It’s looking like in the not so distant future, Elon Musk is going to finally ignite that pile of cash on fire:
Hours before a Thursday deadline that Elon Musk had given Twitter employees to decide whether to stay or leave their jobs, the social media company appeared to be in disarray.
Mr. Musk and his advisers held meetings with some Twitter workers whom they deemed “critical” to stop them from leaving, four people with knowledge of the conversations said. He sent out confusing messages about the company’s remote work policy, appearing to soften his stance on not allowing people to work from home before warning their managers, according to those people and internal emails viewed by The New York Times.
All the while, two people said, resignations started to roll in. By the deadline, 5 p.m. Eastern time, hundreds of Twitter employees appeared to have decided to depart with three months of severance pay, the people said. Twitter later announced via email that it would close “our office buildings” and disable employee badge access until Monday.
There are all sorts of amazing reports- locking everyone out of the system and having to unfire someone to let them back in, people stuck in garages because the barricades won’t open because their badges were revoked, etc.
There are lots of people out there who think he is doing this intentionally to own the libs, but I for one, do not. I just think he’s this fucking stupid. Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity, they say. And the dirty little secret is that not only is the American Dream dead, but America has not been a meritocracy for a long, long time. If you actually pay attention, it’s fucking alarming how many extremely rich people are very, very stupid. The governor of my state is one of them, although I don’t know how rich he is anymore. A lot of these guys had one idea, made it rich, and it’s been a shitshow ever since. Hell, there’s reason to believe Elon has never even had one:
Someone has to say it: Elon Musk has lied for 27 years about his credentials. He does not have a BS in Physics, or any technical field. Did not get into a PhD program. Dropped out in 1995 & was illegal. Later, investors quietly arranged a diploma – but not in science. 🧵1/ pic.twitter.com/ziuOMblwLJ
— capitolhunters (@capitolhunters) November 17, 2022
It’s a long tweet thread and I have no verification, so reader beware.
At any rate, this jackass thought he was coming into a company coal town in the 1900’s where the employees will quite literally starve if they don’t do what he said, and a couple thousand highly educated engineers and the like looked at him, thought for a second, and told him to Johnny Paycheck his bullshit.
Where it goes from here is anyone’s guess. Musk might be whisked out of the office and saner heads might take control. Or he might blow it all up and end up selling it on the cheap to someone. Maybe Jack. And I am gonna be honest, I’m gonna die laughing if Jack buys back twitter for pennies on the dollar-0 imagine being outwitted by that dimestore philosopher who learned all the wrong lessons on his diamond plated ayahusca trip that he probably went on with one of Gwyneth’s jade eggs crammed up his arse.
Shalimar
I am kind of shocked that he thought “work 80 hours a week in the office indefinitely for the same money you’re currently getting for managing your own productivity from home” would get a gung-ho reception from most employees. What the fuck is Elon smoking?
Captain C
It’s only 1:15 in the morning (here) and I think it’s safe to say the internets have likely been won for today.
HumboldtBlue
There has been a tweet that has appeared and re-appeared on my feed for a few hours now that is essentially stating, “Musk is destroying Twitter because BIG money/influence/power wants it gone.”
Sure as hell seems to fit a profile, that’s all I’m sayin’.
mrmoshpotato
“Appeared” is lifting the weight of the universe here. Hot! Damn!
ArchTeryx
The going theory I’ve seen is that the Saudis paid Musk big money to implode Twitter because they (and pretty much every other repressive, authoritarian regime in the Middle East, i.e. all of them) did not like that their dissidents had a channel for communication they couldn’t lock down. It’s a great conspiracy theory, but Twitter is private – Elmo could just shut it down and fire everyone with zero warning. This looks a whole lot more like brute stupidity.
He still thinks he’s in apartheid South Africa.
Pete Downunder
I’m a long way away and don’t use Twitter, but I agree with John that stupidity plus arrogance explains it all. If big money wanted it gone they could have paid a lot less and then just shut it down.
MisterForkbeard
The locked-in-a-garage thing was from a parody account.
That said, it looks like the rest of this is real. There are some reports that Twitter HQ is doen to about 250 employees and maybe less than 1000 employees total. Tech leads have left, entire teams have left including IT/administration teams and infrastructure teams that keep things moving.
Twitter will probably survive – its in for a few extremely rough weeks and will have a ton of problems but likely won’t immediately fall over and catch on fire. But I’m endlessly amused by all the rightwing Elon stans who proclaim that this is super smart and it only takes 12 people to run a website you know! And also all the current employees are awful terrible people. Etc.
Watching these people is like watching Trumps cult form all over again in 2015. They’re just that deluded.
HumboldtBlue
I’m also out of the loop on the egg-up-the-ass thing, so that’s good.
Space Karen will forever rule, however.
Shalimar
@HumboldtBlue: On the one hand, if your goal is to destroy the company, driving away all the advertisers and the employees in the way he has is by far the best way to do it.
On the other, there is no reason he should waste hours and hours every day pretending to have no understanding of how Twitter works if it is just cover for destroying the company. Occam’s razor says Musk really has no clue about the company he just bought.
mrmoshpotato
This sack of shit still thinks he lives in apartheid South Africa, doesn’t he?
