Elon Musk's Twitter Teeters on the Edge After Another 1,200 Leave

[Kennah]

Source: NY Times

Elon Musk sent a flurry of emails to Twitter employees on Friday morning with a plea.

“Anyone who actually writes software, please report to the 10th floor at 2 p.m. today,” he wrote in a two-paragraph message, which was viewed by The New York Times. “Thanks, Elon.”

About 30 minutes later, Mr. Musk sent another email saying he wanted to learn about Twitter’s “tech stack,” a term used to describe a company’s software and related systems. Then in another email, he asked some people to fly to Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco to meet in person.

Twitter is teetering on the edge as Mr. Musk remakes the company after buying it for $44 billion last month. The billionaire has pushed relentlessly to put his imprint on the social media service, slashing 50 percent of its work force, firing dissenters, pursuing new subscription products and delivering a harsh message that the company needs to shape up or it will face bankruptcy.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/18/technology/elon-musk-twitter-workers-quit.html

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They were about 7,500 employees, about 3,700 were let go, now another 1,200 leave.

Not every single person in a tech company writes software, but you start gutting and forget being able to improve or advance the software, let alone create a revamped 2.0 version.

Slow motion bankruptcy? Maybe the bonesaw crowd wanted Twitter gone so badly that they paid Muskrat to do this. Sounds way too conspiratory, even for me, but I'm really at a loss to explain this craziness. New Coke makes sense to me compared to this.

[tonekat]

1. There's a term for this:

"Controlled descent into terrain."

[Xipe Totec]

11. Inverted on the glide slope. nt

[bucolic_frolic]

2. You must never question brilliance as they drive off the cliff

They must find out for themselves.

All day long I thought the plea for coders a joke. It was real!

[ZonkerHarris]

3. please report to the 10th floor of the building we cut off your badge access to yesterday

If you cant make there somehow you dont want it enough

[WVreaper]

4. History in the making!

How to blow 44 billion in one month.

[Mawspam2]

14. Brewster's Millions starring Richard Pryor

[Sucha NastyWoman]

5. If you're still working there

Seems like you ought to be able to name your price.

[ToxMarz]

6. The bonesaw crowd values money over everything. I think they have Musk over a barrel.

They bankrolled his purchase, but they don't get left hanging. He pledged something to get their cash, something he can't afford to pay or he would have just bought it himself. He's a desperate cornered (ex)billionaire in bed with people who use bonesaws to settle debts. And apparently they have immunity I'm reading.

[lostnfound]

7. 'Back room deal to capture and kill' seems plausible at this point

Fascists did not want Twitter around when the tyrants and dictators come into full bloom again.

[ToxMarz]

12. Yes, but there is not a "high barrier to entry" for anyone that wants to compete with

or take over the space they (once) occupied. It's Neanderthal technology in Silicon Valley. The only reason there is no alternative is because there is barely enough money to be made for the one player that already owns the space. It won't happen tomorrow, but it is super easy to create an alternative (relatively speaking from a software engineering perspective, not that it's easy), and countless people are already at work doing just that. The only question is which alternative, that no one today has ever heard of, ultimately occupies the space. Mastodon itself won't because that's not what they do, but Mastodon is an open source platform, anyone can freely use it to create whatever they want as long as the adhere to the open source licensing requirements. Trumps truth social and gab are already both running on Mastodon source code, their problem is that they just SUCK (both in general and in execution)

[yardwork]

20. Authoritarians never believe that freedom will triumph.

They may think that if they crush Twitter, they will win. It doesn't occur to them that somebody else will launch another communications platform.

[madville]

17. How is he an ex-billionaire? Still worth 180 Billion

I think they take it back public next year and all the hype drives the stock price to the moon, then he and his investors cash out before the bubble bursts.

[yardwork]

19. But does he have access to $180 billion?

Musk, like Trump and other supposed billionaires, have paper assets that claim a certain value, but that value is meaningless if there isn't a buyer. Musk can value Tesla, SpaceX, now Twitter at these astronomical amounts, but... Tesla is not profitable and the self driving cars kill people (apparently because of an engineering glitch that has been pointed out to Musk, that he refuses to acknowledge). SpaceX has never landed anything on an object outside Earth. Twitter's brand is badly damaged (as is the Elon Musk brand, after this spectacular disaster). Sure, Musk could hire new staff and rebuild Twitter - but who has any confidence in him now? Why destroy it in the first place? It's been revealed to the world how feckless, vain, and bullying Musk is.

The money is all on paper.

[Lithos]

8. Sympathy please

Am under the impression many of the remaining people fall into one of three categories:

Sales people who do not give a ratf*ck because they have nothing to lose
Engineers who can not willingly leave because of Visa and other immigration issues.
People who already were either Elon-bros or just extremophiles in how they handle stress.

the sympathy is towards the second group. The others are not sufficient to maintain anything.

[yardwork]

21. Add some more categories: people who need health insurance for themselves and their families.

People who will lose their homes if they quit.

The U.S. doesn't make it easy for people to quit their jobs. No safety net.

[DemocraticPatriot]

9. Poster boy for "lack of foresight"....

[NCjack]

10. He said "please". His manners are improving.

[SergeStorms]

13. Hardly "Latest Breaking News".

This is about the fourth posting of this today. Just saying.

[Javaman]

15. Over half the workforce is gone

There is no going back

Twitter is done

It’s nothing more than a slow motion train wreck from here on out

[Ford_Prefect]

16. Anyone here remember MySpace? Or perhaps the early days of Facebook?

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

18. For his next trick, Musk will buy USPS from DeJoy. ...nt

[LetMyPeopleVote]

22. For this thread

[Stuart G]

23. Musk already has shown his true self, by ..'letting go of 3,700 people.

..You don't make a statement by .."letting go of half the staff

And, a whole lot of "tech people." Elon like Trump is much too stupid, that he knows he is ....STUPID

VERY VERY STUPID...didn't Musk say something like, "Donald Trump needs to be reinstated." (on twitter)
So, Musk likes Trump on Twitter.

Is that good for Twitter or Musk? Either one or both. Or bad for both.?

Here is a link to that statement, read paragraphs 1 & 2:

https://www.barrons.com/news/elon-musk-asks-twitter-users-if-trump-should-be-reinstated-01668828606