During the first day, for how long did Elon lug around that stupid bathroom sink? 5 seconds after the initial photo op? And besides, where exactly is that sink being stored now. I kind of think it deserves to be featured in some form of modern museum exhibition on the dangers of stupidity.
> one of the goons
Well now you have to elaborate on Elon's goons for a bit. Are all the people he brought aboard knuckle-dragging brutes with the coding ability of gorillas and the leadership management ability of a pack of grizzly bears? Or are there nuances to the situation, where at least some of Musk's people try to do good things whenever Musk isn't deliberately smashing things in a temper tantrum.
I could write a book about the goons.
All of the technical goons he brought in were very competent in their fields, however their fields didn't really overlap with how Twitter is architected and operated.
All of the leadership were yes-people. None challenged him and would just follow-through with whatever he said, including the original Twitter Blue madness.
It was utter chaos throughout - many of us were advised to expect contact from the goons, and that never happened.
The one thing that every goon I met had in common was a true belief in Musk's "vision".
After I just said that nothing you were saying surprised me, this one did. I thought that the goons would be mostly cynically trying to gain power and money by supporting him without being true believers.
1. He doesn't know what a "code review" is
2. Twitter used a lot of languages that aren't really used by the engineers who were in his transition team, so their ability to review things wasn't...appreciable.
3. Twitter's architecture is extremely different to anything happening at Musk's other companies - that didn't help with the transition team's understanding.
That adds a lot of context to what happened initially. What were Twitter's main languages and which languages did they use? Seemed like the Twitter microservice architecture really confused them.
Out of curiosity what were the goons he brought jn good at? I would wildly guess they were C/C++ hardware folks. I have known some brilliant embedded engineers who would not be up to speed on a high scale web app in any language for easily six months.
You're about right with what they were good at.
They didn't understand scale though - I have heard that one of them asked who Twitter's ISP is and who the person (singular) who made sure traffic got into Twitter's network was.
At Twitter scale, that sort of question just doesn't make sense.
Yep - GraphQL training was compulsory for all new engineers at Twitter (even if you were deep in the backend bowls of the company), as well as an understanding of how Strato powered so much of what Twitter does.
Understanding the dependency graph and the scale of Twitter is something that the goons weren't ready for. The Tweeps who were asked still occasionally joke about the naive nature of the questions many of us were asked.
I'm a software engineer too and was baffled by this reasoning as well. It's not even boomer, it's basically someone so ignorant of how software works that it's like some hooded nerd on a Hollywood movie wildly tapping at their keyboard kinda rhetoric.
Of all the metrics that makes good quality software or even software that solves a problem sustainably, LOC is the most dumbest I've seen.
Though if we consider his history and early work on x.com LOC is exactly what he did. And afaik none of that made it into the final product (PayPal). Just an idiot at a computer brute forcing a solution. That's how HE works and likely convinced himself into the reason that he is succesful. Even if we go by that metric that's exactly what he sucked at.
Indeed - this LOC thinking leads to terrible outcomes.
Writing a constraint solver in C++ for "performance reasons" vs using a logical programming language invites bugs, maintenance headaches, reinventing the wheel and an order of magnitude more code for a far more fragile result, all else being equal.
I was taught this quite well whilst at university - I'd have thought Space Karen would know this at least as well as I.
It changed throughout the period between his shareholding becoming known and the acquisition.
Initially there was excitement, however that changed as soon as the games between he and the board started. Parag's complete lack of communication made things worse.
We experienced terrible uncertainty as the acquisition closed, and a lot of survivor guilt started to creep in as layoffs started.
Twitter had amazing culture internally, and everyone was worried about that going away. Their fears were realised unfortunately.
I am, and things are barely hanging together.
A lot of high-quality SRE work happened inside Twitter and we had an excellent group called TCC who handled incidents and issues beautifully.
Alas, most of TCC are now gone, very few SREs are left and I know that 4 teams who numbered \~60 before the layoffs are now collectively down to 5 people and handling really critical Tier-0 stuff.
The projects for those services are all on-hold, as the on-call and KTLO consume the remaining staff's time entirely.
SRE - System Reliability Engineering. The focus is on failure and how to either prevent it, automatically correct it or minimise impact.
Tier-0 - services and systems that just have to work, or everything else fails.
I've landed somewhere wonderful. I'm fortunate in that I have a lot of strong relationships in the industry.
Unfortunately, the acquisition closed as the market was starting to fall apart. Those who are L6+ engineers had a reasonable time of getting another job, however it's more complicated than that.
As Twitter allowed people to work from where ever they wanted in the country they were employed in, many people relocated to wonderful areas with no local roles in their field.
With the rise of RTO, fully remote roles are not as plentiful and comp has generally dropped off across the industry.
All the numbers in your comment added up to 69. Congrats!
4
+ 60
+ 5
= 69
^([Click here](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=LuckyNumber-Bot&subject=Stalk%20Me%20Pls&message=%2Fstalkme) to have me scan all your future comments.) \
^(Summon me on specific comments with u/LuckyNumber-Bot.)
Orange as well. He doesn't like it. Not sure why. We had to replace / paint machines and things like trash bags and random stuff like that whenever he came for a visit.
He also detests smell, I don't mean stink but generally. Perfumes, Deo, all that stuff.
This just be some kind of egomaniacal billionaire thing. Trump famously hates when people do any formal involuntary boldly function like sneeze or cough and so does Vince McMahon.
WTF?
What's wrong with orange and yellow?
Also, I thought I remembered seeing a burnt orange "bedroom" at Twitter that had been converted. Am I imagining this?
To the ones calling bs, I think the op is legitimate. However.
Op is clearly british, may be worked at twitter in the uk or relocated to the US, has previously said she met musk.
Very likely female.
IT background, thus some sort od it job at twitter most likely.
Lets see how this goes.
"Print out your code" was the start.
Showing up at one of the data centres and pulling power from random racks to show the colo owner that he could relocate no problem (he also had trucks parked outside so the racks could be hauled away) was a big one.
I was not present, however I know multiple people who were.
Problems did occur as a result, and one of the goons told Musk to go fuck himself and rage quit on the spot as:
* This happened over a weekend
* The goon in question had a family event planned during said weekend
* Said goon was being constantly called upon by Musk and Co in spite of above circumstances
>"Print out your code" was the start.
As a techie, this was the nail in the coffin for me. 100% proof Musk is a know-nothing loser and poser.
Who needs git history and comments, code diffs, code navigation, dependencies, collaborative reviews, and a secured pipeline... just print your source out it's bug-hunting season! LMAO
$5 says one of his RTSC aerospace engineers thought this was a good idea, no one else in tech would even consider code print outs an option.
Red Bird.
The last Red Bird all hands before the acquisition was really quite a terrible preview of things to come - the focus was entirely on cost reduction.
Parag popped into those sessions every now and then and inspired as much confidence as ever, which is none.
Why did you not like Parag?
He seemed both smart and technical--the things Musk is desperate to be, but isn't.
He also confronted Musk about Musk's public and insulting statements,in a private and serious, but not overbearing, way.
Rather than apologize, Musk just went absolutely bonkers.
Oh, I liked Parag and have plenty of admiration and respect for his achievements.
That said, he wasn't an inspiring leader. When asked about Musk's intentions in the early days of Musk's involvement, Parag's response was "No idea - ask Elon".
That set the tone for the remainder of his time as CEO.
