever resort to relying on Reddit comments we might as well shut down the CE.

 

[Cassidy]

Its not at all clear, you can't tell the impact of job cuts after week. Its also worth noting 2FA stopped working in that time. So a critical feature that has always worked broke during the cuts. Let's see over the next few months if we get more outages, less moderation, more operational issues etc.

I was not talking about Twitter there read up.

The tech sector became overvalued and bloated.

 

[Jotun]

He kind of did. Paypal was created when Elon Musk (X.com) and Peter Thiel (confinity) merged their companies in a 50-50 merge, with Musk being the initial CEO (he was ousted in favor of Thiel, I think 8 months later). The merge is described in length in Peter Thiel's book, but essentially, both him and Musk realized that if they continue competing against each other, both companies would be screwed.

He definitely did not found Tesla, but as far as I know, Tesla had built less than 100 cars when Musk invested there. While the idea of Tesla/electric cars has nothing to do with Musk, he essentially was in charge of transforming a small startup into a car company that last year was more valuable than the rest of car companies combined, and is still by far the most valuable car company.

He is not a physicist, he is not a rocket scientist (does anyone claim it), and he is not an engineer. He is also not an AI scientist, and every time he talks about AI, it is clear that he knows feck all about it. At the same time, he was pivotal in building 3 multi-billion dollar companies (one of which is valued at over 100B, and another at its peak was valued over 1 trillion). I guess you can be lucky once by chance, but three times is a bit too much. Of course, that doesn't mean that he knows what he is doing for many things (as clearly we can see from Twitter), and he definitely seems to have a massive Dunning-Kruger effect, which wouldn't surprise me if it becomes his downfall.

He should just stick to Tesla and XSpace, instead of thinking that he is saving the world, when in fact, he is just elevating his ego. Kind of the Kevin Durant of entrepreneurs.

Great post. I really don't understand why some people are trying to take away Musk's accomplishments from him, or present him as some stupid person. Guy was a pivotal person in making three extremely successful businnesses. He obviously isn't stupid and is most likely more intelligent than average.

However, I don't understand, either this obsession with successful and/or smart people, as if everything they do is right. Einstein, regarded as one of the brightest men ever, was denying existence of black holes. Carlsen, probably the best chess player ever is not immune to making blunders.

We humans make mistakes and it doesn't matter how smart you are, you will make them. We can be wrong and one of the worst thing is, when we happen to think we are smarter then we actually are, which is looking like happening with Musk. But that doesn't mean we should take away his other accomplishments from him.

Also, all three of Paypal, Tesla and Space X, where Musk had his successes where in fields that were new to private commerce but he saw opportunities and exploited them brilliantly. On the other hand Twitter is completely opposite, an already established global business in a market that is very competitive. Had he bought some unknown social media platform with a different take, perhaps he could transform it or he could see some market opportunity to exploit. But with twitter this all looks like ego-driven money waste. Perhaps, he believes he can turn it around, but at this point I just think he is trying to save the situation on stop it from bleeding further financially, but he is not thinking it through and so far it looks like it might backfire spectacularly.

 

[sebsheep]

non existent.

Probably qualifies

 

[slyadams]

I was not talking about Twitter there read up.

The tech sector became overvalued and bloated.

The work force was bloated clearly (not just Twitter the entire industry)

Here you are clearly saying Twitter was bloated along with the whole industry.

 

[Jotun]

Its clear from all the job cuts in the last few weeks

It's clear he doesn't know how to handle twitter.

So far he's undermined the authenticity of his platform.

Started firing critical staff (and then trying to rehire them)? It's obvious he doesn't know what he is talking about at times, like those tweets with thousands RPC requests. Any single developer would know that's nonsensical statement.

Now, I won't exclude the possibility of twitter becoming profitable, but so far, from my educated guess it doesn't look likely. My reckoning if he had a proper vision of Twitter and really thought this through he wouldn't have tried to back out.

He blundered, he knows it and know is scrambling to save himself, but is just making it worse, because his ego can't handle it.

