However good you are, if you pay way too much for something, you're worse than someone who just didn't overpay and made no other changes.
People seem to think one of three things about Elon Musk:
A) Musk is a typical rich asshole who only loves money. B) Musk is a typical power hungry asshole who loves power and money is a side effect. C) Musk is a big nerd who thinks he can solve big problems better than other people, and power and money are side effects.
I believe he's type C (Hopeful Nerd). So for that type of person, his positive return is solving the problem. He thinks he can fix social media. He thinks social media is a big problem. He thinks humans need to fix social media or they are fucked, just like if they don't get off oil they are fucked, and just like if they can't leave Earth they are fucked. Fundamentally, he does think humans are worth saving.
I would bet that the vast majority of people that choose to work with Elon believe he is type C (Hopeful Nerd) and believe in humanity as well. That's why they put up with all of his flaws and toxicity - because they believe in the cause and know it's a broken eggs == omelet situation.
He seems to embody all three “types” fairly well.
And I agree with OP - all this will be forgotten when Twitter is considered an elite place to work in a few years. Love him or hate him, but the guy attracts really talented people that want to work with really talented people.
+1. It's hard to see how the ROI works out here. The price was 50% overvalued if not more, and Twitter has had severe problems with monetization.
On the other hand, Musk actually uses Twitter at scale unlike the previous management of the company. That might give him more insight into the possibilities than his predecessors.
I once watched the YouTube video of musk talking about battery prices and buying raw materials on the London exchange, and I thought, wow this guy is so insightful, no wonder his companies do well. It’s not till later that I found out that everything he says is someone else’s idea that he takes credit for.
There are a zillion ideas out there. The idea (!) is to be able to pick the right ones.
For example:
1. never give up
2. don't beat a dead horse
Which idea is correct?
John Carmack reflects the latter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQro0rkg2DE
George Hotz reflects the latter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P_Y8CUcqks
Andrej Karpathy reflects the latter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbxladysbTE
Among hiring managers at big companies, they absolutely do.
The idea that spacex engineers are lazy / don't work hard etc is fanciful thinking. SpaceX being badly managed? Maybe true. But engineers at spacex? If you look at competitors like an engineer on the SLS project (which has taken 10-20 years to get to one 20B rocket launch) - no question who you'll want to hire if you are in "new space". I think for old space companies - probably still worth hiring SLS type folks just given that they will know how to deal with the paperwork of those jobs.
I would NEVER work for Tesla or SpaceX (work life balance way off). But neither would I claim they are lazy or poor engineers.
I know of a few folks from what I would call older line engineering (thinking boeing / SLS type places) actively looking to get onto a musk company (younger folks generally pretty eager to do work).
It's pretty visable when you see NASA administrators doing presentations and then SpaceX folks (who all seem like they are in their 20's to me). Pretty clear you are getting a lot more experience at SpaceX then in the big SLS subcontractor stack for example. I'm adjacent to this space a bit and I think most of the senior folks leaving tesla / spacex (plenty of them) have all landed pretty well despite your claims.
I don't like Musk, I don't like Tesla, I don't like (most of) what SpaceX does. But as a professional I can't agree with your Reddit-AntiWork-MuskIsEvil portrayal of those companies. It's just not true.
What do you not like about SpaceX?
It's 'social' and 'media' which are completely different operating environments.
Twitter is long, long established as another company.
The 'user base' of Twitter is entirely different kind of customer.
He has no 'big government subsidies' to rely on, aka neither Tesla nor Space X would exist without major budgetary support from Big Gov.
I suggest Twitter under Elon may be more profitable. Or different in some other way as well, but I'll give it only 25% chance it becomes like you're suggesting.
Energy is subsidised, roads exist, international commerce, the internet, laws, money.
It's still not obvious to me what they did with 7500 people that couldn't have been done with 10% of that
Feel like there are more and more people here who know nothing about the industry.
In an environment like that, "rock stars" who can knock out projects in short order are going to see their careers skyrocket. But the trick is, they're going to pull this off by taking every shortcut they can. Code reviews are out, refactoring is out, performance and scalability concerns are out, etc. They will successfully launch the thing and then flee to the next glorious launch opportunity.
This will work very, very well for a while. The thing about taking on a lot of debt is that it allows you to accomplish big things in short order. But the debt will be hidden, and over a year or two, they will start to find that suddenly getting projects done is becoming nearly impossible, even compared to the pre-Musk days. And things will slowly fall apart.
It might be that all of the technical debt they're about to take on will have been worth it. Debt's a tool, and maybe making big changes to adjust their company's heading is worth it. And maybe to Musk, it's VERY worth it, because technical debt doesn't show up on financial ledgers, and he probably wants the company to look as solvent as possible.
But I wouldn't want to be a software engineer there in a year.
Social media just isn't these days, from an engineering perspective. The fun parts (scaling distributed infrastructure) are already old hat and it's mostly a business rules complexity problem. Most of what all these people are doing relates to complicated and boring business details. It's a corporate job. It won't pay, for engineers, in excitement, so it has to pay in money.
So I'm not sure where all these people that are so excited to work their asses off for something that will be boring for them will come from (exciting for the businesspeople, as there are very hard business problems, but not for the engineers, as there are no hard tech problems in this domain anymore).
The only option will be to do what FAANG and hedge funds have always done, and either really overpay to force top talent to care about these boring problems, or just settle for average talent with average productivity and average outcomes.
People will be flipping out the whole time and a few Twitter competitors will rise, which will be great. Each Twitter alike will take on its own culture and the bubbles will now be network wide, much like they are with big press outlets like Fox and NYT. But Twitter will be the big daddy that all the journalists are on and if you want to broadcast something it will be the best place.