So just because he is well known, you suddenly believe a Twitter employee. But others who Elon claims to not be working, they’re probably not working?
All Elon needed to do was to reply "thanks for bringing this to my attention, clearly the ball has been dropped somewhere. I'll make sure someone responds to your e-mail", and then take it private.
That doesn't mean most were not doing anything, but "most" is not the word used in the comment to which yours replies.
https://medium.com/darius-foroux/prices-law-why-only-a-few-p...
This translates into other parts of the economy. High income households experience high income volatility, consistent with the hypothesis that there is lots of competition at the highest levels of success—not very little competition.
Haraldur seems like a pretty accomplished guy and I don't like what Musk did either. But none of the things you wrote about are about things Haraldur did at Twitter. Without knowing more about the situation, we're all just guessing it, but it is possible for a accomplished individual to join a company and then lose motivation and not do much.
Nobody deserves to be fired without communication, without HR being able to confirm if they work at the company, and then proceed to be publicly mocked on Twitter for their physical disability.
Speculating about the person's work at Twitter is beside the point. Thousands of Twitter employees have been let go, but mocking someone for their physical disability on the internet is something else entirely.
The perspective warp that happens in these comment threads is baffling. If someone posted the same scenario (getting fired without communication, then their CEO mocked their disability on Twitter) as an "Ask HN" thread, everyone would have their pitchforks out. Replace unknown CEO with Elon Musk, and suddenly commenters are doing mental gymnastics to ignore the real bad behavior and try to justify something else using speculation.
Today is my first time hearing about this scandal. Do you have a link to the mocking in question?
He also had a (now deleted) comment where he called the guy "just the worst":
https://twitter.com/JamesClayton5/status/1633155915892527104
I know someone who can literally only move her eyes and her neck a little, and she still manages to use software to type.
It looks like we're in the "there's always a tweet" era of Elmo's breakdown. This is coming from the dude that got so addicted to Twitter he bought the entire company.
Yeah, it happened today.
The only thing I was saying is that we don't know if he was a productive employee of Twitter or not. Besides that, absolutely horrible how he was treated, productive employee or not. But that doesn't remove the fact that we don't know what happen behind the scenes.
"well if he's not working why is elon paying him"
for these groups of people Elon is tied to their identity and he can do no wrong
Except... of course... it's not that simple. "First-principles" thinking is a nice buzzword and it's rooted in some truth, but it's an excuse for university engineering graduates to ignore real world problems and consequences, and jump to solutions that are certainly disruptive, but often disruptively bad, and rarely overall an improvement from the status quo. It's pure naivety, and as someone with a lot of self confidence from unearned privilege, it's something I'm constantly battling against inside myself. Can I really do a better job than experts? Probably not.
Is SpaceX much better than competitors? Yes, but not entirely because of first-principles thinking, there was a lot of winning the right contracts and clever business decisions from Gwynne Shotwell. Is Telsa much better for its reinventing the car from first-principles? Not really, it was for a bit, but the vertical integration has so far borne out fairly low quality cars relative to their price. What about Twitter? Well Musk dropped in to a working business to re-evaluate everything with that first-principles thinking and look where it's got him. He was naive. He didn't value the expertise of those actually doing the job for years, and he's effectively destroyed the business.
So yeah, I get why people like him, and in moderation I think those aspects are worthy of respect. However Musk doesn't do moderation, and so it just comes across as naive.
And yet, Tesla makes like 10x the profit of German car makers per vehicle sold [1].
The established car makers still, over a decade after the first Tesla rolled on the streets, haven't come close to realizing just how screwed they are... the biggest threat to Tesla isn't the established car makers, it's Chinese BYD.
Don't get me wrong: Musk is despicable as a person. But those working under him have truly created awesome things.
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/elon-musks-guerilla-taktik...
At this point, I'm embarrassed to have done so, and seriously doubt even those accomplishments, which I now credit far more to the people around him accomplishing despite Elon rather than due to his influence (not that he deserves zero credit, but far less than he gets or wants).
Aside from the kind of recent entitled asshattery and actively promoting authoritarian propaganda while claiming it's all "centrist" (perhaps it is from an apartheid point of view..., what undid it for me was his public exchanges with Twitter engineers in late '22, just displaying brazed BS and ignorance while trying to belittle everyone. What a smug, ignorant, blustering, asshat, wasting everyone's time, all for his own inadequate ego.