I was not talking about Twitter there read up.

The tech sector became overvalued and bloated.

I don't know what that means? But if you are referring to business being overvalued, then it certainly doesn't make sense to buy a tech company at an overvalued price.

 

[Cassidy]

Here you are clearly saying Twitter was bloated along with the whole industry.

Yes the entire industry. Your response was specific to Twitter with the example of 2FA. I didn’t say Twitter was 90% bloated but it was bloated.

 

[unchanged_lineup]

From an investor perspective its not wrong at all.

Seriously?

You asked what have Twitter shipped in recent years. That was the question. You have the answer from two people here. Are you that inflexible?

 

[unchanged_lineup]

Its clear from all the job cuts in the last few weeks

I think you need to give it a week or two to see how wrong that pov is when Twitter has its inevitable massive outage. There's no way it's not going to happen.

 

[Cassidy]

Seriously?

You asked what have Twitter shipped in recent years. That was the question. You have the answer from two people here. Are you that inflexible?

We’re talking about whether or not the business will be successful. My first statement was. I think they will have a better product and be profitable in 2 years.

Shipped nothing to me, probably worded incorrectly I can hold my hands up there. If we are talking from a business perspective, nothing that moved the needle in terms of revenue / profitability.

 

[Cassidy]

I think you need to give it a week or two to see how wrong that pov is when Twitter has its inevitable massive outage. There's no way it's not going to happen.

Again that statement wasn’t focused on Twitter alone. And no I was not saying 90% over staffed. Read first.

 

[Jotun]

I think you need to give it a week or two to see how wrong that pov is when Twitter has its inevitable massive outage. There's no way it's not going to happen.

I don't worry about outages. It's most likely they have a lot of that stuff automated and have the code designed and written to not be affected that much. Although devs have been mentioning technical debt, so who knows.

But from my experience, most likely what will happen is bugs. Old bugs reappearing because nobody will check them as nobody will know who's responsibility it is. New bugs will slip in as QA won't have time to check everything and then those bugs will not be fixed for long time as nobody will know who's responsibility is to handle it.

With this kind of massive scaling down it's possible for catastrophic bugs. Such as microservices not booting up (circular dependence somewhere, query not compiling in production), faulty logic causing corruptions in databases, then attempted fixes causing even more issues.

I suspect there will be a lot of issues and outages will be the least of it.

 

[unchanged_lineup]

Again that statement wasn’t focused on Twitter alone. And no I was not saying 90% over staffed. Read first.

If multiple people haven't gotten that from what you wrote, isn't it possible that what you wrote wasn't clear?

 

[unchanged_lineup]

I don't worry about outages. It's most likely they have a lot of that stuff automated and have the code designed and written to not be affected that much. Although devs have been mentioning technical debt, so who knows.

But from my experience, most likely what will happen is bugs. Old bugs reappearing because nobody will check them as nobody will know who's responsibility it is. New bugs will slip in as QA won't have time to check everything and then those bugs will not be fixed for long time as nobody will know who's responsibility is to handle it.

With this kind of massive scaling down it's possible for catastrophic bugs. Such as microservices not booting up (circular dependence somewhere, query not compiling in production), faulty logic causing corruptions in databases, then attempted fixes causing even more issues.

I suspect there will be a lot of issues and outages will be the least of it.

The example of old bugs reappearing has already happened days after they fired half the people. I think larger-scale issues are inevitable and on the way soon.

 

[fishfingers15]

Again that statement wasn’t focused on Twitter alone. And no I was not saying 90% over staffed. Read first.

I'll have you know that investors always agree with salary and workforce reduction. I work for a tech / consultancy company and one of the investment groups (Elliott) acquired a sizable portion of our shares and began demanding reducing and optimizing operations. We went through a lot of pain for a period of two years when we started giving in to their demands. In my personal view, there is always room for improvement in any company, but investor led workforce reduction rarely is based on bloat or merit. They basically bandy around industry standard figures and how some company is doing better than that and why we should match them blah de blah.

Sorry if it ended up as a rant.

