I’m not really sure how to judge someone that I don’t know based upon press reports. Some of the things Elon is doing sounds like he has really poor judgement and people skills. Then again, I wonder how employees working at Tesla feel. If the reorganization was couched in gentle language, no doubt it would be better public relations, but I wonder if the outcome would be the same. And those who think that Elon is going to be a friend to the far right might be disappointed, apparently he is a social liberal. They’ll be complaining Elon’s gone woke before you know it.
Many years ago, my unionized employee group was trying to get a contract. It was ugly, our CEO sent us an infamous “red letter” declaring the company was going to do the job “with or without you”, was planning on furloughing out of seniority, held anti-pilot rallies with the other employee groups, and truly enraged all of us. Terrible work environment, this hostility went on for a long time. But we ended up hashing it out and most of us now respect and appreciate him, wishing he would be the CEO again. My point being, you don’t always know from the outside what is happening, and how things are going to work out in the end.
Well, supposedly the former pres claims that he won’t use Twitter, he’ll stay on his own money losing platform. This would be enhancing the competition. Then again, I doubt he’ll be able to resist having a larger megaphone.
@oldfort, they can be decent human beings and some worry a lot about the culture they are trying to build. And some are not.
My sense is that at some of the companies that Musk built, his employees self-selected and he had a cadre of folks who would run through a brick wall for him. Those that wouldn’t didn’t join or left. In contrasts, at Twitter, he does not have employees with the same ethos and cannot easily get it them. However, getting rid of 3/4 of the employees, by firing or by the employee’s choice, especially those that possess a lot of knowledge, may destroy the company before he can assemble a loyal cadre and have them get up to speed.
Musk believes in disruption. He didn’t pay $44B (and counting) to build a “better” Twitter. He wants a fundamentally different product. To design a new product, he needs smart and dedicated employees, but not necessarily those who are too attached to the old product to think differently. The transition isn’t going to be easy. It’s more likely to fail than to succeed, IMO, but it’s his money.
You don’t need to spend $44 billion to get a bunch of smart developers. He bought Twitter on a whim (he even said that he picked the price of $54.20 because of 420) and then tried to back out but couldn’t. Now he’s going to try to do things his way. If he is willing to keep spending money on it he’ll figure something out. Money masks a lot of faults.
I think that’s right. He’s also saying that “AI” will allow him to undertake automatic content moderation without the legions of staff who previously reviewed flagged material. That seems like a re-run of FSD at Tesla, but in this case regulators, especially in the EU, aren’t going to stand by and let it happen. Apple and Google could also pull Twitter from their app stores for lacking content moderation, as they did with Parler.
More broadly I think the question is what the consequences will be for his other ventures and for him personally. To me Musk’s recent behavior seems to indicate an expectation that he’ll be charged with something serious by the authorities. Hence his efforts to suggest that Democrats are opposed to him for political reasons.
I was just repeating what I’d read that Elon said about himself, that he’s socially liberal. And nowadays “woke” is being interpreted to be, “anyone slightly to the left of me”.
Paying $44B for Twitter was clearly a poor financial decision. That’s what sometimes happens when one makes an impulsive decision. Twitter, if it survives, does give Musk a good platform to launch a new product someday, but it will still likely be remembered as one of the worst acquisitions.
Strongly disagree. Twitters influence is much smaller than it likes to think. (How important is what influencers and celebrities think about eating fish?) In the US, the daily users are abut 14 million, out of a country of 350 million.
It’s the US journalists who are primarily threatened bcos its a free mouthpiece for them; it’s easy (and lazy) way for them to communicate.
The CBS article doesn’t support your point anonmander, as the prior folks were still in charge an hour after teh close. Prior management had a legal obligation to keep things running as-is until new management shows up onsite, so that hate speech happened under their watch…
Clearly this was a preplanned attack based on Elon’s takeover, not any moderation changes since he didn’t have time to implement them.
It was at least in part driven by people who felt emboldened by Musk’s takeover, given his statements on how speech would be handled in the future.
The article also quotes Musk on how future decisions regarding deplatforming will be handled.
“Twitter will not allow anyone who was de-platformed for violating Twitter rules back on platform until we have a clear process for doing so, which will take at least a few more weeks,” Musk said Tuesday night. “Twitter’s content moderation council will include representatives with widely divergent views, which will certainly include the civil rights community and groups who face hate-fueled violence.”
Like much else that has happened at Twitter, this was just Musk riffing, as it obviously hasn’t happened. Trump was reinstated by a poll, not by a clear process involving any sort of content moderation panel. Others have been reinstated according to his whims.
This is management by the day to day whims of Elon Musk. It is funny how many are defending this clown.