Alison Rose
JC, why are you slumming it here when you could be writing cards for Hallmark?
glc
@mrmoshpotato:
At the moment, the whole of this phrasing seems to me to be a thing of beauty, perhaps a tag.
eldorado
oustanding resume! you have all the qualifications we’re lookin…wait, you didn’t leave twitter until 2023?
mrmoshpotato
@Shalimar: He’s smoking his own ass hole.
mrmoshpotato
@eldorado: LOL!
Shalimar
@mrmoshpotato: The funniest part of that is that Musk and his flunkies were calling employees and trying to convince them to stay but not offering any increase in compensation. Apparently just the honor of talking to Musk personally was going to change minds.
Leslie
@Alison Rose: Speaking of Hallmark, they are advertising a holiday movie called Sister Swap. I didn’t know they’d expanded their brand to include swinger romance. Very open-minded of them.
HumboldtBlue
@ArchTeryx: @Shalimar:
Points taken, and a shave to be had considering the razor, but this Twitter drama is truly fucking absurdly funny, enraging, and to be quite honest, mind-boggling confusing, and I will miss it if it’as gone.
And the motherfucker really does think he’s back in an apartheid state, the kind the current GOP wishes they had.
Peale
So, when its gone, does that mean we just reset to 2010 and bloggers are back in fashion?
mrmoshpotato
@HumboldtBlue: Wow. Bravo to the inspired genius who made that.
nasruddin
“Drivin’ that train….”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyuc8Rm0zG4
No idea really but I’ve been wondering if something chemical is at the root of all of this craziness….
HumboldtBlue
@Peale:
Only if you bring back TBogg.
Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
@Shalimar:
After Musk hung up, I’ll bet a lot of those ex-employees called the best California Unemployment Law attorney they could find.
mrmoshpotato
@Shalimar:
BWAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
kalakal
You’ve got to give the guy his due, he certainly made an impression on his first day in the new job
Princess
I wonder how many of the ones who did sign on to stay are on H1B visas attached to their employment at Twitter. I feel badly for those guys.
HumboldtBlue
@Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman):
There was a class action lawsuit filed the day Musk ordered layoffs.
kalakal
@mrmoshpotato: That’s the part I find hysterical, you know the egomaniac actually believed that
mrmoshpotato
@Peale:
Can we first decide who wins which Powerball and MegaMillions jackpots? I would settle for the default $20 million, but wouldn’t want us all to go in on one drawing and come back with a dollar each. 😁
Sister Golden Bear
@Shalimar: Trump’s Razor — “the stupidest possible explanation that can be reconciled with the available facts is usually the right one” — seems more apropos.
mrmoshpotato
@Princess: Yeah. So much of the tech industry are immigrants looking for a better life.
frosty
This is Betty C level invective!
Princess
I still don’t believe that Musk/Thiel/the Saudis bought Twitter to destroy it. Maybe to turn it into a Libertarian hells ape and to reduce it’s left/activist impact, but not to destroy it. My understanding is that the engineering is quite simple — too easy for someone else to start something similar right up again.
Dangerman
Twitter set to join Nantucket in the category of unfortunate Limericks
mrmoshpotato
Worth reposting if I did earlier.
Twitter link
No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen
@NoLieWithBTC
Speaker Pelosi just said on the House floor, “I have enjoyed working with 3 presidents.” She served as Speaker under 4 presidents.
Perfect.
1:15 PM · Nov 17, 2022
·Twitter Web App
West of the Rockies
@Leslie:
The trailer is not especially informative, but the movie looks pretty drab and definitely not at all kinky.
Oh, and in a bizarre bit of happenstance, I ran into the old friend and her family yesterday and had a pleasant half-hour chat in RiteAid.
West of the Rockies
@Peale:
Careful… that would mean a return to comic sans fonts, too.
West of the Rockies
@Dangerman:
There once was a critter at Twitter…
Martin
Sorry about the lack of CA updates – been sick.
But yeah, Twitter is basically donezo. Seems we have confirmation that their payroll department all quit. Tax and financial reporting are entirely gone. Twitter blue (the team that was supposed to make 2.0) is entirely gone. SRE is entirely gone (site reliability – basically the folks that make sure the servers are running) – rumor is that Apple is hoovering up the SRE folks as they surface. Apple has been hiring Twitter SRE for quite a few years – basically you can get hired practically sight unseen (as that goes in tech). Some of the other engineering teams are either completely gone or nearly so.
Employees are supposed to be locked out until Monday but nobody is. Speculation that the folks who were supposed to do that resigned before doing it.
Musk brought in some people from his other companies this afternoon to try and entice people to stay. Didn’t work. Might have made things worse. This situation is impossible to salvage so long as Musk is involved.
Might get a curious question answered here: what happens when a successful, major corporation loses all of their employees without having lost all of their customers?
Martin
@Princess: Yeah, I do to. My guess is they’re massively overrepresented among the folks that didn’t resign. Sounds like maybe 500 left, tops. Out of 7500 3 weeks ago.
West of the Rockies
@Martin:
Well, it appears the LA Rams all quit (even if they’re still in uniform). The fans remain. (Tragically, I am among them.)
