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The Great Thing (And Also The Problem) with Elon Musk

Arnox

Master
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Founder
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5,285
I already said earlier in the chatbox that Elon is the J. Jonah Jameson of Twitter and I stand by that in almost every sense of the name. lol But still, I feel like I should probably expound a little further as to my personal thoughts on this guy. Many people love him and many people hate him. Me though, I'm somewhere in the middle, as always. Some of the stuff he says and does is pretty on-point and cutting, but other times, I think Elon is just too damn unprofessional or perhaps doesn't take certain things as seriously as he should. There's a time for memes, and there's a time for sobriety and professionalism. You can't just YOLO it and expect everything to work out totally great. And I'm not just talking about Twitter here either. For example, Elon talks a lot of shit, but his cars are still notoriously anti-right-to-repair. He mouths off constantly on Twitter, but it's also causing a lot of misunderstandings and probably a bunch of actually competent employees are just leaving, regardless of whether Elon has this grand master plan or not.

Elon's been burning bridges left and right like a maniac and some of them did need to go up, but he better be careful with those matches or else one day he's gonna light himself on fire. Some might say he already has.
 

Phiwise_

Adherent
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29
Specialization
Technophiliacs & Technophiles
Specifically in the case of Twitter, Musk's mostly doing what he has to. He's doing it with his own personality, of course, but hostile takeovers always need to be uncompromising at first; "Men must either be caressed or else annihilated" and all that, and I don't think even his detractors would honestly argue that most of the people he's dealing with fall closer to benign than to poisonous. Professionalism is seeking a middle-ground, which, without an overarching structure to effectively enforce it, is just opening yourself up to be taken advantage of. Defensiveness is never ideal, but neither are the risks that make it necessary.

Musk put 44bil on *two* no-win models, advert funding and being the guy who cleans house, so it's no surprise that he has to burn a lot of social capital to even have a chance of recouping. He made another "mistake" yesterday, which is to say he did something a CEO shouldn't want to do, but it's not clear he has the option not to, practically speaking.
 

Arnox

Master
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5,285
Specifically in the case of Twitter, Musk's mostly doing what he has to. He's doing it with his own personality, of course, but hostile takeovers always need to be uncompromising at first; "Men must either be caressed or else annihilated" and all that, and I don't think even his detractors would honestly argue that most of the people he's dealing with fall closer to benign than to poisonous. Professionalism is seeking a middle-ground, which, without an overarching structure to effectively enforce it, is just opening yourself up to be taken advantage of. Defensiveness is never ideal, but neither are the risks that make it necessary.

Musk put 44bil on *two* no-win models, advert funding and being the guy who cleans house, so it's no surprise that he has to burn a lot of social capital to even have a chance of recouping. He made another "mistake" yesterday, which is to say he did something a CEO shouldn't want to do, but it's not clear he has the option not to, practically speaking.
Perhaps, but I do think professionalism, while indeed sometimes requiring an unyielding stance, also entails doing your best not to air your dirty laundry out in public. Elon coming into Twitter was always going to make a big splash, sure, but I also feel he's taking some unnecessary risks here and making himself more of a target. That said, if someone within the company tries to start shit with him in public, then of course, he can deal with that in public.

What does make things murky here though is that I don't think we really know just how "bad" Twitter was, internally. I mean, we always knew it was fucked at the top, but how far does this go? So it's really hard to make a judgement call one way or the other until we get some concrete details as to how things really were within the lower echelons of the company.
 

gaijinkaiju

Lord Inquisitor
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612
What does make things murky here though is that I don't think we really know just how "bad" Twitter was, internally. I mean, we always knew it was fucked at the top, but how far does this go? So it's really hard to make a judgement call one way or the other until we get some concrete details as to how things really were within the lower echelons of the company.
Twitter was rotten to the core. Putting aside the left lean the company had and the habit of hiding trending hashtags that were bad/inconvient for "their side" (re: hunter biden laptop), the fact that only after Musk took over that they cleared out a hashtag being used to distribute csam and added an option to report it, should tell you all you need to know about how bad it was.
There's also the "day in a life of a twitter employee" videos that show just how little work they actually did.
 

Arnox

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5,285
Twitter was rotten to the core. Putting aside the left lean the company had and the habit of hiding trending hashtags that were bad/inconvient for "their side" (re: hunter biden laptop), the fact that only after Musk took over that they cleared out a hashtag being used to distribute csam and added an option to report it, should tell you all you need to know about how bad it was.
There's also the "day in a life of a twitter employee" videos that show just how little work they actually did.
Yeah, but... There was over 7,000 employees working at Twitter. It's a little hard to believe that even just most of them were in on it.
 

gaijinkaiju

Lord Inquisitor
Sanctuary legend
Sanctuary contributor
Messages
612
Yeah, but... There was over 7,000 employees working at Twitter. It's a little hard to believe that even just most of them were in on it.
yes, and 7000 of them did nothing about it. They wouldn't be getting sued over it, if they had done something
 

Houseman

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1,068
It's easy to get thousands of people who work at a company to be "in on it" when your group controls HR, and therefore, who gets hired and who gets fired.

Notice how the only people left are all the immigrant, male nerds who write the code that is essential to making Twitter work. Look at the before and after pictures.
 

Arnox

Master
Staff member
Founder
Messages
5,285
It's easy to get thousands of people who work at a company to be "in on it" when your group controls HR, and therefore, who gets hired and who gets fired.

Notice how the only people left are all the immigrant, male nerds who write the code that is essential to making Twitter work. Look at the before and after pictures.
Heh. Speaking of which, I think it's a sorry indication of our current status how STEM fields, and especially the tech fields, are still so male-dominated. But not because SEXISM, but because women just rarely seem to give a fuck about those fields enough to want to go into them. It's nobody's fault but it is still kinda sad.
 
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