Elon Musk

i wonder why elon decided to do it this way, he easily couldve done a more normal amount of layoffs like 15% in a normal way, then had buyouts and a hiring freeze then another round of layoffs in six months and accomplished the same thing without precipitating a huge pr crisis and probably a technical crisis too and a morale crisis as well maybe some other crises idk, such bad choices hes just unstable seems like

Guys, I'm starting to think this Elon Musk guy isn't actually very smart and is terrible at running businesses.

he did amazingly well with tesla tbf, tho in a very scammy high risk way, he seems to have lost all discipline, maybe he just cant work without huge government subsidies

he easily couldve done a more normal amount of layoffs like 15% in a normal way, then had buyouts and a hiring freeze then another round of layoffs in six months and accomplished the same thing without precipitating a huge pr crisis

The PR crisis is the point. Disruption is the point. Cruelty is the point. What is confusing about this?

If Trump still had competent lawyers willing to work for him (lol) they would be suing Musk for copyright infringement and/or biting the Trumpian steez

Seriously it is like the most massively telegraphed heel turn in history, why is anyone acting surprised? Shitty person acts shitty, film at eleven

i mean yeah except he also does seem to think that it should have worked out better for him, these are still not the outcomes he wants

lmaoooooo

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FgvBBomUoAAWwj9?format=jpg&name=medium

user @maplecocaine: each day on twitter there is one main character. the goal is to never be it
user @elonmusk: i could be it for SO many months dude just watch

he's like when the villain plugs their brain directly into the central mainframe flow

https://media.tenor.com/GNQ_kULIvKMAAAAd/irina-spalko-indiana-jones.gif

it's cool that free speech in America is entirely dependent on advertisers

there are days when I think that no one in the USA understands what "free speech" really means. instead, every day millions upon millions of people in the USA loudly, openly and incessantly complain that it's being denied them. after which they freely go about their lives and that's free speech in a nutshell.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FgvHjn0XgAIRAE5?format=jpg&name=medium

The PR crisis is the point. Disruption is the point. Cruelty is the point. What is confusing about this?

I thought the point was to make money

the point was to make a weird impulsive decision to buy the company then get forced to buy it when you tried to wriggle out out of the deal

then plug brain directly into central mainframe flow

it's like literally everything he does is the most opposite possible to touching grass

very funny to develop terminal posting brain so late in life

I mean he's got the same brain disease that every conservative has, this weird belief that every complex issue is actually simple but can't be dealt with that way because the woke left hates free speech and will throw you in solitary the instant you use the wrong pronoun or whatever. but unlike those conservatives he actually has the ability to fuck around and find out, and is so mind bogglingly stupid that he actually went ahead and did it

Be extremely funny if he tanked Tesla so much he got forced out

def on the table

i know it’s already been said but god it’s just Trump on twitter 2.0 -corporate version
Elon running company through tweets & getting good grace from stans bc he “is a successful businessman”

bleh

trump and elon also similar in that their "business success" is very tied in to their ability to manipulate the media

I mean he's got the same brain disease that every conservative has, this weird belief that every complex issue is actually simple but can't be dealt with that way because the woke left hates free speech and will throw you in solitary the instant you use the wrong pronoun or whatever. but unlike those conservatives he actually has the ability to fuck around and find out, and is so mind bogglingly stupid that he actually went ahead and did it

i know it’s already been said but god it’s just Trump on twitter 2.0 -corporate version
Elon running company through tweets & getting good grace from stans bc he “is a successful businessman”

corporate Trump is the worst Trump to be, dude lost money on practically everything he did that didn't directly involve fraud

the tesla analysts i follow all have mentions full of $TSLA investors saying "ok this was funny elon but let's get back to the real stuff now, stop fucking around"

xp didn't Trump go bankrupt dealing real estate in NYC in the 80s? (ie during a real estate boom in one of the most lucrative real estate markets in the world)

According to Business Insider, he told an audience on Friday: "I tried to get out of the deal, it was like that scene from The Godfather.

"I mean I think most people would say, given how market has evolved this year, the price is on the high side."

We're not sure what scene he is referring to in The Godfather, the classic film about the Mafia. Hopefully not the one involving a horse's head.

This scene springs to mind -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UneS2Uwc6xw

Max:

I’ve been thinking about this divide because, since Musk bought Twitter, most of his public statements have suggested he holds the first view of Twitter: It’s a “a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner,” as he said in a statement to advertisers this week. But charging money for blue-badged check marks -- check marks that won’t even be nominally connected to a real “verification” process -- suggests a deeper understanding of Twitter as something much closer to the second view: a place to establish and enjoy your social dominance as a “prominent” person.