Steeplejack
@West of the Rockies:
Maybe give your snarkmeter a whack to make sure it’s working.
Martin
@Shalimar: I don’t think it was intentional. But I also think he’s utterly incapable of even understanding how a two sided market with ads on one side and community engagement on the other would work.
But putting an alt-right guy on top of an unavoidably left-leaning platform of 450 million people based out of SF couldn’t do anything but blow up. Just happened faster than people expected.
oatler
These evil billionaires are how The Virus interfaces. It thinks it’s people!
Martin
@West of the Rockies: I’m going to challenge your statement there. It is possible for an employee to be so bad that you can’t tell whether they still work there or not. You sure the Rams ever showed up to begin with?
nasruddin
@Martin: Interesting. The other evil thought I had is that this is a rerun of PATCO in 1981. In this version of the fairy tale, the beleaguered boss has no choice but to replace all the “striking” workers with H1Bs & low cost offshore employees & move his hq to some low or unregulated political unit like Texas. Or the UAE. Or somewhere.
This would result in a lot of government agency interest, which is why he was hoping for / advising choosing a Republican congress. He only got half his wish, may not be enough.
Danielx
I will never be able to unsee that image.
West of the Rockies
@Steeplejack:
It’s been on the fritz lately…
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Steeplejack: Hey, be nice. The past five years have been really hard on snarkometers, even industrial-grade ones.
Steeplejack
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
That’s why I upgraded to the Snark-Mo-Tron 2000. Highly recommended.
Martin
@nasruddin: I can’t see how any of that will help. He’s going to be competing with Truth Social for advertisers no matter what he does. Not sure even the H1Bs will sign on given Musks proclivity for just spontaneously terminating everyone. H1Bs need stability – that’s sort of the point.
JoyceH
@mrmoshpotato:
He thought he could change corporate culture with a wave of his hand and tweeted bravado. Thought his remaining employees would respond to the ‘work hardcore’ tweet with a fist pump and a “hard! core! Sir, yes, SIR!”
Because he doesn’t realize that the internet is a mature industry these days and he’s asking his employees to work like they work for a startup. Working for a startup = work crazy stupid hours and you hardly ever see your apartment, but it’s a pit anyway and there’s a sofa in the break room that’s sort of comfortable. But you do it, because you’re in your 20s with energy to burn and if you’re really good and really lucky, you might be extremely rich before you’re thirty, and you’re too inexperienced to know how long the odds of that outcome are. So – you’re supposed to work like THAT. For. Ever. But you’re not in your twenties anymore, you’re in your forties, you’re not a developer, you’re a systems manager, with a comfortable job that’s routine but important to keep the widgets moving, and you have a wife and kids and a little league team to coach, and your knees are starting to twinge and when you see that commercial with the talking box colon cancer test you wonder if you should get one.
So – yeah. Wrong audience, wrong decade.
sab
@Martin: Hilarious. Everyone hates the tax reporting people until they are gone and your company still has to tax report. And I bet not a single one of his employees kept any kind of of paystubs because techbros are way too cool to do that.
Been there and done that with my baby sister.
HumboldtBlue
@JoyceH:
This is why we read this blog.
sab
@HumboldtBlue: I laugh until I remember these are real people.
Hopefully skilled enough to land solidly elsewhere.
jnfr
Feeling real sorrow for my small communities who have to find some way to suddenly maintain their connections.
I’ve been on the internet a long time and I’ve seen this again and again, but this is bigger than anything.
sukabi
@Martin: I expect we’ll all find out in the next 3-5 days.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
The really strange thing is Musk should know the California labor market and labor laws better than this. There is now way Musk could keep Tesla going in Fremont with that “fuck you, your fired” attitude considering how desperate the hardware manufactures are. Not to mention Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink all employee programmers and there is no way in f his attitude would fly with senior programmers. My sisters has stories of the being in team meetings were the programmers left a VP humiliated and crying after tearing his latest Brilliant Idea to shreds threw a series of very professionally worded questions.
bjacques
Twitter right now:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dq6T5BojXc8
Enhanced Voting Techniques
ROFL
And that is what is awesome about Pelosi. You can almost hear Trump yelling from from Florida “she means BUSH!”
Martin
@JoyceH: That wasn’t even the problem. Twitter didn’t have a meaningful engineering problem that needed to be solved until Musk invented one.
Musks main problem is that he bought into the alt-right conspiracy theory that the right was the dominant culture and that the left, through institutions like twitter, were suppressing them. And *that* was the problem he sought to fix. That Twitter was a SF company was only added proof of that.
One academic who studies conspiracies theories saw Musk’s plan for and justification for eliminating verification and knew exactly what that was – eliminating any sense of authority on the platform and replacing it with every rando being able to declare that their dumb shit theory on Paul Pelosi is as authoritative as what the AP has to say. He was building a conspiracy theory machine.
His views on moderation were couched in speech issues, but moderation isn’t really about speech – it’s about attacks on a community. It’s about the intent of the person speaking to harm the community, and it’s about protecting that community (which is doubly important as you are protecting advertisers in the process). The real issue is that his alt-right community was constantly being excluded from this much larger community because they are unable to operate from the minority. The actual speech didn’t matter, the exclusion mattered, and he wanted that community to be included without having to do the work of being accepted.