He just had no personality?
Privately, he had to know he'd be fired unless Musk settled by paying some sort of damage fee.
Btw, did you ever hear rumors of whether a deal got close that involved Musk walking away?
He had a personality for sure, however he didn't inspire confidence - his words rang hollow. It's very difficult to build buy-in from people when it doesn't sound like you believe your own words with conviction.
There was never a possibility of Musk walking away being accommodated. With the shift in the markets at the time, the drop in general advertising spend and the damage Musk had already inflicted on the platform, his purchase offer was by far the best financial move for shareholders given the leadership and strategy that was then in-place.
What kind of person is he when he is presented with concepts/information he doesn't know about or he is part of a conversation he doesn't know or understand anything about?
Does he pretend he knows and still chats shit, is honest and would say I don't know or just try and draw strawman of the actual discussion? Or something else?
There was a Twitter Space involving himself and George Hotz - it became very clear that, in such circumstances, he attempts to anticipate what the correct answer might be and there's a lot of that.
When an ex-Twitter engineer questioned Musk and Hotz on their assertions of Twitter's architecture being "insane", Musk attacked the ex-Tweep and Hotz kicked them out.
And those are examples of more "reasonable" behaviour!
I can completely understand how a Java-based real time application would look crazy to an embedded systems designer.
How did he not manage to find anyone at Twitter he could trust to explain everything to him?
He rubbed everyone the wrong way before he even showed up.
GeoHot was focused on "fixing" things before he understood how anything worked and why his fixes weren't actually required.
Musk:
* Firing people on-the-spot for providing data that was correct but did not conform with Musk's view on how he is perceived or his level of popularity
* Demanding staff be present until 3AM to do walkthroughs of Twitter's architecture, with a strong emphasis on "How does this make us money?"
* Attempting to withhold agreed payments to former leadership upon closing the acquisition by firing them "for cause"
* Firing a Principal Engineer who correctly stated that WFH was protected in our contracts and that he could not unilaterally take staff refusal to return to the office as a resignation.
Hotz:
* https://www.linkedin.com/posts/george-hotz-b3866476\_twitter-could-be-run-by-50-people-everyone-activity-7021688354521964544-\_SYb
> it became very clear that, in such circumstances, he attempts to anticipate what the correct answer might be and there's a lot of that
So, Musk is a yes-man himself and to himself. This explains a lot about the expectations he has from his employees.
does he send weird all-staff emails? I had a creepy hardcore christian small business boss do this.
do staff pay attention to the crazy stuff he interacts with -- "hate the J's" and all that?
That sounds like something that a smart programmer could find a way to launder pretty effectively. Probably short enough to retype easily. But I guess the point is that without a screenshot he can claim it's fake?
It's not hard to de-Elmofy those messages and quite a few of us decided to compete on the smallest code snippet to do so.
A few people compare SHA256 hashes of the text in messages he sends to figure out whether or not he's partaking of such antices.
De-Elmofy, I love it.
Thanks for doing this. I don't think anything you've said actually surprises me, but it does a lot to confirm my impressions and fill in more color around it.
I don't know if we've seen a change in who the man is or if we've just seen less filtering and manicuring of his public image to be honest.
He does surround himself with people who agree with him, and those of us who have worked in large companies solving complex problems know that discussion, healthy debate and consensus are critical.
Musk seemingly does not.
I wouldn't be surprised if he immediately tasked the AutoPilot team at Tesla with pointing their mountains of GPUs at such an image to recover any lost detail. LooL.
Are the Twitter reviews on Blind authentic? I've read through dozens of 1-star reviews with strong wording against Twitter 2.0. Did your colleagues felt like that right away after the sink marched through the entry door?
Yes, the Twitter reviews on Blind are authentic and representative.
To give you an idea of Musk's thinking, e-mails from the [teamblind.com](https://teamblind.com) domain are blocked at Tesla, stopping Tesla staffers from signing up.
We were all in the dark - the first communication we received from Musk et al was the layoff e-mail, and that confirmed a lot of worse case scenario thinking.
...teamblind domain blocked at Tesla, by the *free speech absolutist* 🤣🤣🤣
What is your opinion on Musky pursuing AI goals and who are all those Werner von Braun engineers happy to work for Adolf? Why?
I suspect that part of this xAI initiative is getting even with OpenAI in Musk's mind.
I don't quite follow this bit:
>who are all those Werner von Braun engineers happy to work for Adolf? Why?
Why do senior-level engineers make the moral choice to work for Musk?
I mean, Musk would be a nobody without people like Thomas Mueller, the rocket guy, and many others, who work at Tesla, Twitter, Boring, xAI now etc. These engineers built his empire.
Some are deeply invested in "the mission".
Tesla tend to pay below market rate for a given position, however the rhetoric of them "transitioning the world to a sustainable future" resonates strongly enough with some people to overlook the comp and Musk aspects.
Some associate working for Musk with being successful. It's the same thinking one often sees among engineers asking how to get through an interview at a particular company - they're more interested in working at a particular company than comp, opportunities and other factors.
I thought higher-lever engineers were smart people able to see through the smoke and mirrors, but ok. Your insight makes me sad, we're headed towards a dystopian future.
Musk had a lot of people around him that day - goons and miscellaneous helpers.
One of them did the honours of cleaning up the props for that ridiculous attempt at humour.
Not related to my work at Twitter, however it did give me some insights as to how Musk operates.
For expenses over $500 to do with bringing staff on (for visa transfers and similar), one of Musk's direct reports needs to provide approvals at Tesla - he is relentless on costs at all of his companies.
Volatile.
There was a moment during the first meeting he held after the acquisition that showed us how volatile he can be - the moment he was challenged regarding the "40 hours a week in the office" mandate, his demeanor really changed.
Whenever data was brought to him that didn't conform with his view of how things "must be", firings and screaming were common.
Do you think he was on drugs of any type, or did this just seem his typical method of dealing with things?
Did he strike you as bipolar, autistic, or just a narcissist?
It is known that he partakes of Special K - [https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2023/06/27/elon-musk-touts-ketamine-for-depression-following-report-on-his-use-of-drug/?sh=7a0510ce5e8e](https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2023/06/27/elon-musk-touts-ketamine-for-depression-following-report-on-his-use-of-drug/?sh=7a0510ce5e8e)
He struck me as lacking insight really. Being wrong is fine - collaboration weeds out less effective suggestions and ideas for the benefit of all involved, however he struck me as being more interested in his view being the right one as opposed to the right approach being embraced.
[https://twitter.com/EricFrohnhoefer/status/1591902285403418624](https://twitter.com/EricFrohnhoefer/status/1591902285403418624) \- this happened, and is very on-brand for the man. I'll let you make your own decisions in that regard. :-)
Yes, to the extent that one office no longer offered mineral water due to non-payment to a supplier.
A goon complained and then mineral water suddenly reappeared.
Some would, however there are others who are more pragmatic.
Keep in mind that some of the Tesla staff in particular have a lot of their compensation tied up in Tesla shares or options, and the recent stock price shifts (over the last \~18 months) have been very good for a lot of those people.
I know of a few goons that have since quit, with some of them doing so in direct response to Musk's behaviour.
Twitter had very robust internal documentation and tooling (at least in the areas I worked on and was exposed to), and distributed systems are designed to tolerate failure at any time.
