Musk stressed the hell out of twitter. His technique and demeanor were total trash. They probably fired the wrong people in many situations. But he did prove that they were overhired by 50% or more.
The difference is that Twitter was not arrogant about it. Saying they where hardcore engineers with insane working hours and other bollocks. Musk dislike comes from him being extremely dickish about other peoples work while being an absolute clusterfuck of a manager.
Twitter was not bad because of its tech. Musk made it worse.
Musk hired people who wanted to change the world. His businesses at the time were the only place to push the envelope on space exploration to Mars and launching a commercial EV.
Twitter on the other hand will never get such motivated workforce
Twitter was also very bloated. Musk has an agenda, some of it is personal. I think from a business standpoint this was well overdue especially from some ex-twitter employees I've talked to.
It's also not the first time I have seen this type of layoff. I was a part of a few companies that got taken over by vulture capitalists and it's much the same. Everyone gets sorted into an arbitrary bucket based on metrics. Usually, these include commits, vacation taken, etc. Then the MBAs sort the list and fire the worst. Hostile takeovers are always, always bad for the employee. Twitter, however had other problems than a usual company. A dramatic lack of profitability, too many salaries to pay, etc. I'm not saying his methods are just but for Twitter to even have a chance at profit there needs to be some very, very dramatic changes.
If you were to believe the media Musk is literally destroying free speech (on a private platform?) and firing people for no reason. I doubt he would do this. He's a jerk, but he's not an idiot. It doesnt help twitter employees happen to be the most vocal, often whiniest, group of people so this is getting megaphoned to death in a way that wouldn't happen almost anywhere else.
If it is possible for Twitter to layoff employees, retain previous customers, and add more... I dunno, what was the previous management doing? I mean it is of course possible that Musk is just much more competent than them.
This. Even before Musk arrived there was a lot of debate about Twitter being overstaffed and departments are not producing any value at all. I don't know more or the details, but this is what sometimes I was reading years back.
This was an interesting article until it started praising musk for slashing half of twitter - I don’t think the HR and legal departments were doing fake work, and the current lack of stability seems to indicate that a good portion of those people layed off where actually important.
Twitter laid most of their staff off then Musk gave them an ultimatum of: commit every day, all day, sleep at the office, to Twitter, or get fired. I wonder why there was more work produced in that period.
Musk sounds like a nightmare to work for. Why would any self-respecting developer stick around under these conditions? I expect an exodus of talent from Twitter in short order.
Musk has extraordinary capability of extracting every bit of potential a person can deliver. Either you work crazy at your 200% or you are worthless and the company is not for you. Twitter will see lots of layoffs, massive restructuring - some unknown people being promoted for top roles, but end result will be better financial.
I am not sure Twitter will remain the same as it is.
Lots of people think Elon is not good at dealing with public perspective or government, but if you see most of his businesses, his expertise is dealing with governments, contracts and policies makers. On PR, he really doesn't care. And it works for him
Musk might have been right about some things. There probably was some degree of bloat. But to say he's badly mishandled this whole saga is a gross understatement. It is very difficult to utterly kill a site like Twitter; the fact that we're even considering that as a realistic possibility shows just how badly.
I think Musk is used to Tesla and SpaceX, which are both companies that a lot of people are (or at least were) excited to work for because they believe in the mission and what's being created. Plus there aren't many alternatives if you want to do that work. Twitter really isn't like that for most people; a Twitter developer has many other options to do similar work. Add to that the fact that he's both cranked up the intensity of the abuse and that it's more visible to everyone, and you can't expect a lot of good people to stick around. And despite the fact that it might coast for quite a while on the back of excellent work in the past, eventually you do need good people to keep a business going. (This is leaving aside the direct impacts of his actions on users and advertisers!)
If it hadn't been Musk, it would have been someone else. Twitter was grossly over-valued, over-staffed and under-performing in a business sense. There might have been a gentler way to handle the transformation, but Musk being Musk is attempting to speed-run the transformation and pay no attention of how it hurts staff or certain parts of the user base.
It is possible to criticize Musk and his management of Twitter for completely apolitical reasons. You have to be a sycophant to describe his management style as anything other than chaotic. There are literally employees at the company who don't have any work because there is no one to assign them to a department or team. There are people who don't even know if they work there anymore because the layoffs were handled so poorly. It goes way beyond Musk's opinions on free speech or whatever political opinion you want to blame. The whole purchase has clearly been a train wreck up until this point.
This feels very reminiscent of when Steve Jobs came back to Apple in an official CEO capacity. He laid off 3000 people in his first year as CEO and was ruthless with axing unnecessary projects and product lines. He also installed key NeXT employees into positions of influence. The rest is of course history. I'm curious to see how this plays out for Musk and Twitter.
The Elephant in the room is that Musk is pretty much the perfect example of what makes Twitter terrible, and Dorsey had more than enough opportunity to fix it because he was literally in charge of the company for years and did nothing. All the shit Musk is throwing at Twitter now is stuff Dorsey was responsible for.
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