Maybe there’s only 25% of employees left to share the pie, but the pie itself is now only worth $10B. That’s not a great incentive when asked to work nights and weekends on capricious initiatives that come and go.
"The H-1B program allows companies and other employers in the United States to temporarily employ foreign workers in occupations that require the theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge and a bachelor’s degree or higher in the specific specialty, or its equivalent."
Note, among other things, the word "temporarily" and the phrase :highly specialized knowledge." The real problem is that H-1Bs are often used by companies in very different ways than their stated purpose.
Stock options could have a strike price of whatever, but tax favored stock options need to be granted at fair market value. Granting non-favored options away from FMV needs to be treated as immediate income, which is messy.
He can almost certainly make time for spite.
In actual fact, excepting "cultural loyalty" (which is usually interrupted in any such large acquisition/disruption event) essential employees are typically the most transient/difficult to retain. Many are not as remuneration-driven (more likely to be comfortable & their competence is often driven by a more vocational motivating factor) & even those who are can negotiate good terms elsewhere with relative ease.
This leads to a concentrated brain-drain where the fewer engineers remaining to partake in the pie aren't contributing as much value. That ain't protecting your core.
Fun, maybe? I'm not smart enough to work on those kinds of problems, but I do love a challenge. If I was an actual CS person with relevant experience, I could totally see myself working at that kind of company.
It's not what you do forever, but it's totally fun.
From my POV, the massive scale of Twitter is nothing but downside for engineering focus in the current situation where all the moderation and legal frameworks have been blown to bits. I spent a couple of years at Facebook, so I’ve seen what the legal reality is for product work in high-volume social media. Nothing could entice me to work in a situation where I as an engineer became personally responsible for managing that. Yet that’s the de facto situation at Twitter. They’re not even taking meetings with EU regulators anymore because there’s nobody left at the company! It’s not my kind of fun if I’m being asked to make rushed decisions that can lead to multi-billion fines and/or distress and physical harm to users.
I'd imagine the same exists on the legal and product side, too. They need people who love a challenge and want to see whether they can overcome it, they need adventurers. No clue if it'll be successful, but I can see the appeal.
There was an investor case/ business plan that could have been prepared by 19year old MBAs. There was some nonspecific media bait on free speech. That kind of noncontent is pretty typical for business comms, but it's not what Musk did before. With Tesla/SpaceX/neuralink/etc... Musk told us the strategic case. We knew what he was up to, what the main risks were, the goals the milestones, the reasons.
All commentary about Twitter is rooted in speculation and smartarsery.
Maybe what you describe (reboot) is what Musk's up to. We don't know. It's like taking sides in the abusive screaming session happening in the house next door.
No one cares when
Money maybe? If the employee count is half and they have more lax firing due to non performance, theoretically it could allow them to better reward top performers. Not sure if that is practically what is happening, but Musk seems to have good enough track record previously in building teams of productive people.
Also lot of best people like to work in productive teams, and don't like teammates that slack off without repercussion.
Nu-Twitter doesn't have that. They've got interesting infrastructrure problems, but so do a dozen other companies working at similar scale. Musk's product vision seems to be incredibly incremental, e.g. the $8 checkmarks. Honestly, the only mission that Musk seems to be setting up in his public writing is the free speech bit, applying only to his alt-right pals? And if that's the mission he tries to build a team around, it's hard to see advertisers and normal users sticking to the platform for much longer.
The obvious stuff:
* adding features people want but are denied by ESG transnationals (privacy, e2e encryption, removing politically motivated censorship) - this is huge and a guaranteed win short term.
Stuff that will happen if the google/Apple make the wrong moves, which they likely will:
* programmable mobile phone with crypto chip and starlink carrier for recurring revenue when/if google and Apple ban Twitter app from their walled gardens
* adding crypto/stable coin based “wallet” to Twitter which cross-sells the mobile phone with crypto chip
This would be a world-class feat of engineering, which would also require that Twitter hire a set of engineers entirely different than the ones they have. It's difficult to see how they'd pull this off successfully.
I don't think Musk has any realistic chance of competing with Apple. Apple has been poaching from the best of the best in every level the phone industry for over a decade now.
He could quickly and effectively crank out an undifferentiated Android phone for sure, but I'm not sure what he'd do with it or how he'd convince anyone to buy it. His phone would be more expensive to make than the ones out of Moto, Huawei, etc, and it wouldn't work as well. Maybe if he hired aggressively or borrowed people from Tesla somehow he could make a good Android phone, but I don't see why anyone would buy it.
I actually thought that by now we wouldn't really be bothering with apps so much, and computers would be more like the one on Star Trek. I don't think Musk could just toss that together any time soon though, haha.
They'll buy it because 1) they don't want transnational ESG digital hall monitors spying on them and curating what apps they can install, and 2) it would have global cell coverage. That's more than enough to compete with Google and Apple at this point. People are fed up, I think you underestimate just how many people.
I don't think the privacy angle is going to help at all either. If anyone actually cared about privacy or control we'd all be using the same weird open source pocket computer as Stallman.
That said, I wish him the best of luck
The solution to cracking both at once is somehow to cross-sell this to Twitter users, the vast majority of whom want neither to switch phones nor to make crypto payments on the hellsite? I remain sceptical, to say the least…
This all sounds very far-fetched to me and not at all obviously profitable in any way. If Microsoft didn't manage to build a viable smartphone ecosystem I don't see how twitter will.
Musk is quickly learning that the "censorship" is motivated by advertisers, not politics. As he scrambles to bring them back to the platform, expect the same policies to trickle back.
Also, when you are part of a company that used to run with 7000 people, and you realize it can run with a fraction of that AND you have been chosen to be part of that fraction, that must (and should) speak highly to many.
So I’m wondering about this part:
> Elon is currently applying the playbook to Twitter:
> Scale back drastically, ideally the closest to your Series A size and cost base;
> Protect your core: engineering and science
What exactly is he doing to protect the core? It seems like it’s been all stick, no carrot. What are the incentives for Twitter’s best to stay, other than second-hand exposure to the Musk aura?