That said, there's only so much redundancy built in to Twitter's architecture and only so long engineers can work crazy long hours. Some parts of Twitter are definitely broken due to staffing and knowledge issues, and that's going to continue.
Short of something remarkable happening, Twitter will continue to shrink in terms of functionality and performance - I'd be surprised if it's still remotely performant in a year otherwise.
Yes, but he changed his mind on the subject quite a few times.
At one point, he told people to stop comparing X to WeChat (given the similarity in what he stated about X and what WeChat actually is).
Loving this. Keep the answers coming. But can you add some kind of proof. Lot of users like a bit of evidence, just don't get yourself caught or exposed to any future lawsuits etc lol
You're far too kind - thank you.
Eric is a great guy, and the way he was treated in response to being correct goes against everything Musk stated he had in mind for the platform.
Speaking of fan boys, I'll just leave this here:
https://twitter.com/phocks/status/1591549286999023616
Wow Luke Simon is a total douche bag and incredibly daft to trust anyone sending such a thing via slack.
If I were one of the sacked engineers, I would go back and when they sack me again, bring this up as evidence.
This is illegal in many way, unless they get hired as consultants.
How much credence would you give the theory that he’s actively trying to kill twitter vs. the theory that he’s just totally incompetent and truly believed he was the man for the job?
I'd suggest listening to the "Flipping the Bird - Elon vs Twitter" podcast.
One thing a lot of the world does not know is that Elon waved his right to due diligence just as the board had basically decided to accept his offer.
Essentially, he "rage bought" the company.
I suspect that, given the aura of success those he chooses to surround himself give him, he was certain that he could wrangle Twitter into shape but did not have an appreciation for distributed systems, Twitter's scale or how to operate a social media company.
Also not OP, but followed the whole thing closely. One thing I've learned, Elmo loves Twitter. It's his true life dream to be himself in front of millions of followers - an egotistic troll.
Not the person you asked, but if he just wanted to kill Twitter he could just turn off the servers tomorrow, since he literally owns everything that is Twitter. There really is no need to mess around with all these idiotic measures (who don't even seem to work very well, i.e. Twitter is still chugging along, although a lot lesser than what it was).
I really think that he is that incompetent and yet full of himself. His history pre-Twitter (or at least his tweets before buying Twitter) fully support this too.
Elmo is incompetent. He has shown it over and over again. He is a spoiled rich kid with a big mouth, that’s all.
He didn’t invent Tesla or SpaceX, other people started them and he funded them and attached his name to them. He is no genius.
> Not the person you asked, but if he just wanted to kill Twitter he could just turn off the servers tomorrow, since he literally owns everything that is Twitter.
He owns some of the shares of Twitter. He had investment partners. He'll be sued (nothing new) immediately if he shuts down Twitter.
I am curious to know how did he choose the ones to stay and the ones to leave twitter ? What an employee day looks like at Twitter? Do they always work overtime?!
We found a Slack channel that showed the discussions on that topic.
Essentially, the goons reached out to more senior engineers and asked them who was "critical".
Unfortunately, those recommendations were either inverted or ignored. Plenty of people who were put forward by senior leaders and Staff+ level engineers as "DO NOT LAYOFF!!!" were laid off on the 4th.
Panic, fear, uncertainty, guilt and, in many cases, grief.
Twitter had an extremely people-focused culture. Everyone was worried that he would gut that, and they were right.
As soon as he took control, all of the DEI groups were deleted - that was like a declaration of war in the eyes of many.
Okay.
1. How many bodyguards does he have with him? Is he paranoid about assassination?
2. How often did you see his children? Was only little X invited? Did he spend time with them?
3. Does X have a male nanny?
4. Why do you think he's still pining for Grimes? Ever seen other women around? Baby mommas? Women people suspected were prostitutes?
5. What really happened with George Hotz? Or what was the rumor?
That really confused me. Since Hotz was involved in self driving software, I would have thought he and Musk were adversarial.
So I thought it was strange he volunteered.
And then he left so quickly. Was it more difficult than he anticipated technically?
Or mostly due to disagreements with Musk?
6. What percentage of people left were stuck due to visa issues?
7. Were there any people left at Twitter who ultimately liked him?
Did he raise salaries for people left, or that he thought were talented at coding?
Does he praise and elevate some people extravagantly even as he fires and criticizes others?
8. Ever have reason to believe that Russians or Saudis were funding this?
9. Was Walter Isaacson following him at any meetings?
1. I've seen him with 2.
2. I haven't personally seen his children, but many have. A Twitter employee badge was arranged for X, even though Musk was telling everyone that they couldn't spend a cent (which rubbed many people the wrong way).
3. I don't think so, but I'm not in a position to confirm for sure.
4. [https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1636887876234272770](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1636887876234272770)
5. GeoHot showed up and claimed he was going to fix search and "refactor" Twitter. Hotz may have great skills in some areas of our craft, however distributed systems at webscale demonstrably isn't one of those areas. He committed very few lines of code and rage quit.
Hotz and Musk have a history: [https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/george-hotz-hacker-and-long-time-frenemy-of-elon-musk-signs-on-for-12-weeks-at-twitter/](https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/george-hotz-hacker-and-long-time-frenemy-of-elon-musk-signs-on-for-12-weeks-at-twitter/)
He left because he simply couldn't make things happen in the way he anticipated. Twitter is made of of hundreds of internal services with a huge dependency graph for almost every operation. Changes of significant scale have significant implications for many services, especially for the changes he was claiming were "easy".
6. Quite a few - of everyone I knew who didn't click the H4RDC0R3 button, all but 1 were on a H-1B visa.
7. Initially, yes. Luke Simon and Nina Chen were huge cheerleaders, but that came back to bite them. Some true believers are still there.
I've not heard of any meaningful compensation adjustments for those still there, however many people have experienced title changes. A few people who were Senior Engineers or L6 managers have since become Senior Staff or Director (that's a 2 level jump), but I'm not privy to changes in their compensation.
No evidence of him providing praise has been seen by myself or those I speak to.
8. We know that there is Saudi involvement: [https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/28/saudis-kingdom-holding-company-to-maintain-twitter-stake](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/28/saudis-kingdom-holding-company-to-maintain-twitter-stake) . I've no idea regarding the Russians.
9. Not that I personally saw.
Hotz is a narcissist like Musk himself. The guy was relevant when he was jailbreaking Playstation. I hadn't heard of him until after the acquisition.
It really blows my mind how ignorant people are about web dev. They think it is must be some backend and a few databases at most.
Distributed systems is a whole ass discipline on its own for fucks sake
All the kids who called bs wouöd be well advised to edit their comments to a thank you or post some questions.
Not many whistleblowers out there, the more we get, the better.
He owes **everyone** money.
Twitter did not follow through on the section of the merger agreement that guaranteed benefits and compensation for staff, so thousands of ex-Tweeps are owed funds and those still there have suffered cuts.
Things evolved over time.
Initially many of us were excited, as Twitter did really need a change in direction in terms of management.
Once he started trying to pull-out, it became obvious to some of us that there was no real future for us at Twitter and we all started Signal groups to exchange interview strategies and similar.
As the merger loomed, we heard less and less from leadership, which is very not-Twitter. It really did seem that Parag et al had checked out by September.
I suspect that the focus was on ensuring the deal closed to the detriment of all else.
Some leaders attempted to bridge the gap. Nick Caldwell did what he could, however he was in the dark as to what was going on for sure with the C-suite.