I mean, there’s no way this ended differently. This was always the outcome. All that mattered was the timing. If he could have gotten the employees on board with his plan then it could have stretched out longer, but Twitter effectively has no revenue now, and that wouldn’t have been any different had the staff gone along. And the only reason Twitter was in pretty decent shape when Musk bought it was because the workers there understood the business and the relationship between the community and advertisers and pushed against jack and the other libertarian assholes to make it work. Jack to his credit, allowed them to push, because they were right. But Musk is always the smartest guy in the room, and he’ll kick as many people out of the room as is necessary to make that true.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Musk apparently made a statement he is only doing doing this in the interm and there will be a new CEO. Except who would want to take over Twitter after Musk burnt it to the ground like this?
Bruce K in ATH-GR
Weird how many similes and metaphors come up with regard to Elmo. First I thought he was like Cave Johnson, and now I’m reminded that he was treated kind of like a rock star, which brings to mind Billy Joel’s description of the fate of a rock star who’s gone past his sell-by date: “put in the back in the discount rack like another can of beans.”
And I’m pretty sure this is what history is going to remember Musk for: taking over a widespread communications network serving the entire planet and imploding it in the space of a single season. SpaceX and Tesla are going to be footnotes in his biography compared to this display of hubris.
Martin
@sukabi: It’ll be interesting when the spike in video traffic from the World Cup kicks in. If users haven’t already bailed by then. Twitter normally has teams preparing for high volume events like that to make sure the servers stay up.
gwangung
@jnfr: I also think of this quote:
Ruckus
@Shalimar:
He’s not smoking anything, he’s just never had to actually work a day in his life. His only concern is his financial numbers. He’s never run a company before all he knows is jack and shit. I know more than he does about running a business. He’s made money by investing his inherited wealth, he likely knows less about running a company, especially one with over 7000 employees than a majority of the people he fired or gave really, really good reason to quit.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
That’s a quote to remember.
Martin
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: That won’t help. The reason his Paul Pelosi tweet was so damaging to their ad revenue is it was a realization that it didn’t matter what Twitter’s moderation policy and implementation was, the owner of the company couldn’t be held to them. After all, they’re his policies – his behavior will always supercede them.
So bring in a new CEO and you might address some of the staffing issues (man, is that a hell of a deep hole to dig out of) but you haven’t addressed any of the fundamental issues. I just don’t think it’s possible for Musk to own this company. His personal presence is the problem, and the CEO doesn’t mean Musk still doesn’t own the place.
sukabi
@Martin: I was only half joking last month when I said Musk would kill twitter in 2 months….he’s been even more unintentionally destructive than I thought he’d be…just bloody clueless on how to interact with new to him employees, or how to walk into a new company and gain respect and trust….instead he smashes all the windows on his entrances, craps on the floor and says “you’re all fired bitches”
just amazing how fucking incompetent he is.
Doug
@Martin: From the estimable Abigail Nussbaum (in case you didn’t see it a week ago):
That was just seven days ago. In the time since, it’s as if the captain of the Titanic said Wheeee! and ordered the ship to turn around and let the iceberg gouge out the other side, too.
Martin
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: It’s not just a communication network, it’s a community and a culture. I mean, there’s a reason people are so invested in this – it’s a kind of cultural genocide. There are relationships there, in-jokes, shared knowledge, etc.
I think there are enough close alternatives like Mastodon that the community and culture can reform and persist, but there will still be enormous damage done. And for no reason but he thought liberals were being mean to fascists.
Once people realize what’s been lost, this will be unforgivable.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Martin: Twitter is a bit unique because it’s an internet community that includes the rich and powerful. But I supposed that’s means Twitter was doomed from the start because sooner or later some rich a-hole like Musk was going to pop and trash the place over some BS they were upset about.
Martin
@Doug: I made my Mastodon account a few days before Musk took over. It was obvious to me then. I’ve made a lot of money investing in tech companies. I’ve got a pretty good sense of what does and doesn’t work.
I’ll admit things have gone even worse than I thought. I keep describing to people why this feel so unsettling. There’s a pattern that happens when a corporate crisis hits where the company pulls the sails in, puts the PR folks out, a plan is developed and leadership goes out to settle investors, the public, assure the crisis won’t repeat, and make whole the people harmed. Everyone does it a bit differently, but it *always* happens. You can count on it. But day after day it never does here. We just move from crisis to crisis within hours with no self-awareness that there even is a crisis and no real effort made to address it. There’s something genuinely pathetic about it.
I mean, FTX just blew away $30B in a matter of a few days and the massively disgraced 30 year old former CEO is doing a better job of addressing his crisis than Musk is – and it’s looking pretty likely that guy stole a billion dollars is looking to flee extradition. How the fuck is Musk doing worse than SBF?
Lady WereBear
@Shalimar: White supremacy wants slaves back. Thank ourselves that this is no longer acceptable unless it’s dressed up as something else, at least.
Brachiator
@Martin:
Very droll. And on point.
