Musk's Acquisition of Twitter Drags On (1 Viewer)

[AccessBlaster]

So how's Elon's twitter thing going?

Well, Jack Dorsey and Parag Agarwal are GONE along with their minions. You have the left losing their collective minds over free speech and blue check marks, so yeah mission accomplished

 

[Isaac]

All he'll have left now is a few good men.
An actual possible way forward.
Got ridda the crap

 

[Isaac]

Plus I assume all those who voluntarily quit means they don't get the huge severance gift - a nice savings for the Muskinator.

Shave that damn little world's most annoying company down to about 500 people to maintain what should be 99% turnkey with a few people to handle exceptions that require human thought & judgment - tech support, account reviews, legal/litigation/compliance.

And in my opinion just get out of the countries that are making it impossible to do business. If the U.K. tries to shut you down because you let one person say something about gay marriage, or Pakistan shuts you down because you said something about a burka, etc. etc., just get out already. Leave the company be something that performs with a slightly more SINGULAR version of policies that can be easily run by 500 people and doesn't require extensive legal exposure all over the world.

Not everything just HAS to be global. In fact many companies do better when focused on serving a populace. Everything ends up making more sense that way.

With all the man-bun tree hugger types removed who got so wrapped up in the dream of a high paying job to sit around sipping mocha's while oozing to each other all the good they were doing in the world (??? that I believe nobody ever knew what they were talking about any way ???), you hope to be left with a small core of actual skill who perform actual work for a lean product.

 

[Jon]

Twitter was a bloated fatty piece of meat, which Elon has now trimmed down to a lean fillet steak. A recipe for success!

 

[AccessBlaster]

 

[Steve R.]

A bit more devious than portrayed in the cartoon below. Social media, such as Twitter, manipulated the public narrative to tilt the 2020 presidential election in Biden's favor. Unfortunately, this continued exposure of the truth by Musk comes after the damage has been done and it is too late to "fix". A silver lining, the Republicans will assume control of the US House of Representative in 2023 so it is unlikey that the Democrats would be able to install a witch-hunting partisan based show committee to rake Musk over dubious accusations.

 

[Isaac]

Most of the major changes Elon has made are so common-sense, I feel like "how did we ever do WITHOUT these?" things.

Like his new announcement, nobody will be banned or censored from reasoned questioning of science - which as any scientist knows, is part of science itself.

These are all just another aspects of the basic foundations of free speech that we all were supposed to learn in Civics or Government class when we were 10 years old, I mean right??! As you allow a free conversation, hearing all sides, that environment is the most conducive to the Truth eventually floating to the top. It's not perfect, but it's ALWAYS better than one biased side having control - in which case the Truth very often will never appear.

Virtually all of mankind's great achievements are from people questioning the status quo, or the preponderance of majority / institutionalized "wisdom" at the time

 

[Pat Hartman]

Have they instituted a procedure where you can actually talk to a human if you get banned? And also the ability to escalate if you disagree with the reason?

I wonder if Musk has fired all the people who came to Twitter from the FBI or all the people who were implementing the FBI and other government requests to violate the first amendment? I don't know if Twitter can be sued over any of this but it is seriously hard to sue the Feds so it is likely that nothing will ever come of this.

 

[Isaac]

I think Elon should continue to focus 99 if not 100% of his efforts on the mere EXPOSING.

Just like all the things we like about free speech, the magic of the system is in the EXPOSING. The truth will float to the top. People will ultimately come to the right conclusions, if only they have the right information.

No need to try to prosecute people, just let the entire world know what Twitter and the Govn. conspired to do. Because Trump did some of it too.

 

[Steve R.]

@moke123: When companies are taken-over, chaos usually reigns for a while, as you referenced in your post and the quote below.

Nov 6 (Reuters) - After Twitter Inc laid off roughly half its staff on Friday following Elon Musk's $44 billion acquisition, the company is now reaching out to dozens of employees who lost their jobs and asking them to return, Bloomberg News reported on Sunday.

Some of those who are being asked to return were laid off by mistake. Others were let go before management realized that their work and experience may be necessary to build the new features Musk envisions, the report said citing people familiar with the moves.

But looking beyond the simple acquisition chaos, the media viewed this as an opportunity to lambast and demonize the evil capitalist Musk for laying people off. Whether it was bad management or good proactive management is open for debate. Musk's may actually be entitled to the last laugh. Two months have now elapsed and many companies are now following Musk's footsteps by announcing their own layoffs. Seems that Musk was one of the first in recognizing the need to streamline. Of course, the media that had lambasted and demonized Musk will never apologize. Musk may deserve an "award' for leadership!

Tech layoffs 2023: Companies that have made cuts

Companies across the tech industry, including Vox Media, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, have made major cuts in 2023.

abcnews.go.com

As an associated article:

Why Were Tech Stocks Down In 2022—And How Long Will The Slump Last?

Tech stocks fell more than 30% in 2022, with many experts expecting the slump to continue in 2023.

www.forbes.com

Tech stocks fell more than 30% in 2022, more than the overall market drop of 20%.

 

[AccessBlaster]

I thought ALL the big tech firms were laying off including Microsoft. They claim it has something to do with Covid-19 and working from home, but who knows.

 

[Pat Hartman]

I'm sure the "working" from home prompted this. He also recognized, given what employees were posting on Twitter, that they did not have anything close to enough to do to justify their employment. So lay them off. Some of the chaos around that was probably caused by deliberate sabotage by people playing favorites and pursuing grudges, plus trying to inflict damage on Twitter by laying off people who should never have gotten the ax.