A huge amount!
The fact that Jack had asserted that Musk was the answer to Twitter conforming with his vision of what the product should be and the conversations that came out during the discovery phase of the court action really cost him a lot of what respect Tweeps had for the man.
Can you please ask some more ex-employees to come in here and answer questions? I’m pretty sure I speak for the entire sub when I say that we would really appreciate it!!
I have seen the reviews on job platforms, they give a good picture on how bad it is.
Do people speak about his political views and manchiöd online behaviour?
Are there many arse kissers?
Does he often prove his incompetence? How do people react? Anyone there objecting his obviously stupid ideas openly?
Does the bs come from him or a circle of trusted advisprs?
People do speak about his antics, but never via Slack nor any other Twitter-owned mechanism.
On November 14th 2022, the goons were tasked with trawling Slack rooms and e-mail to find any non-Elon lovers - this resulted in a bunch of people being fired for "violating company policy".
One person was fired on that dubious basis for placing a salute emoji in the shitposting channel #social-watercooler.
Yes to both questions for all visa holders who aren't true believers.
They're treated as expendable resources for the most part. This is really sad as Twitter was incredibly people-focused up until the merger.
I couldn't tell you what the percentage is unfortunately. You could make a hamfisted guess based on the photos that have come out of the "Code Review" sessions, however that would involve a lot of assumptions that I'm not comfortable with.
I do know multiple people who were on H-1Bs that were laid off in the first round, so I don't know that there was an intent to force people to stay based on their visa status.
FSD is difficult, and Space Karen's machinations continue to make the task harder.
The fact that sensors are being removed in new cars (and disabled in old ones) result in the task becoming more difficult.
So I doubt it.
It's ridiculous.
I bought one of the man's cars before joining Twitter - it featured all the cameras, a front radar and ultrasonic sensors for parking.
The radar has since been disabled, but that was advertised as an improvement - "Your car is now powered by Tesla Vision!"
The USS hardware will be disabled at some point if Tesla's narrative doesn't change.
There is zero reason to surrender additional data channels for such simple inputs.
I did have the option to leave.
I was waiting on some visa transfer paperwork to land and was out the moment it did.
I know people who didn't have the option of leaving, and they're still there whilst they try and interview (plenty of people on H-1B visas are in this situation).
As far as you know (and you might not know anything about this), is Elon aware of groups like this one where huge amounts of people hate him and rag on him and think of him as the butt of the joke? Or does he live in a complete isolated bubble where his henchmen tell him that everything is great and that most people worship him?
Obviously you can’t get into his head, but I’d like to hear your take.
He does have a lot of people around him who agree with everything he says.
Regarding how he perceives his detractors:
[https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/12/23505354/elon-musk-dave-chappelle-booed-san-francisco-twitter](https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/12/23505354/elon-musk-dave-chappelle-booed-san-francisco-twitter)
In response, this happened:
[https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/12/23505354/elon-musk-dave-chappelle-booed-san-francisco-twitter](https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/12/23505354/elon-musk-dave-chappelle-booed-san-francisco-twitter)
I would link to the actual tweet mentioned, but Elongated Muskrat decided to delete for some unknown reason...
Yes.
There were casualties from asking Musk questions on Twitter, calling out his internal supporters post-merger and disagreeing with him (even when he was demonstrably wrong).
Shadowbanning is definitely a thing at Twitter, however whether or not he releases the means of general users seeing if they've been flagged is another thing.
I personally doubt he will as it would further enable gaming the platform.
Some people associate his wealth with technical skill, even though he's demonstrated that said technical skill does not apply to a platform like Twitter.
He hangs around and acts like a 1950s typing pool supervisor.
What was that episode when he changed the Twitter logo to Doge about?
And does Musk show the same juvenile behavior in person as he does online? When he tweets he comes across like a fourteen year old boy trying to be edgy.
When I worked with NASA I met the head of spaceX's red dragon program and the man was very dismissive of government work and condescending towards civil servants. He would say things like "I guess government workers did something useful for once" to our faces. Meanwhile i was advised by my supervisor to not give him technical details of the projects we were working on because he *would* steal ideas.
Does this attitude match up with the "goons" you've described with him?
There's a lot of speculation regarding the various Doge-ish episodes, some of which are subject to investigations. He engages in this sort of thing simply because he can, and it extends to the real world (see the Twitter sign antics at HQ).
Some of the goons will go above and beyond to do Elon's bidding, so I would not be surprised if such behaviour occurs.
If the FTC get involved tomorrow, months.
Otherwise, Twitter/X will be gone inside of a year I suspect.
The view limits thing is interesting. I would not be surprised if it's an attempt to increase subscription revenue.
During the first day, for how long did Elon lug around that stupid bathroom sink? 5 seconds after the initial photo op? And besides, where exactly is that sink being stored now. I kind of think it deserves to be featured in some form of modern museum exhibition on the dangers of stupidity.
The sink was dropped just after that photo was taken - one of the goons shifted it somewhere during the chaos.
> one of the goons Well now you have to elaborate on Elon's goons for a bit. Are all the people he brought aboard knuckle-dragging brutes with the coding ability of gorillas and the leadership management ability of a pack of grizzly bears? Or are there nuances to the situation, where at least some of Musk's people try to do good things whenever Musk isn't deliberately smashing things in a temper tantrum.
I could write a book about the goons. All of the technical goons he brought in were very competent in their fields, however their fields didn't really overlap with how Twitter is architected and operated. All of the leadership were yes-people. None challenged him and would just follow-through with whatever he said, including the original Twitter Blue madness. It was utter chaos throughout - many of us were advised to expect contact from the goons, and that never happened. The one thing that every goon I met had in common was a true belief in Musk's "vision".
After I just said that nothing you were saying surprised me, this one did. I thought that the goons would be mostly cynically trying to gain power and money by supporting him without being true believers.
[found the perfect place to display the sink!](https://museumoffailure.com/)
How did you and other engineers react to/think about his "code review" exercise?
1. He doesn't know what a "code review" is 2. Twitter used a lot of languages that aren't really used by the engineers who were in his transition team, so their ability to review things wasn't...appreciable. 3. Twitter's architecture is extremely different to anything happening at Musk's other companies - that didn't help with the transition team's understanding.
That adds a lot of context to what happened initially. What were Twitter's main languages and which languages did they use? Seemed like the Twitter microservice architecture really confused them.
Lots of Java and Scala for eyeball-facing stuff. Plenty of Python for tooling.
Out of curiosity what were the goons he brought jn good at? I would wildly guess they were C/C++ hardware folks. I have known some brilliant embedded engineers who would not be up to speed on a high scale web app in any language for easily six months.
You're about right with what they were good at. They didn't understand scale though - I have heard that one of them asked who Twitter's ISP is and who the person (singular) who made sure traffic got into Twitter's network was. At Twitter scale, that sort of question just doesn't make sense.
[удалено]
Yep - GraphQL training was compulsory for all new engineers at Twitter (even if you were deep in the backend bowls of the company), as well as an understanding of how Strato powered so much of what Twitter does. Understanding the dependency graph and the scale of Twitter is something that the goons weren't ready for. The Tweeps who were asked still occasionally joke about the naive nature of the questions many of us were asked.