@Ruckus:
I don’t think this is quite right. Musk has founded a number of companies. But it seems to be the case that he doesn’t know how to run them. He has a record of alienating employees and being ousted as CEO.
He has stubbornly refused to learn from his mistakes. And yet he has still been able to profit from his stupidity. A good deal of his wealth comes not from investing, but from money made when his companies were bought by others.
Compaq acquired Musk’s first company Zip2 for $307 million in cash in February 1999, and Musk received $22 million for his 7-percent share.
Musk keeps trying to prove he is a great businessman and he will keep destroying companies until he exhausts his considerable wealth.
Shalimar
@nasruddin: Interesting plot for a movie, but if it were the intended result here, Musk wouldn’t have terminated 90% of the Indian office in the first round of layoffs.
Narya
There is a dissertation in how folks are choosing where to go. Mastodon seems to be the place, but I’ve seen several others emerge briefly. Personally, I just want to read the folks I read, and I just follow them wherever they go; at this stage the choice doesn’t seem to be affected by, say, ad revenue, so choice is emerging in some other way. Fascinating.
lowtechcyclist
I’m getting a real Pol Pot 1975 ‘drive everyone out of the cities’ vibe out of this. Fortunately without actually shooting anyone this time, but the same sort of combination of sudden power, disregard for consequences, and fundamental idiocy.
trucmat
I’m coming to the end of a long tech career and think I have some knowledge of your average tech worker. I did a career switch in mid nineties and earned an MS in Computer Science. In the years since I’ve allowed my personal life to disrupt my career many times but still have accomplishments of which I’m proud. Recruiters hit me up regularly even today.
Why the personal review? Because I am not as desirable by a long shot as the departing programmers from Twitter. The best of them were probably just made rich by Musk when he bought out their Twitter stock. They don’t need him or Twitter because they will be snapped up by other better companies. Only true believers, foreigners on visas, and apathetic or desperate employees will remain.
This nineteenth century approach needs to fail. Asshole bosses over the world are going to get more abusive if Musk shows it’s possible to beat down elite workers and win. I’d like Twitter to survive but not if it turns into an exploitive hellhole in which to work.
Twitter isn’t an emerald mine under Apartheid where poor workers are infinitely replaceable. Twitter techies have desirable skills that are in short supply. They are going to do just fine without Musk.
JPL
Twitter demise will leave a void for those that used it for good. Andrew Kaczynski appealed first for information about the rare brain cancer his daughter was diagnosed with. Hundreds stepped forward. After her death a few months later, he started fundraising for Dana-Farber Hospital. Last he raised close to 2 million.
Another platform will take over, but it will take time to rebuild the community.
Narya
@JPL: Twitter was proof of concept and proof that it could be used for good.
sdhays
@Brachiator: Too bad his wealth is so considerable that it probably won’t ever be exhausted.
Percysowner
Movie Bob has a video on how Elon Musk Is Stupid i.e. The Internet is stupid here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMldvdc_H4E
I like the dude and I like the video
lowtechcyclist
@Martin:
Now we’re getting into Pythonesque “those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked” territory.
Baud
I’m surprised they’re up to date on their electricity bills.
Geminid
@West of the Rockies: Did the Rams shut down QB Stafford for the season? If so, there is a silver lining: Bryce Perkins will get playing time. That guy’s a winner!
MomSense
@Dangerman:
hahahahaha!
lowtechcyclist
@Martin:
I know, right? Who do we think we are, having the effrontery to criticize and make fun of fascists? How dare we look down on them!
Lady WereBear
@ArchTeryx: Exactly. I could see them cooking up a scheme to destroy it, even the Saudi influence makes sense and they have enough money.
But not falling on their sword for the cause. Much less losing money like an exploded dam AND being a global fool.
Baud
@Lady WereBear:
Yeah, it’s a dumb theory. It’s actually the type of thing wingnuts would come up with: a grand conspiracy of evil masterminds are implementing a nefarious plan to get us. I don’t buy it.
Baud
Via Reddit.
https://i.redd.it/wlh2gzolqo0a1.jpg
The Thin Black Duke
@Lady WereBear: Elmo has been coasting on his underserved reputation as the mutant offspring of Tony Stark, Howard Roarke, and Lazarus Long for years. Elmo just blew that up. Yeah, he’s still ridiculously wealthy, but Elmo will never be able to buy his mythos back.
trucmat
This is pure conjecture but here’s a chain to follow …
1 Russia produces porn as honey traps
2 Russian hackers track porn habits of powerful Americans
3 Some computers are vulnerable to remote activation of cameras and mics
4 Some powerful Americans are now blackmailed because of porn choices and or recorded … exercises
5 Elon Musk, Lindsey Graham …
Some people say this makes sense. ;)
JPL
@lowtechcyclist: 😅😅
Rebelsdad (fka texasboyshaun)
@HumboldtBlue: Updated for the new generation: “Your Tulsi sweatshirt won’t get you into heaven anymore…”
lowtechcyclist
When I opened up Edge this morning, this popped up:
Key Evangelical Figures Turn On Trump: ‘He Used Us’
And it only took them seven years to figure that out? Congratulations! (I was laughing hard enough to bust a gut. No shit, Sherlock!)