Making spaceflight exciting again was huge and it must have taken an incredible engineering effort to get semi-reliable high-definition live streams from multiple angles on and around rockets.
And then Twitter brain.
A narcissist has two important parts. One is a desperate hunger for status. The other is a grandiose false self that they see as sufficient to justify their importance. Narcissists put amazing time and energy into constructing and performing the false self. If you've ever met one in person, they can be amazingly compelling.
But what if somebody has the same deep emotional hunger but lacks the ability to construct the false self? One path is developing a realistic sense of self and balanced emotions. But what if they don't?
My theory is that they are prone to attaching their identity to an existing narcissist. They become fans, even superfans. They adopt their opinions. They buy their products. They identify with the narcissist's public false self.
So I think Elon's stans are the ones who, if they were big boy narcissists, would have a false self like "Elon the billionaire playboy technoking". They see themselves as brilliant first-principles thinkers who can sweep into a room and by the sheer power of their genius make vast improvements over whatever the petty mortals previously present were doing.
There but for the grace of god go I, honestly.
> for these groups of people Elon is tied to their identity and he can do no wrong
I'm not an Elon fanboy and I'm not familiar with these events. But it seems like paying someone who isn't working isn't a great use of money. It seems reasonable to end an arrangement like that. Was that really what happened?
He and Twitter agreed to structure the buyout of his firm as income for tax reasons so even if he didn't do a single ounce of work for twitter his entire tenure it would have been money well spent for no other reason than the time value of money. Common sense and reading between the lines a bit it seems like his contract stipulates that Twitter now owes a lump sum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haraldur_Ingi_%C3%9Eorleifsson
I expect most people will infer the wrong thing here. To be clear, those "tax reasons" were that he wanted to maximize the amount of tax he would pay.
> an agreement between him and Twitter, most of the purchase price was paid as salary to maximize the tax he would pay for the sale in Iceland, he chose to pay for tax out of respect to Iceland for the disability benefits he received. Per the agreement, he paid the second highest tax of an individual in Iceland in 2021.
If Haraldur intended to bait him, it was a near-flawless execution. I'm sure there are countless labor, disability, and health info privacy lawyers lining up in Halli's DMs.
I'm bit afraid what he is going to do now.
> Mission Control flips up the protective cover over the switch, toggles off the data link and communications
> Mission accomplished.
Wasn't there a recent study that suggested that mindfulness meditation is correlated with an increase in narcissism, not a reduction?
Can't say if he's on the psychopathy spectrum or not, but he has admitted to be on the autistic spectrum, and I think that alone must be enough of a hinderance to running a social medial company.
However being autistic is not an excuse for this kind of behavior. Many autistic people have sensory issues and will appear rude when they suddenly withdraw from a conversation, or have an unexplainable tantrum. However neither of these is what we are witnessing in Elon’s behavior. His is simply rude and disregarding of other people. That can be an indication of psychopathy (but doesn’t have to be). If this was a tantrum we wouldn’t be able to understand him this easily, and this is engagement—which is the opposite of withdrawal—so we can rule out over stimulation.
I think the most likely explanation here he is simply a bad person regardless of autism or other neuro-divergency.
Considering there were entire articles by news outlets like the BBC just queued up and ready to go. My sense is this was premeditated. Elon is such an easy target.
Excessively conspiratorial imo, it isn't difficult to slap together an article about a series of tweets and the BBC article wasn't posted until about 8 hours after the first tweet and 3.5 hours after the last tweet from Elon in the original thread.
http://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://www.bbc.c...
Are you implying that journalists conspired with this guy to bait Elon into responding in a terrible manner and they pre-wrote articles about it?
Journalists use Twitter, too. They can write and publish articles quickly. There’s no conspiracy here. News articles appearing several hours after a story unfolds entirely within public Tweets is both common and normal.
A richly deserving target, too.
Reading Icelandic names like Haraldur evokes strong subconscious aura of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Curious if someone would write a novel (or a parody or a game) about Middle Earth's modern high tech corporate culture.
I didn't know being paralyzed made you immune to criticism.
(Some capital T capital T capital S tools figure it out from flow in the same way that automated captions do comma and most open paren all question mark close paren let you dictate punctuation as well period)
the issue here is not his handicap why are we even discussing it? Elon main argument is that he did not do any work. Reading the replies of Haraldur it seems he was not given any. Elon fired the wrong guy.