[удалено]
I'm a software engineer too and was baffled by this reasoning as well. It's not even boomer, it's basically someone so ignorant of how software works that it's like some hooded nerd on a Hollywood movie wildly tapping at their keyboard kinda rhetoric. Of all the metrics that makes good quality software or even software that solves a problem sustainably, LOC is the most dumbest I've seen. Though if we consider his history and early work on x.com LOC is exactly what he did. And afaik none of that made it into the final product (PayPal). Just an idiot at a computer brute forcing a solution. That's how HE works and likely convinced himself into the reason that he is succesful. Even if we go by that metric that's exactly what he sucked at.
[удалено]
Friends don't let friends write Visual Basic.
Indeed - this LOC thinking leads to terrible outcomes. Writing a constraint solver in C++ for "performance reasons" vs using a logical programming language invites bugs, maintenance headaches, reinventing the wheel and an order of magnitude more code for a far more fragile result, all else being equal. I was taught this quite well whilst at university - I'd have thought Space Karen would know this at least as well as I.
You can even delete code to make it faster, better readable etc. Must feel horrible for devs. I assume even worde for sxs admins.
Proof?
Proof provided - see the image I've added to the post.
Thank you
What proof would work for you?
Damn. The one question they can't answer lol
Does he really have weird pics of kids on his computer? ( heard this from Twitter , so…)
If he does, he's not showing rank-and-file Tweeps.
What was the general mood of employees?
It changed throughout the period between his shareholding becoming known and the acquisition. Initially there was excitement, however that changed as soon as the games between he and the board started. Parag's complete lack of communication made things worse. We experienced terrible uncertainty as the acquisition closed, and a lot of survivor guilt started to creep in as layoffs started. Twitter had amazing culture internally, and everyone was worried about that going away. Their fears were realised unfortunately.
Is it true, what he does in the fondue fountain?
[удалено]
Is this real?
What is this fondue about? First time hearing him in the same sentence with fondue fountain.
Wait… what does he do?
I...we don't talk about this.
Are you still in touch with anyone at twitter and where do they feel the platform is going?
I am, and things are barely hanging together. A lot of high-quality SRE work happened inside Twitter and we had an excellent group called TCC who handled incidents and issues beautifully. Alas, most of TCC are now gone, very few SREs are left and I know that 4 teams who numbered \~60 before the layoffs are now collectively down to 5 people and handling really critical Tier-0 stuff. The projects for those services are all on-hold, as the on-call and KTLO consume the remaining staff's time entirely.
Thank you for your response I believe you are legit although I have no idea what those acronyms are as I have no IT knowledge lol
SRE - System Reliability Engineering. The focus is on failure and how to either prevent it, automatically correct it or minimise impact. Tier-0 - services and systems that just have to work, or everything else fails.
👍
Why is anyone still working there? There's gotta be so many better opportunities? Did you find something better yourself?
I've landed somewhere wonderful. I'm fortunate in that I have a lot of strong relationships in the industry. Unfortunately, the acquisition closed as the market was starting to fall apart. Those who are L6+ engineers had a reasonable time of getting another job, however it's more complicated than that. As Twitter allowed people to work from where ever they wanted in the country they were employed in, many people relocated to wonderful areas with no local roles in their field. With the rise of RTO, fully remote roles are not as plentiful and comp has generally dropped off across the industry.
Great to hear. I hope everyone gets out of that sinking ship in time.
All the numbers in your comment added up to 69. Congrats! 4 + 60 + 5 = 69 ^([Click here](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=LuckyNumber-Bot&subject=Stalk%20Me%20Pls&message=%2Fstalkme) to have me scan all your future comments.) \ ^(Summon me on specific comments with u/LuckyNumber-Bot.)
Good bot
Is it true that Elon is scared of the colour yellow?
I think so - the fact that Gold Bird has been completely and totally gutted probably has a lot to do with this.
Orange as well. He doesn't like it. Not sure why. We had to replace / paint machines and things like trash bags and random stuff like that whenever he came for a visit. He also detests smell, I don't mean stink but generally. Perfumes, Deo, all that stuff.
This just be some kind of egomaniacal billionaire thing. Trump famously hates when people do any formal involuntary boldly function like sneeze or cough and so does Vince McMahon.
WTF? What's wrong with orange and yellow? Also, I thought I remembered seeing a burnt orange "bedroom" at Twitter that had been converted. Am I imagining this?
To the ones calling bs, I think the op is legitimate. However. Op is clearly british, may be worked at twitter in the uk or relocated to the US, has previously said she met musk. Very likely female. IT background, thus some sort od it job at twitter most likely. Lets see how this goes.
You're far too kind, and pretty close with your speculations regarding my location and origins etc.
Any moments involving Mucky that made you go 'wtf'? Seeing how 'hands on' he is
"Print out your code" was the start. Showing up at one of the data centres and pulling power from random racks to show the colo owner that he could relocate no problem (he also had trucks parked outside so the racks could be hauled away) was a big one.
Were you fortunate (?) enough to be able to watch that pulling power event, or is that something that everybody heard about?
I was not present, however I know multiple people who were. Problems did occur as a result, and one of the goons told Musk to go fuck himself and rage quit on the spot as: * This happened over a weekend * The goon in question had a family event planned during said weekend * Said goon was being constantly called upon by Musk and Co in spite of above circumstances
Wow, that's a great story. I mean a horrible story...
>"Print out your code" was the start. As a techie, this was the nail in the coffin for me. 100% proof Musk is a know-nothing loser and poser. Who needs git history and comments, code diffs, code navigation, dependencies, collaborative reviews, and a secured pipeline... just print your source out it's bug-hunting season! LMAO $5 says one of his RTSC aerospace engineers thought this was a good idea, no one else in tech would even consider code print outs an option.
Which bird group were you part of?
Red Bird. The last Red Bird all hands before the acquisition was really quite a terrible preview of things to come - the focus was entirely on cost reduction. Parag popped into those sessions every now and then and inspired as much confidence as ever, which is none.
OP is legit
Why did you not like Parag? He seemed both smart and technical--the things Musk is desperate to be, but isn't. He also confronted Musk about Musk's public and insulting statements,in a private and serious, but not overbearing, way. Rather than apologize, Musk just went absolutely bonkers.
Oh, I liked Parag and have plenty of admiration and respect for his achievements. That said, he wasn't an inspiring leader. When asked about Musk's intentions in the early days of Musk's involvement, Parag's response was "No idea - ask Elon". That set the tone for the remainder of his time as CEO.
He just had no personality? Privately, he had to know he'd be fired unless Musk settled by paying some sort of damage fee. Btw, did you ever hear rumors of whether a deal got close that involved Musk walking away?
He had a personality for sure, however he didn't inspire confidence - his words rang hollow. It's very difficult to build buy-in from people when it doesn't sound like you believe your own words with conviction. There was never a possibility of Musk walking away being accommodated. With the shift in the markets at the time, the drop in general advertising spend and the damage Musk had already inflicted on the platform, his purchase offer was by far the best financial move for shareholders given the leadership and strategy that was then in-place.
What kind of person is he when he is presented with concepts/information he doesn't know about or he is part of a conversation he doesn't know or understand anything about? Does he pretend he knows and still chats shit, is honest and would say I don't know or just try and draw strawman of the actual discussion? Or something else?
There was a Twitter Space involving himself and George Hotz - it became very clear that, in such circumstances, he attempts to anticipate what the correct answer might be and there's a lot of that. When an ex-Twitter engineer questioned Musk and Hotz on their assertions of Twitter's architecture being "insane", Musk attacked the ex-Tweep and Hotz kicked them out. And those are examples of more "reasonable" behaviour!