For the remainder, he gave them a deadline for returning to the office. If you don't show up by "x", we'll assume you quit.

 

[AccessBlaster]

I'll bet production was way down thus ending the experiment

 

[Pat Hartman]

For the life of me, I can't figure out what all those "programmers" were doing. I guess if everyone needs time to spend in the quiet room, in the game room, at the juice bar, at the snack bar, at the coffee bar, in the gym, on the lawn and whatever, they were probably not getting more than an hour's worth of work per day out of most of them, if that.

I remember an article in the Kuwait Times, the local English language weekly. The reporter had interviewed some government employees why were extolling the virtues of their workforce because they worked at least 5 hours per day. Of course, they were scheduled for 8 but who's counting.

 

[Steve R.]

A good piece of news for Musk. Tesla of course is only one piece of the "pie" that Musk is managing. Time will tell if Musk's acquisition of Twitter didn't overstretch Musk management capabilities.

Tesla posts Q4 financial results, CEO Elon Musk weighs in on earnings call

CEO Elon Musk participated in Tesla's earnings call on Wednesday as the electric vehicle and clean energy company released its fourth-quarter financial results.

www.foxbusiness.com

During the earnings call Wednesday evening, Musk praised the Tesla team for its performance "despite the fact that 2022 was an incredibly challenging year due to forced shutdowns, very high interest rates and many delivery challenges."

In response to a question about whether Tesla tracks brand favorability and how it goes about managing any damage to the brand, Musk referenced his Twitter account.

"I’ve got 127 million followers, and it continues to grow very rapidly," Musk said. "That suggests that I’m reasonably popular."

He acknowledged he "might not be popular for some people" before adding: "But for the vast majority of people, my follower count speaks for itself. I’m one of the most attractive social media account maybe in the world, certainly on Twitter – and that predated the acquisition."

His $44 billion purchase of Twitter was completed back in October, with Musk having since made numerous changes to the social media company and the platform itself.

He said the platform is "actually an incredibly powerful tool for driving demand for Tesla."

 

[The_Doc_Man]

For the life of me, I can't figure out what all those "programmers" were doing. I guess if everyone needs time to spend in the quiet room, in the game room, at the juice bar, at the snack bar, at the coffee bar, in the gym, on the lawn and whatever, they were probably not getting more than an hour's worth of work per day out of most of them, if that.

I remember an article in the Kuwait Times, the local English language weekly. The reporter had interviewed some government employees why were extolling the virtues of their workforce because they worked at least 5 hours per day. Of course, they were scheduled for 8 but who's counting.

Actually, Pat, the Navy expected folks to only work about 5 hours of productive work a day anyway due to meetings and mandatory training and obligatory reviews and such. Talk about time-wasters! But filing reports on progress by e-mail would have been too easy. So we had to have the inevitable status update meetings.

There was a thing called "core hours" where all employees would be on site, and those of us who had reason to be in earlier or later than average were asked to make our hours match the core as much as possible. I had to be in by 0700 because my assigned systems served the Office of the Commander, U.S. Naval Reserve Command, which started work at 0800 one time-zone to the east from me. But it meant I could leave at 1500 each day plus whatever time I spent at lunch.

 

[Pat Hartman]

I once interviewed for a job back in the 80's at a large aircraft company with many government contracts. They had just started this three year conversion project to go from in house apps to an ERP they bought. The manager told me he had everyone scheduled to work 10 hour days already. Of course we were classified as "management" at that time even though we didn't meet the FLSA standards for "management" so that meant we wouldn't be getting paid for the extra 10 hours per week, not that I believed it was rational to be in a forced overtime position during the first month of a 3 year project. I politely declined. My husband ended up working for the company three years later on the same project which at that time was officially over a year behind and everyone on staff was totally burned out. At least he was working the project as a consultant so he got paid for all the hours he put in. The project ended up 2 years late. The worst thing about the project was that the column names were limited to 8 characters and since the application was developed in Germany, the names were all abbreviations of German words so they were totally incomprehensible to the programmers.

 

[JonXL]

Not sure I understand the opposition to working from home. As long as the job gets done, what's the problem?

Truth is, folks who aren't productive at home weren't/wouldn't be productive at the office, either. In the office, though, it's just that much easier to look busy while doing nothing. When WFH spread, a lot of managers had to learn how to measure productivity in ways other than counting the heads they saw poking up over cubicles. While initially a tough task, the outcome has been productivity measures that reveal what was a long unnoticed truth: there are employees who are (and always were) unproductive by the new (better) standards whose unproductivity has simply gone unnoticed. Some seemly see this unproductivity as a result of WFH when really WFH just made apparent what was always there.

Anyway, for the mass layoffs happening now, I understand many to be the result of businesses that grew rapidly during the pandemic and now need to ungrow as the economy is basically moving toward what most business leaders anticipate being a serious recession.

To the extent WFH factors into this, it's likely an insignificant contribution that mostly just enhances the already-existing productivity disparity between higher- and lower-performing employees.

 

[AccessBlaster]

It feels like ever since covid people aren't crazy about working anymore. At work or home.

Could be just my perception.

 

[Pat Hartman]

Certain jobs benefit from the quiet afforded by working at home but the benefit is minimized by the lack of interaction with one's peers. When I am working in the early stages of a large project with a team, it is far more productive for us to all be in the same room where we can spend a lot of time discussing requirements and potential implementation methods. Once the plan is in place and we know what we have to do, then it is nice to be able to sequester yourself behind a closed door or at home so people don't just pop in and break your concentration. Most companies don't recognize the need for different levels of interaction with team members at different states in the development cycle.