Of course, they were using him too. It was a transactional relationship, and it was a successful transaction for both sides. He got to be President, and they got their pro-fundie majority on the Supreme Court.
But if the fundagelicals really are deserting him, then he’s going nowhere in 2024. They’ll all be in the DeSantis camp in a matter of weeks, is my bet.
brendancalling
I know the coronavirus posts are important, and the travel posts are a welcome respite from 24/7 politics, but I wish this post could be pinned to the top for the rest of the day.
Geminid
@The Thin Black Duke: Musk damaging his reputation among lenders. Seven of the biggest banks in the world put up $13 billion for the purchase, a little 25% of the $billion purchase price. Morgan Stanley accounted for $3.5 billion of this.*
These are big banks, and they’ll survive the hits they take over this fiasco. But it will be a long while before Musk can get banks to lend him that kind of money again.
Someone here speculated that Musk would have been better off putting more of his own money in, that the long term reputational damage among banks could have greater consequence than just losing most of $13 billion.
“The Elon Musk-Twitter purchase: who is financing the 44 billion deal?” CNBC October 28, 2022.
Kevin
@ArchTeryx: this seems most logical to me as well but still 50/50 whether he’s just that stupid.
Subsole
@Shalimar:
He’s smoking a whole bunch of pseudo alt-right insecurities, if I had to guess.
Everything he’s done since he arrived has played to these chanboard alpha-male tropes about the hardcore business tyrant (leavened with IDW trolling). Basically the asshole boss who somehow stays successful enough to tell everyone what to do and where to shove it. Someone rich enough and powerful enough to get away with being an enflamed asshole. Right?
It’s all the same crap, once you dig down. Loud noisy display rooted in a paralyzing fear that one’s balls are going to vanish in a puff of estrogen the instant everyone is no longer forced to pay attention to them.
Baud
@brendancalling:
I have a feeling there will be more Musk posts.
Bryn
I would understand being hardcore to work on getting to Mars. Maybe even to work on interesting AI stuff. But who in the world wants to be hardcore about a social media app? How do you explain to your family that you’re not coming home again tonight because you’re too busy working on the next generation of how to charge for a subscription or deliver an ad?
And how does he not know that the hardcore developers who can do the work he wants can write their own ticket, and what they want as much as money is to work some place that reflects their values?
Calouste
@trucmat: I just saw a post by someone in my LinkedIn timeline saying they left Twitter. 4 of the 25 comments were along the lines of “Hey, we’re hiring, please send me your resume”. And they looked pretty targeted at what their experience. These people will be fine.
NorthLeft
I did not know that Musk spent some time in Canada. Especially that he went to Queens University (my eldest daughter’s alma mater).
But his story, move to Canada with the ultimate goal of moving to the states, is all too familiar. I have worked with a few people that have done that. One from Singapore who connived to have his pregnant wife bear their child in the states to gain citizenship.
I shouldn’t care, but I just find it unethical in some way.
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: Yeah, the political evangelicals were using Trump, and they got good use out of him. But they helped elect him and owe him nothing.
They’re a networky bunch, and that could help DeSantis within this sizeable component of the Republican coalition. The leaders may be cautious, though. DeSantis has yet to prove himself on the national stage, and there will be a more candidates entering the race.
One would be former Secretary of State Pompeo. He probably has his own evangelicals networking for him. He also has ties to the Koch network and will not lack for money. Pompeo’s an asshole of course, but that’s now a requirement for the nomination, not a bar.
So I guess I’m saying that much of the evangelical vote could still be up for grabs going into 2024. And Trump might still have the Pentecostal vote locked up. They are enthusiasts, and they believe in snakehandling.
The Thin Black Duke
@Bryn: Huh. A narcissistic zillionaire who hates people buys a social media app. What could go wrong?
schrodingers_cat
Immigrants like Mars Karen give all of us immigrants who have stayed on the straight narrow for years sometimes decades, maintaining our status, navigating through a thicket of often confusing rules and unfriendly bureaucracies a bad name.
Nettoyeur
artem1s
@lowtechcyclist:
They are already trying to resurrect Dence from the ashes of 1/6. It might take them another election cycle to decide which of the GQP ‘leaders’ are awful enough to take over their fallen Messiah’s trappings. How old is Huckabee? He’s been waiting in the wings since forever to the fundy’s nod for the WH.
Matt McIrvin
@artem1s: DeSantis is gunning hard for religious-right support; he’s probably good enough.
Nettoyeur
@Captain C: Reminds me of Nokia, which hired a Microsoft exec as CEO and then allowed its smartphone biz to be sold to Msoft for billions to the shareholders. Msoft spent a few years and tens of billions failing with smartphones before giving up, at which point the Nokia guys got their name back and relaunched themselves on an Android base, and are now happily back in the smartphone biz. The Finns made out bigtime, Msoft lost its shirt.
Nettoyeur
@Captain C: Reminds me of Nokia, which hired a Microsoft exec as CEO and then allowed its smartphone biz to be sold to Msoft for billions to the shareholders. Msoft spent a few years and tens of billions failing with smartphones before giving up, at which point the Nokia guys got their name back and relaunched themselves on an Android base, and are now happily back in the smartphone biz. The Finns made out bigtime, Msoft lost its shirt.