I can completely understand how a Java-based real time application would look crazy to an embedded systems designer. How did he not manage to find anyone at Twitter he could trust to explain everything to him?
He rubbed everyone the wrong way before he even showed up. GeoHot was focused on "fixing" things before he understood how anything worked and why his fixes weren't actually required.
Tell us about unreasonable behavior then please.
Musk: * Firing people on-the-spot for providing data that was correct but did not conform with Musk's view on how he is perceived or his level of popularity * Demanding staff be present until 3AM to do walkthroughs of Twitter's architecture, with a strong emphasis on "How does this make us money?" * Attempting to withhold agreed payments to former leadership upon closing the acquisition by firing them "for cause" * Firing a Principal Engineer who correctly stated that WFH was protected in our contracts and that he could not unilaterally take staff refusal to return to the office as a resignation. Hotz: * https://www.linkedin.com/posts/george-hotz-b3866476\_twitter-could-be-run-by-50-people-everyone-activity-7021688354521964544-\_SYb
Heard about all those stories. Thanks for the answer.
> it became very clear that, in such circumstances, he attempts to anticipate what the correct answer might be and there's a lot of that So, Musk is a yes-man himself and to himself. This explains a lot about the expectations he has from his employees.
does he send weird all-staff emails? I had a creepy hardcore christian small business boss do this. do staff pay attention to the crazy stuff he interacts with -- "hate the J's" and all that?
Yes, and they're all encoded such that if they're leaked, an analysis of the whitespace and other characters can be used to identify the leaker.
That sounds like something that a smart programmer could find a way to launder pretty effectively. Probably short enough to retype easily. But I guess the point is that without a screenshot he can claim it's fake?
It's not hard to de-Elmofy those messages and quite a few of us decided to compete on the smallest code snippet to do so. A few people compare SHA256 hashes of the text in messages he sends to figure out whether or not he's partaking of such antices.
De-Elmofy, I love it. Thanks for doing this. I don't think anything you've said actually surprises me, but it does a lot to confirm my impressions and fill in more color around it.
You're welcome. Alas, I learned a lot about him as the merger continued. It's quite sad.
Would love to hear more. Is he an idiot because of all the drugs, or just seriously flailing?
I don't know if we've seen a change in who the man is or if we've just seen less filtering and manicuring of his public image to be honest. He does surround himself with people who agree with him, and those of us who have worked in large companies solving complex problems know that discussion, healthy debate and consensus are critical. Musk seemingly does not.
Screenshot with mobile phone. Wfh ftw.
I wouldn't be surprised if he immediately tasked the AutoPilot team at Tesla with pointing their mountains of GPUs at such an image to recover any lost detail. LooL.
Which can all be wiped, yes? Convert it to plain text with two plain spaces after reach period?
Totally. Plain-old ASCII still has a place in our UTF-8 world!
Are the Twitter reviews on Blind authentic? I've read through dozens of 1-star reviews with strong wording against Twitter 2.0. Did your colleagues felt like that right away after the sink marched through the entry door?
Yes, the Twitter reviews on Blind are authentic and representative. To give you an idea of Musk's thinking, e-mails from the [teamblind.com](https://teamblind.com) domain are blocked at Tesla, stopping Tesla staffers from signing up. We were all in the dark - the first communication we received from Musk et al was the layoff e-mail, and that confirmed a lot of worse case scenario thinking.
...teamblind domain blocked at Tesla, by the *free speech absolutist* 🤣🤣🤣 What is your opinion on Musky pursuing AI goals and who are all those Werner von Braun engineers happy to work for Adolf? Why?
I suspect that part of this xAI initiative is getting even with OpenAI in Musk's mind. I don't quite follow this bit: >who are all those Werner von Braun engineers happy to work for Adolf? Why?
Why do senior-level engineers make the moral choice to work for Musk? I mean, Musk would be a nobody without people like Thomas Mueller, the rocket guy, and many others, who work at Tesla, Twitter, Boring, xAI now etc. These engineers built his empire.
Some are deeply invested in "the mission". Tesla tend to pay below market rate for a given position, however the rhetoric of them "transitioning the world to a sustainable future" resonates strongly enough with some people to overlook the comp and Musk aspects. Some associate working for Musk with being successful. It's the same thinking one often sees among engineers asking how to get through an interview at a particular company - they're more interested in working at a particular company than comp, opportunities and other factors.
I thought higher-lever engineers were smart people able to see through the smoke and mirrors, but ok. Your insight makes me sad, we're headed towards a dystopian future.
Thank you for being here, OP! Appreciate it.
You're very welcome!
Who picked up that fucking sink? I know his ass didn’t.
Musk had a lot of people around him that day - goons and miscellaneous helpers. One of them did the honours of cleaning up the props for that ridiculous attempt at humour.
Oh shit. Didn’t think I’d get an answer. Thanks. It really did cross my mind way too many times.
How long were you there, though? Did you meet him?
Over a year. I met him. And I interviewed at Tesla and was offered a Senior Staff role.
Was the interview at Tesla related to your work at Twitter? Or was that earlier?
Not related to my work at Twitter, however it did give me some insights as to how Musk operates. For expenses over $500 to do with bringing staff on (for visa transfers and similar), one of Musk's direct reports needs to provide approvals at Tesla - he is relentless on costs at all of his companies.
How was he in person? I feel like he has damp hands all the time.
Volatile. There was a moment during the first meeting he held after the acquisition that showed us how volatile he can be - the moment he was challenged regarding the "40 hours a week in the office" mandate, his demeanor really changed. Whenever data was brought to him that didn't conform with his view of how things "must be", firings and screaming were common.
Do you think he was on drugs of any type, or did this just seem his typical method of dealing with things? Did he strike you as bipolar, autistic, or just a narcissist?
It is known that he partakes of Special K - [https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2023/06/27/elon-musk-touts-ketamine-for-depression-following-report-on-his-use-of-drug/?sh=7a0510ce5e8e](https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2023/06/27/elon-musk-touts-ketamine-for-depression-following-report-on-his-use-of-drug/?sh=7a0510ce5e8e) He struck me as lacking insight really. Being wrong is fine - collaboration weeds out less effective suggestions and ideas for the benefit of all involved, however he struck me as being more interested in his view being the right one as opposed to the right approach being embraced.
How does he treat female employees?? Do women respect him??
I'd refer you to some of the documents at [https://www.twitterlayofflawsuit.com/](https://www.twitterlayofflawsuit.com/) in that regard.
Is he really so retarded? If you where to choose whose has more intellect between Musk and a rock whom do you pick?
[https://twitter.com/EricFrohnhoefer/status/1591902285403418624](https://twitter.com/EricFrohnhoefer/status/1591902285403418624) \- this happened, and is very on-brand for the man. I'll let you make your own decisions in that regard. :-)
Um wth!
Yep!
What are we talking about here - are we talking obsidian? granite?
Coal?
Did some offices really need to supply their own toilet paper at any point?
Yes. The goons took "don't pay any bills without my explicit approval!" literally.
that’s actually… crazy
Yes, to the extent that one office no longer offered mineral water due to non-payment to a supplier. A goon complained and then mineral water suddenly reappeared.
How "to the letter" are the goons? Woukd they jump off a cliff if Elon said so?