Elon is the one who brought up the disability.
As somebody who was a manager at Twitter (briefly; laid off in 2017 after 7 months) I want to say that this is very much a management problem, not a worker problem.
When I started there, in my initial 1:1s with my team, each told me their story of their time at Twitter. Every single one had worked on at least one project that they were excited about and made great progress on but that at the last minute got canceled by senior execs. At least one; some had more.
So I believe that the main reason Twitter had a justified reputation for low feature velocity was executive-level chaos. Dorsey was the half-time CEO from 2015-2022. When I was there, the VP Product position was jokingly called "defense against the dark arts teacher", as a new person swapped in every year or so. I'm sure it's possible to have a half-time CEO, but for that to work you need a very clear vision and an excellent executive team that is actually working as a team, neither of which I saw during my time there.
It would not surprise me at all that Twitter ,ended up with some people who became discouraged and were just biding their time. However, during my time there I never met anybody like that. Twitter was full of smart, passionate people who loved the product.
That said, if Twitter, months after Musk's takeover and after massive layoffs still has do nothing people, that is 100% Musk's fault. All the people there have passed multiple selection filters by Musk and his goons. Musk has had months to change the culture, share his vision, and build a sense of mission. In my view, he's failed comprehensively. At this point, him publicly shitting on his workers is just him displaying his lack of basic competence as a manager.
... and because this is Hacker News, yes I'm aware the "alpha/beta" male thing is based on a discredited model of wolf pack hierarchy but the meme was assimilated into popular culture anyway so it's true for people now even if it was never true for canines.
What was it about Ueno's work that made it so good? I've admired it from the first time I saw Halli & Ueno's portfolio, but I've never been able to identify what it was.
Clean and bold?
Either no reply & cc:HR, or "Yup, HR should get on this".
With that kind of money and power, the #1 or #2 richest person in the world, you can afford to be extremely gracious and self-effacing. And it is good for your wealth.
Instead, Elon chooses to make a public show of being a smug, petty, abusive, asshat. What an impoverished emotional weakling is on display here. Almost sad and pitiful, except for his abuse of others.
Its incredible to me how people are burying the lede here to somehow rehabilitate Musk's disastrous response.
Thorleifsson repeatedly inquired of HR, then made a single tweet to Musk.
As I pointed out, Musk could have 1) simply ignored it, 2) ignored it and cc'd HR to reply, or 3) publicly replied something brief and to the point, such as "Yes, terminated, cc:HR to close out paperwork".
Yet, musk chose to do none of the above, instead choosing to escalate the situation, evidently while underestimating his opponent.
This is absolutely 100% on Musk, it's his company, his response, and he's the wealthiest and one of the most powerful men in the world. He chose it, and the fact that he got publicly pwnd is entirely his own doing.
But, as usual, there's that meme about some weird nerd who always throws himself in front of a valid point to try to protect Elon. (If it matters, I also posted on HN several things defending Musk, but this is indefensible)
Somebody once pointed out to me that the reason Instagram became so much more popular with celebrities than Twitter is that Instagram has filters to make you look prettier, but Twitter doesn't have anything to make you look smarter or funnier.
Musk is clearly desperate to be The Best At Social Media. But he's just not. Which should be fine! We can't all be good at everything. But he can't let it go. So much so that he spent $44 billion to win at Twitter. And when that wasn't enough, he ordered people to fix it for him: https://www.platformer.news/p/yes-elon-musk-created-a-specia...
I saw the Twitter purchase described as "fragile narcissist buys criticism factory" and that gets truer by the day.
It irks me so much that everyone calls him Elon like we’re all pals with him and he’s just one of us.
He isn’t. I find him to be an insufferable douche, he’s probably a psychopath, and he’s just a despicable human overall.
His companies are remarkable though but they’ve been built on the sweat tears blood and exploitation of so many people that I don’t think they’re respectable.
But sure let’s keep calling him Elon like he’s just everyone’s friendly neighbor or uncle.
/end rant
The optics could not be worse. I mean this guy is literally in a wheel chair.
If you were a well-funded tech company looking for design help from say 2014-2020, Ueno was probably on your shortlist. The fact that twitter could not find something valuable for this guy to do reflects more on the current state of Twitter management than it does on him.