The truth is I can’t really tell what Musk thinks Twitter is -- if he actually does imagine it as a “common digital town square” dependent on transparency and authenticity, or if he agrees with the resentful Silicon Valley freaks he’s surrounded himself with that it’s a game of hierarchical social positioning, or if he thinks of it as both or either depending on the last person he talked to. Over the past week he hasn’t acted like a person with a real plan, let alone a clear concept or theory of balancing the tensions of an advertising-funded social-media platform. Instead he’s made impulsive and contradictory decisions, acted out for attention and approval, and attempted to appease varying intransigent groups of users before lashing out when praise wasn’t forthcoming, all the while complaining and posting vaguely resentful memes. He’s been acting, in other words, like a message-board moderator.

He's going to make a print version of Twitter delivered to every subscriber's doorstep

lol wut? (xp)

they are tweets printed on concrete blocks and thrown through the window

it's like literally everything he does is the most opposite possible to touching grass

― mark s, Friday, November 4, 2022 1:33 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglin

This is good i am going to steal it to describe so many people

that's a good article jaymc, I really do think the most simple explanation for this is that's he's basically apartheid Lowtax

something something radium

lmao when you fire 50% of people with a coin toss things like this happen

Just to be clear, he fired the team working on this. https://t.co/56I1uyBIIR

— sillyrobin is a fmr Tweep (@SillyRobin) November 4, 2022

lol

that was the only other twitter blue thing that seemed possibly worthwhile, maybe an Apple News alternative or something that'd be more relevant if you get most of your headlines via tweet

a lot of companies have undergone layoffs or a major change in methodology or structure but those things often take **years** to work out. I don't think I've ever seen one try to do it this quickly without immediately going under. I'm curious what the next few weeks are gonna look like. obviously with half (!!) their staff getting the axe and (presumably) many more actively looking for new work it's only a matter of time before the company starts to experience some major issues, either a lengthy downtime or big accounts getting hacked or the whole thing just devolving into an unmoderated cesspool overnight. kinda get the feeling that if Twitter becomes unusable for like 2 weeks the vast majority of their users just won't come back. maybe it won't even be that long.

Fail whale being hastily sorted out for the app as we speak

lmao keep posting dude

You tweeted a conspiracy theory from a website less credible than the National Enquirer like four days ago. We all need to look inward as well as outward.

— Hank Green 🧦 (@hankgreen) November 4, 2022

And therefore Twitter should die?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2022

got that real Big Don energy with that reply

thank god he can't run for President

Elon, face it: As long as you are not perfect in every way, you are to blame for everything that goes wrong. Because everyone else who criticizes you is perfect in every way and therefore has the right to blame you for everything.

— Maren Kahnert 🦊⚔❤ (@marenkahnert) November 4, 2022

🤣💯

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2022

This really is like if Michael Scott was the world's richest man.

An illuminating exchange:

one of those stories in three tweets pic.twitter.com/Attc0TUWPs

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) November 4, 2022

I know little about marketing, but Paskalis' MMA Global seems to have just about every big brand as a member.

coincidentally he seems to be currently celebrating brand safety week

Post Brand Safety week speakers dinner recap with two great friends. pic.twitter.com/ShKT21g1kw

— Lou Paskalis 🇺🇸 (@LouPas) November 3, 2022

Some Jack Torrance energy there in that photo

the kubrick stare, brand safety week edition

As a former SRE, I'd just like to say:
This site isn't going to burn down. That's way too calm and organized a death for a site this big which apparently just fired most of the on-call staff.

— foone🏳️‍⚧️ (@Foone) November 4, 2022

Right now a disk is filling up on a server somewhere in some data center that a person who has just been laid off has been manually clearing every few days and when that disk fills up Twitter will go down.

— @✧✧✧@i✧✧.excha✧✧✧ (@craigcalef) November 4, 2022

xp i think that thread is a bit rich, but i keep getting surprised about how fast things are going, and who knows

this is not wrong

Part of me is morbidly curious to know what happens when you try to take infra spend from $1.8bn to $0.8bn after firing 80% of your infra staff and with 100% of those remaining looking to be somewhere else as soon as possible.

— Mark Dennehy (@MarkDennehy) November 4, 2022

its an interesting experiment lol

Evidence that Twitter is falling apart: I've been receiving multiple DMs from people who joined in December 1969. Anyone familiar with the Unix Epoch will recognize that date and that it indicates timestamp failures. pic.twitter.com/B4Cbs0GeXM

— Ken Shirriff (@kenshirriff) November 4, 2022