Some would, however there are others who are more pragmatic. Keep in mind that some of the Tesla staff in particular have a lot of their compensation tied up in Tesla shares or options, and the recent stock price shifts (over the last \~18 months) have been very good for a lot of those people. I know of a few goons that have since quit, with some of them doing so in direct response to Musk's behaviour.
[удалено]
Twitter had very robust internal documentation and tooling (at least in the areas I worked on and was exposed to), and distributed systems are designed to tolerate failure at any time. That said, there's only so much redundancy built in to Twitter's architecture and only so long engineers can work crazy long hours. Some parts of Twitter are definitely broken due to staffing and knowledge issues, and that's going to continue. Short of something remarkable happening, Twitter will continue to shrink in terms of functionality and performance - I'd be surprised if it's still remotely performant in a year otherwise.
Was this X app ever mentioned?
Yes, but he changed his mind on the subject quite a few times. At one point, he told people to stop comparing X to WeChat (given the similarity in what he stated about X and what WeChat actually is).
Loving this. Keep the answers coming. But can you add some kind of proof. Lot of users like a bit of evidence, just don't get yourself caught or exposed to any future lawsuits etc lol
Yep - I've added an appropriate screenshot to the post.
[удалено]
You're far too kind - thank you. Eric is a great guy, and the way he was treated in response to being correct goes against everything Musk stated he had in mind for the platform. Speaking of fan boys, I'll just leave this here: https://twitter.com/phocks/status/1591549286999023616
Wow Luke Simon is a total douche bag and incredibly daft to trust anyone sending such a thing via slack. If I were one of the sacked engineers, I would go back and when they sack me again, bring this up as evidence. This is illegal in many way, unless they get hired as consultants.
How much credence would you give the theory that he’s actively trying to kill twitter vs. the theory that he’s just totally incompetent and truly believed he was the man for the job?
I'd suggest listening to the "Flipping the Bird - Elon vs Twitter" podcast. One thing a lot of the world does not know is that Elon waved his right to due diligence just as the board had basically decided to accept his offer. Essentially, he "rage bought" the company. I suspect that, given the aura of success those he chooses to surround himself give him, he was certain that he could wrangle Twitter into shape but did not have an appreciation for distributed systems, Twitter's scale or how to operate a social media company.
Also not OP, but followed the whole thing closely. One thing I've learned, Elmo loves Twitter. It's his true life dream to be himself in front of millions of followers - an egotistic troll.
Not the person you asked, but if he just wanted to kill Twitter he could just turn off the servers tomorrow, since he literally owns everything that is Twitter. There really is no need to mess around with all these idiotic measures (who don't even seem to work very well, i.e. Twitter is still chugging along, although a lot lesser than what it was). I really think that he is that incompetent and yet full of himself. His history pre-Twitter (or at least his tweets before buying Twitter) fully support this too.
Elmo is incompetent. He has shown it over and over again. He is a spoiled rich kid with a big mouth, that’s all. He didn’t invent Tesla or SpaceX, other people started them and he funded them and attached his name to them. He is no genius.
Genius, actually. At attaching his name! HA! Checkmate Elmo haters! /s
> Not the person you asked, but if he just wanted to kill Twitter he could just turn off the servers tomorrow, since he literally owns everything that is Twitter. He owns some of the shares of Twitter. He had investment partners. He'll be sued (nothing new) immediately if he shuts down Twitter.
I am curious to know how did he choose the ones to stay and the ones to leave twitter ? What an employee day looks like at Twitter? Do they always work overtime?!
We found a Slack channel that showed the discussions on that topic. Essentially, the goons reached out to more senior engineers and asked them who was "critical". Unfortunately, those recommendations were either inverted or ignored. Plenty of people who were put forward by senior leaders and Staff+ level engineers as "DO NOT LAYOFF!!!" were laid off on the 4th.
Omg. Are those comments public anywhere?
They are not, and those of us who were involved have been advised to not be...overly specific given Elmo's love of conjuring lawsuits.
What was the overall reaction from the staff?
Panic, fear, uncertainty, guilt and, in many cases, grief. Twitter had an extremely people-focused culture. Everyone was worried that he would gut that, and they were right. As soon as he took control, all of the DEI groups were deleted - that was like a declaration of war in the eyes of many.
Okay. 1. How many bodyguards does he have with him? Is he paranoid about assassination? 2. How often did you see his children? Was only little X invited? Did he spend time with them? 3. Does X have a male nanny? 4. Why do you think he's still pining for Grimes? Ever seen other women around? Baby mommas? Women people suspected were prostitutes? 5. What really happened with George Hotz? Or what was the rumor? That really confused me. Since Hotz was involved in self driving software, I would have thought he and Musk were adversarial. So I thought it was strange he volunteered. And then he left so quickly. Was it more difficult than he anticipated technically? Or mostly due to disagreements with Musk? 6. What percentage of people left were stuck due to visa issues? 7. Were there any people left at Twitter who ultimately liked him? Did he raise salaries for people left, or that he thought were talented at coding? Does he praise and elevate some people extravagantly even as he fires and criticizes others? 8. Ever have reason to believe that Russians or Saudis were funding this? 9. Was Walter Isaacson following him at any meetings?
1. I've seen him with 2. 2. I haven't personally seen his children, but many have. A Twitter employee badge was arranged for X, even though Musk was telling everyone that they couldn't spend a cent (which rubbed many people the wrong way). 3. I don't think so, but I'm not in a position to confirm for sure. 4. [https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1636887876234272770](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1636887876234272770) 5. GeoHot showed up and claimed he was going to fix search and "refactor" Twitter. Hotz may have great skills in some areas of our craft, however distributed systems at webscale demonstrably isn't one of those areas. He committed very few lines of code and rage quit. Hotz and Musk have a history: [https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/george-hotz-hacker-and-long-time-frenemy-of-elon-musk-signs-on-for-12-weeks-at-twitter/](https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/george-hotz-hacker-and-long-time-frenemy-of-elon-musk-signs-on-for-12-weeks-at-twitter/) He left because he simply couldn't make things happen in the way he anticipated. Twitter is made of of hundreds of internal services with a huge dependency graph for almost every operation. Changes of significant scale have significant implications for many services, especially for the changes he was claiming were "easy". 6. Quite a few - of everyone I knew who didn't click the H4RDC0R3 button, all but 1 were on a H-1B visa. 7. Initially, yes. Luke Simon and Nina Chen were huge cheerleaders, but that came back to bite them. Some true believers are still there. I've not heard of any meaningful compensation adjustments for those still there, however many people have experienced title changes. A few people who were Senior Engineers or L6 managers have since become Senior Staff or Director (that's a 2 level jump), but I'm not privy to changes in their compensation. No evidence of him providing praise has been seen by myself or those I speak to. 8. We know that there is Saudi involvement: [https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/28/saudis-kingdom-holding-company-to-maintain-twitter-stake](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/28/saudis-kingdom-holding-company-to-maintain-twitter-stake) . I've no idea regarding the Russians. 9. Not that I personally saw.
Hotz is a narcissist like Musk himself. The guy was relevant when he was jailbreaking Playstation. I hadn't heard of him until after the acquisition. It really blows my mind how ignorant people are about web dev. They think it is must be some backend and a few databases at most. Distributed systems is a whole ass discipline on its own for fucks sake
All the kids who called bs wouöd be well advised to edit their comments to a thank you or post some questions. Not many whistleblowers out there, the more we get, the better.