 

[Suv666]

I don't worry about outages. It's most likely they have a lot of that stuff automated and have the code designed and written to not be affected that much. Although devs have been mentioning technical debt, so who knows.

But from my experience, most likely what will happen is bugs. Old bugs reappearing because nobody will check them as nobody will know who's responsibility it is. New bugs will slip in as QA won't have time to check everything and then those bugs will not be fixed for long time as nobody will know who's responsibility is to handle it.

With this kind of massive scaling down it's possible for catastrophic bugs. Such as microservices not booting up (circular dependence somewhere, query not compiling in production), faulty logic causing corruptions in databases, then attempted fixes causing even more issues.

I suspect there will be a lot of issues and outages will be the least of it.

How much time do you reckon before shit starts breaking?

Also cant Twitter remain stable by hiring aggressively? No knowledge transfer but I'm sure Twitter has decent documentation.

 

[The Firestarter]

Well, he gave himself the title of "chief engineer" at a rocket company. The implication is clear.

When I heard that comm to the crew of demo 2 from the "chief engineer" I laughed like a rude Korean person.

 

[Cassidy]

If multiple people haven't gotten that from what you wrote, isn't it possible that what you wrote wasn't clear?

Yes of course most likely true

 

[Cassidy]

I'll have you know that investors always agree with salary and workforce reduction. I work for a tech / consultancy company and one of the investment groups (Elliott) acquired a sizable portion of our shares and began demanding reducing and optimizing operations. We went through a lot of pain for a period of two years when we started giving in to their demands. In my personal view, there is always room for improvement in any company, but investor led workforce reduction rarely is based on bloat or merit. They basically bandy around industry standard figures and how some company is doing better than that and why we should match them blah de blah.

Sorry if it ended up as a rant.

This is true, I work in tech after all.

But in this example its true. Look at the growth rate of the industry in terms of hiring vs revenue and profit over the past few years

 

[stoinz]

Actually not too worried about outages as they are probably on high availability with automated failover. Thinking more in line of them open to cyber attacks. With that much personal data on their server, there is no way any hackers wont be interested to try.

 

[Revan]

I don’t buy for a single minute this Twitter is gonna be better in two years. And if that really happens, and Elon will be able to make a better product with 80% or so less employees, then it means that the entire industry does not know what is doing and has over hired. Which means that all of us in the industry are in trouble. feck that so hopefully Twitter burns!

 

[slyadams]

Yes the entire industry. Your response was specific to Twitter with the example of 2FA. I didn’t say Twitter was 90% bloated but it was bloated.

I've never mentioned your magical 90% number, which is clearly rubbish, I only mentioned your assertion that Twitter was 'cearly bloated', and it was easily shown that you have absolutely no idea if that is true or not. You're guessing.

You keep telling people to "Read", but you're asserting people are saying things they aren't. I would just stop whilst you're behind if I were you.

 

[Cassidy]

I've never mentioned your magical 90% number, which is clearly rubbish, I only mentioned your assertion that Twitter was 'cearly bloated', and it was easily shown that you have absolutely no idea if that is true or not. You're guessing.

You keep telling people to "Read", but you're asserting people are saying things they aren't. I would just stop whilst you're behind if I were you.

Its also worth noting 2FA stopped working in that time.

This is what you said.
Twitter being bloated does not mean that Musk getting rid of 90% of staff makes sense.

Twitter being bloated in terms of staff is clear if you look at the numbers and growth in numbers vs revenues. Its not a guess and thats why the industry is having a correction.

 

[weetee]

Thinking more in line of them open to cyber attacks. With that much personal data on their server, there is no way any hackers wont be interested to try.

Elon is eventually selling personal data in the darkweb for millions already!

 

[stoinz]

Elon is eventually selling personal data in the darkweb for millions already!

It will hurt him more badly when GDPR comes in than him losing advertiser money.

 

[nimic]

I don’t buy for a single minute this Twitter is gonna be better in two years. And if that really happens, and Elon will be able to make a better product with 80% or so less employees, then it means that the entire industry does not know what is doing and has over hired. Which means that all of us in the industry are in trouble. feck that so hopefully Twitter burns!