@HumboldtBlue: Or maybe Musk just turned Twitter into a Truth Social failure.
artem1s
@Matt McIrvin: I just get this vibe that DeSantis is getting set up. He’s going to think he gets the mantle once he takes out TFG, but they will dump him for some Johnny come lately, good hair, beer drinking buddy who they have waiting in the wings. Someone who doens’t have the smoking gun that took out TFG in his hand. It feels a lot like what they did to Issa when he did all the heavy lifting getting the special election going and then dumped him for The Governator. Same thing with Karl Rove mangling McCain so they could put W in power as Cheney’s sock puppet. And Christy with Dump. DeSantis just strikes me as someone who overreaches and never sees the knife coming until it’s in his back.
Ken
So in addition to the SEC and FTC consent decrees, he can expect attention from the IRS. My schadenfreude runneth over.
Ken
And one of those short BBC six-episode seasons, at that.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Bryn: Personally another aspect of Musk I do not understand is his thinking that workers, especially software engineers, developers, programmers should work in the office, period no exceptions. One think the people I work with who are in those careers liked about the pandemic (strange way to put it I know) was that they had to / got to go work from home. Many of them were single or in two-career/no kids relationships and they LOVED the quiet and physical freedom of working at home and having the freedom to set their own hours to some degree. Many of ones I work with would NOT return to the office cube farm if they were told they could not work from home.
MomSense
@artem1s:
I’m only paying attention for the inevitable airing of his dirty laundry. Maybe we should call it renting of the unclean garments since he is God’s 8th day creation.
@Ken:
Like I predicted, this is a shitshow that will result in Musk beihn separated from his money.
coin operated
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone:
Same. When I left my last job 18 months ago we interviewed a half-dozen candidates with quality credentials. Once we confirmed that it was in-office only, the interview ended. They ended up hiring some straggler who brought down the entire company 3 weeks later. I warned them this would happen…
Recently saw that same position posted on LinkedIn with the word hybrid attached to the description. Seems they learned something…
lowtechcyclist
@Geminid:
ISTM that his main handicap is: where are the people who really want this guy to be the next President? I (unfortunately) know people who are chomping at the bit to put DeSantis in the White House, but if Pompeo has a following outside his former Congressional district, I sure don’t see it.
Baptists and Pentecostals would both be considered evangelicals. Both sides of the Baptist v. Pentecostal divide (which I remember well) buried the hatchet decades ago because they agreed on politics way more than they disagreed on speaking in tongues or prophecy.
Also very few Pentecostals are into handling poisonous snakes. Though there might be a few of those around where you live.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Martin: Yeah, but Mister Smartypants thought reliance on cloud computing and quick spin up virtual servers was a waste of the company’s money. Because he doesn’t understand a tech company is not an assembly line car company. And even at his car company he almost tanked the production lines by trying to over-automate everything (yeah, ask GM how that went went they tried it) and then screaming at everyone when it would not work. And firing people who brought serious safety concerns to his attention.
jonas
@sdhays: Musk’s insane wealth is almost entirely tied up in his huge stake in Tesla, which is wildly overvalued at the moment, and which he also put up as collateral for the personal loan he had to take out to purchase Twitter. If Twitter’s collapse also starts taking down Tesla’s stock with it as he has to liquidate more and more shares to keep things afloat and stave off creditors, it’s going to lead to a death spiral for Tesla stock (or maybe at least just bring it back to earth in line with what the company actually makes) and he’ll be out there as CEO before long as well.
Musk may not be literally stupid, but he is phenomenally foolish and an asshole to boot and thinks his own shit don’t stink. Better uppances could not come soon enough.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@coin operated: Exactly! Most of the other 13 people who were in the cubes around me did external client support (which means on the phone, or email with clients and on Teams/Zoom/Webex with coworkers to resolve client issues) or involved in business analysis (meetings with end users about what the program and what it runs does and how the new program needs to work, etc) or number crunching of one sort or another, involving vast spreadsheets. with all of them in phone and online meetings at the office it was Hell. Having 4 foot cube wall and 5 square foot cubes made it worse. I always found it funny that the 13 people I worked with in the department had 8 different bosses…none of whom worked in the state much less the same building.
jonas
I recently read somewhere that Oracle has told its hiring managers to ignore applicants from either coast, esp. NY, LA, and SF because they cost too much and instead bring on stragglers from cheap markets in the south and midwest who will work for less, supposedly.
This will definitely work out well.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@jonas: Two months ago, on September 20th, Tesla stock was $308 a share, today it is about $178 a share. I am curious as to what it will open at on Monday…
nasruddin
@Martin: (& others) I don’t think Musk will have too much problem finding other people to work. It will take him some time (& how much time does he have?).
One thing we learned from the similarly-managed Trump administration is that there are plenty of people who like this style, & plenty of people who think they can ride this tiger (or have to ride it). The techbro community (former member) is full of libertarian types & don’t expect choruses of “Solidarity Forever” from ’em.