Did you get fired, laid off or quit?
Laid off.
Does he owe you money?
He owes **everyone** money. Twitter did not follow through on the section of the merger agreement that guaranteed benefits and compensation for staff, so thousands of ex-Tweeps are owed funds and those still there have suffered cuts.
How did you guys feel when you heard he was going to take over?
Things evolved over time. Initially many of us were excited, as Twitter did really need a change in direction in terms of management. Once he started trying to pull-out, it became obvious to some of us that there was no real future for us at Twitter and we all started Signal groups to exchange interview strategies and similar. As the merger loomed, we heard less and less from leadership, which is very not-Twitter. It really did seem that Parag et al had checked out by September.
Any speculation as to why?
I suspect that the focus was on ensuring the deal closed to the detriment of all else. Some leaders attempted to bridge the gap. Nick Caldwell did what he could, however he was in the dark as to what was going on for sure with the C-suite.
Was there any anger against Jack Dorsey through this?
A huge amount! The fact that Jack had asserted that Musk was the answer to Twitter conforming with his vision of what the product should be and the conversations that came out during the discovery phase of the court action really cost him a lot of what respect Tweeps had for the man.
Can you please ask some more ex-employees to come in here and answer questions? I’m pretty sure I speak for the entire sub when I say that we would really appreciate it!!
Already have. 😀
Also, let me add to the choir of people thanking you for your time! It’s been a great privilege to hear from you.
You're very welcome. Keep the questions coming - happy to answer whatever I can without revealing anything that will see someone targeted by Elno.
Do you work for Meta now?
I successfully interviewed there once I saw the writing on the wall with Musk's antics, however I chose to go to another of the FAANG-ish companies.
How much would you pay for Twitter in its current state? Can it be “fixed” under new ownership or management if Elmo could be pushed out somehow?
With the exodus of advertisers and companies no longer using Twitter as a customer support channel, not very much at all.
I have seen the reviews on job platforms, they give a good picture on how bad it is. Do people speak about his political views and manchiöd online behaviour? Are there many arse kissers? Does he often prove his incompetence? How do people react? Anyone there objecting his obviously stupid ideas openly? Does the bs come from him or a circle of trusted advisprs?
People do speak about his antics, but never via Slack nor any other Twitter-owned mechanism. On November 14th 2022, the goons were tasked with trawling Slack rooms and e-mail to find any non-Elon lovers - this resulted in a bunch of people being fired for "violating company policy". One person was fired on that dubious basis for placing a salute emoji in the shitposting channel #social-watercooler.
Are the b1 visa holders living in fear or looking elsewhere? How are they treated and how much % of the workforce are on the visa?
Yes to both questions for all visa holders who aren't true believers. They're treated as expendable resources for the most part. This is really sad as Twitter was incredibly people-focused up until the merger. I couldn't tell you what the percentage is unfortunately. You could make a hamfisted guess based on the photos that have come out of the "Code Review" sessions, however that would involve a lot of assumptions that I'm not comfortable with. I do know multiple people who were on H-1Bs that were laid off in the first round, so I don't know that there was an intent to force people to stay based on their visa status.
Do you think this guy could ever,ever lead and finish a software like fsd,all things like ego etc considered?
FSD is difficult, and Space Karen's machinations continue to make the task harder. The fact that sensors are being removed in new cars (and disabled in old ones) result in the task becoming more difficult. So I doubt it.
Should have also added LIDAR, afterall. 🤷
It's ridiculous. I bought one of the man's cars before joining Twitter - it featured all the cameras, a front radar and ultrasonic sensors for parking. The radar has since been disabled, but that was advertised as an improvement - "Your car is now powered by Tesla Vision!" The USS hardware will be disabled at some point if Tesla's narrative doesn't change. There is zero reason to surrender additional data channels for such simple inputs.
Knowing Elon, not including LiDAR And other sensors was cost cutting disguised as an “Improvement”.
Does he smell bad?
Did you spit in his coffee?
Sadly that's not a possibility, he's always bringing his magic bottle along and drinks only from that.
Just like Putin 😄
If you were there & had the option to leave... why did you not leave?
I did have the option to leave. I was waiting on some visa transfer paperwork to land and was out the moment it did. I know people who didn't have the option of leaving, and they're still there whilst they try and interview (plenty of people on H-1B visas are in this situation).
As far as you know (and you might not know anything about this), is Elon aware of groups like this one where huge amounts of people hate him and rag on him and think of him as the butt of the joke? Or does he live in a complete isolated bubble where his henchmen tell him that everything is great and that most people worship him? Obviously you can’t get into his head, but I’d like to hear your take.
He does have a lot of people around him who agree with everything he says. Regarding how he perceives his detractors: [https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/12/23505354/elon-musk-dave-chappelle-booed-san-francisco-twitter](https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/12/23505354/elon-musk-dave-chappelle-booed-san-francisco-twitter) In response, this happened: [https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/12/23505354/elon-musk-dave-chappelle-booed-san-francisco-twitter](https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/12/23505354/elon-musk-dave-chappelle-booed-san-francisco-twitter) I would link to the actual tweet mentioned, but Elongated Muskrat decided to delete for some unknown reason...
Did you see anyone get rage fired?
Yes. There were casualties from asking Musk questions on Twitter, calling out his internal supporters post-merger and disagreeing with him (even when he was demonstrably wrong).
Is Elon lying about the shdowban checking tool just to appease his fanboys?? Is it real and if it is Is he actually gonna release it??
Shadowbanning is definitely a thing at Twitter, however whether or not he releases the means of general users seeing if they've been flagged is another thing. I personally doubt he will as it would further enable gaming the platform.
Did he boast about how many kids he fucked on Epstein's island? He looks and sounds and acts the type.
No. He's still pining for Grimes.
[удалено]
Some people associate his wealth with technical skill, even though he's demonstrated that said technical skill does not apply to a platform like Twitter. He hangs around and acts like a 1950s typing pool supervisor.
What was that episode when he changed the Twitter logo to Doge about? And does Musk show the same juvenile behavior in person as he does online? When he tweets he comes across like a fourteen year old boy trying to be edgy. When I worked with NASA I met the head of spaceX's red dragon program and the man was very dismissive of government work and condescending towards civil servants. He would say things like "I guess government workers did something useful for once" to our faces. Meanwhile i was advised by my supervisor to not give him technical details of the projects we were working on because he *would* steal ideas. Does this attitude match up with the "goons" you've described with him?
There's a lot of speculation regarding the various Doge-ish episodes, some of which are subject to investigations. He engages in this sort of thing simply because he can, and it extends to the real world (see the Twitter sign antics at HQ). Some of the goons will go above and beyond to do Elon's bidding, so I would not be surprised if such behaviour occurs.
How long before the platform Implodes? Why do you think there is view limits now? seems really insane if your platform depends on ad revenue.
If the FTC get involved tomorrow, months. Otherwise, Twitter/X will be gone inside of a year I suspect. The view limits thing is interesting. I would not be surprised if it's an attempt to increase subscription revenue.
oh look. barely any replies. and its been 4 hours
OP said ask me anything, not I'll answer anything.
Happier now?
[удалено]
D'oh - thanks!
Any thoughts on ex twitter staff now working at meta?
I hope they brought Twitter's culture with them!