I completely buy the idea that Twitter has been poorly run and could have been a much better (and more profitable) product, but I have zero belief in the idea that whatever Elon is doing now is going to make it any better, or that Elon is capable of doing it in the first place. I wasn't a Twitter shareholder, or someone whose business relied on Twitter, so I was perfectly content with it just sort of stumbling along as it did. This just looks like it's going to spectacularly crash, which will be entertaining for a little bit and then in the end we don't have Twitter anymore.

 

[slyadams]

Its also worth noting 2FA stopped working in that time.

This is what you said.
Twitter being bloated does not mean that Musk getting rid of 90% of staff makes sense.

Twitter being bloated in terms of staff is clear if you look at the numbers and growth in numbers vs revenues. Its not a guess and thats why the industry is having a correction.

Yes, 2FA did stop working. I pointed out that as soon as cuts started being made shit started to go wrong.

Just because you say its clear doesn't make it so. Revenue vs employee numbers never grow linearly, not sure why you think they would.

 

[Jotun]

The example of old bugs reappearing has already happened days after they fired half the people. I think larger-scale issues are inevitable and on the way soon.

Absolutely. It would take a miracle for it not to happen.

How much time do you reckon before shit starts breaking?

Also cant Twitter remain stable by hiring aggressively? No knowledge transfer but I'm sure Twitter has decent documentation.

Hah. Documentation. Hah. In my 10+ years of experience, I have yet to see good, up to date and accurate documentation. The reason is, writing detailed documentations is boring and developers hate to do it. They even hate more updating that documentation after a bug fix or new feature, because they have more bugs and features in pipeline that have to be delivered yesterday, because sprint is over in 2 days. We'll update documentations when there's less crunch (IE most likely never, but even if it happens, soon it's outdated again). If you have some people hired just to write documentation (I've seen that too), they most like don't understand sh*t and that kind of documentation is useless.

What's the point of firing and giving severance package if you are going to hire people. But yes wouldn't be surprised they start hiring new people, as they will need them. It's also possible they will hire freelancers and consulting firms until they stabilize.

As for when will things start breaking, well it's already happening. 2FA stopped working for a time. But it really depends on how competent staff are that remained, how good they will be at patching stuff and hotfixing.

Honestly, I've never seen something like this, so it's hard to predict. Such massive layoffs in a tech company that isn't on the brink of irrelevancy. Mostly the companies start losing relevancy and start slowly scaling down until they stabilize or disappear.

Personally, I think we are witnessing history. In the unlikely case that Musk pulls this off, it could have transformative effects on the tech industry (showing that you can achieve results with significantly lesser people). However, I think Twitter and Musk (Tesla and SpaceX) will crash and burn and we will study him in business and history books on how to build businesses and how to ruin them.

 

[Cassidy]

Yes, 2FA did stop working. I pointed out that as soon as cuts started being made shit started to go wrong.

Just because you say its clear doesn't make it so. Revenue vs employee numbers never grow linearly, not sure why you think they would.

No one said it grows linearly, but I guess read

 

[RedC]

Personally, I think we are witnessing history. In the unlikely case that Musk pulls this off, it could have transformative effects on the tech industry (showing that you can achieve results with significantly lesser people).

I think everybody understands this already; if you work people to the bone, you produce more(in theory, discounting employee wellbeing/churn etc.). One of the core notions of the tech industry is that it doesn't do this though, at least in the way long standing industries like finance do. It's supposed to be run, for the most part, by people that don't subscribe to this burnout inducing mentality, so I'm not sure that it's going to cause some sort of revolution.

 

[slyadams]

No one said it grows linearly, but I guess read

Then state something more than total and complete vagueries. Everything you've said is "its clear, trust me bro". You make a statement about revenue vs employee growth but don't state what you think it should be like. Its almost like you don't know what you're talking about so you're putting headlines out there without anything behind them.

The snide tone lends absolutely nothing to your position or argument, quite the opposite.