Your point that H1B’s need stability is a good one (altho I don’t know but that everyone needs it). It may be that “needs to ride that tiger” covers this – maybe depends on whether this mess is a plan or just the substance abuse talking.
nasruddin
@Martin:
The memory loss is potentially huge – who was that person that said that? Where is that saved thread?
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
It’s similar to the single – source problem. Federations tho are also unstable.
nasruddin
@NorthLeft: If you look at his family history, a few careless mistakes in his grandfather’s history kept him from citizenship by right. I don’t begrudge him US citizenship or even the jackassery.
nasruddin
Good point! I’m desperate to see a pattern of some kind here but it may only be insanity (whatever flavor is in play)
StringOnAStick
The SRE we know took the first offer of severance and then immediately got to work trying to find jobs for his H1-B team members while he himself takes some time off. There were/are good people there, and what Musk is showing, other than his whole ass, is what a poor guy he is for the established Bird culture.
I figure the remaining people are either trapped there (H1-B or medical issues and scared about be hireable with some pre existing even though that’s not supposed to matter though we all know it does) and fellow libertoonian tech bros. What a recipe for a complete hell job.
I’m most upset about the important communities this is destroying. We get a lot of info about Ukraine from Twitter, as just one example.
Subsole
@lowtechcyclist:
It’s all of a piece with Chapelle, Maher, and their ilk.
Angry jerks throwing a tantrum because they can’t force the people they insult to sit there and take it with a smile.
Assholes, the lot of them.
Subsole
@lowtechcyclist:
They wanted a king.
God saw fit to afflict them with one.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
Thing is most of his current wealth is paper wealth, wealth that is stock in companies. That gets traded like monopoly money. Elon is listed by Forbes as the worlds richest man, a contest to see who has/is the most expensive dick. And Elon has proven that he is.
Now granted there is something behind those stocks, actual value. But this particular stock is for a company that is basically a very large clubhouse/bar, where people go to talk, discuss anything, it’s the twitter social club. There’s no dues, no minimum drink level, no tee times. You don’t have to be rich, connected, human to belong.
And this guy, who thinks his shit doesn’t stink because he’s the richest man, who may know how to purchase stuff but who knows diddly squat about how to actual run the company or engineer cars, or really much of anything about actual people doing actual work. He bought a car company but knows jack and shit about engineering, other people do that. He doesn’t give a damn about labor laws or other people’s lives. He spent about double it’s value to purchase twitter, fired half the staff and wants everyone else to work 80 hrs a week for a 40 hr a week salary. And he keeps doubling down on his idiocy. At least there might be a positive out of all this, some people might just revise their concept that money makes one smart. Because Elon has publicly proven that having all the money in the world doesn’t do that in the least.
Paul in KY
@Shalimar: On the surface, it sounds so good…
Paul in KY
@mrmoshpotato: I hope, if they stayed, that they really, really, stuck it to him in the pay dept. Also with special contracts that give them all that money if let go, etc.
Paul in KY
@trucmat: You are going to need more than video of me jacking off to blackmail me. Jeezus, what a bunch of namby-pambys (if true).
Publish, sir and be damned!
Paul in KY
@Bryn: Excellent points.
Paul in KY
@artem1s: They’d probably try Suckabee’s daughter. She’s completely evil & won governor of AR.
Paul in KY
@artem1s: He ain’t overreached yet. Do hope he does, however, as he’s a scary dude.
Ruckus
@Shalimar:
“What the fuck is Elon smoking?”
You know that old joke about the dime bag you brought from some guy on the street corner, and not to be too gross but I’d bet his own turds. Nothing else could smell this bad or be any worse.
The level of stupidity he showing us is rather amazing, but not all that surprising, all things considered.
Ruckus
@Martin:
“But Musk is always the smartest guy in the room, and he’ll kick as many people out of the room as is necessary to make that true.”
So 100% of the employees will be gone within the next week?
Money can’t buy you love, it can buy you an education, but you can’t teach the smartest man in the room that he really isn’t.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
You got it right, as did I.
He knows how to spend money, he knows how to buy companies. But he does NOT know how to run one.
He thinks his shit smells like Channel #5 and he can do anything and everything. But he can’t, 99.999% of us can’t do anything and everything. We can be good or great at one or a few things. Many of us are not capable of even that. He was looking good at one thing. Buying companies. Maybe he’s good at it, or he might just be lucky. And his record at that is decent but he has ZERO idea how to run one. He started out adult life with a lot of money and that sometimes can buy more money. But actual working, thinking, being a boss, even running a small team at some task he may be capable of, but a company? All the bits and pieces, all the different people that he obviously thinks he owns their lives and skills, all the legal issues, all because he has money?
Tehanu
He thought he bought a tech company and better code would make it a success. He had no idea that he was really buying a social platform. I do feel sorry for the foreign workers with the H1B visas who may well be stuck, and even more sorry for Ukraine and the Iranian protesters who may have no means of getting their word out if Twitter collapses.
As for the insulting tweets he’s been putting out to (a) a U.S. Senator and (b) anybody who criticizes him even mildly, I really was surprised at the level of sheer nastiness he displays. It’s like when Dump made fun of that disabled reporter — both of them acting like 6-year-old spoiled brats.