[jef_leppard]

The way this entire thing has been run is a f*cking disgrace. Yes they have a business to run. Yes they need to do what they need to do to keep things healthy on that end, but these are PEOPLE we are talking about here. They have lives and families. The amount of contempt I have for Musk over the way he is treating them is unbounded. We used to think this guy was Bruce Wayne. Turns out he's Lex Luthor.

[buscoquadnary]

Wow laying off a large chunk of an unprofitable company is lex luthor evil? Guess the bar for super villain has become substantially lower.

[jef_leppard]

Layoffs are part of business yes (pretty much what I said in my parent post). What I have a problem with is the way this is being done. Forcing people to quit by dropping arbitrary deadlines without any notice? Notice of 84 hour work weeks? Sleeping in the office? Asking devs to print up their code? All this because he doesn't want to pay severance etc. I think that is hella f*cked up.

[marcusverus]

> Forcing people to quit by dropping arbitrary deadlines without any notice? Notice of 84 hour work weeks? Sleeping in the office?

Did any of this happen as a matter of policy? Or are you getting upset about rumors and hearsay?

[bsimpson]

https://twitter.com/esthercrawford/status/158770970548883046...

[Whatarethese]

That'd be a big heck no from me dawg. No job is worth that.

[andirk]

I've slept at work plenty of times. It's fun! Except one time I went outside for a spliff break at 2am and dropped my wallet w/ key badge right as the door shut. I had to hunt down a taxi and promise him I had money at my house! I also didn't have shoes on for some reason.

[saagarjha]

It did.

[dmak]

Your original comment made it sound like businesses shouldn't layoff people because they were people who had real lives. After reading this follow-up, I realized you have no issues with layoffs, but you actually just had an issue with how they were laid off. Basically, same outcome, but with more grace.

[all_factz]

It’s not the same outcome at all - severance pay is often the difference between needing to take out a loan or not when embarking on a job search after a layoff. Lack of that stability will have material impact on many people: they might have to move, change which schools their kids go to, avoid medical treatment not covered by Medicare, etc etc. He’s not committing some sort of victimless crime.

[dmak]

> but with more grace

> Grace - courteous goodwill.

I think we are saying the same thing. Goodwill can only be built with actions and that would be similar to what Stripe did in their layoffs. The lack of goodwill would result in what you are saying.

[WalterBright]

None of that was in the linked article.

[Ekaros]

Not paying severance is also part of business and what people signed up for if it is not a law or a contract.

[PuppyTailWags]

Forcing people to work over weekends, 84 hour weeks, finding any excuse to make them quit or fire them "for cause" like making them print their code out physically? The end of the year is coming. It's supposed to be the holidays soon. Thanksgiving is in like 3 weeks. C'mon, dude.

[jef_leppard]

Just so. Some big Grinch energy coming from one of the wealthiest people on the planet.

[abledon]

Having employees pull 80+ hr crunch time is common in the AAA game industry... whats so bad about it happening for a few weeks at twitter?

[gizmo385]

> Having employees pull 80+ hr crunch time is common in the AAA game industry

You say that as if the working conditions in the AAA game industry _aren't_ widely regarded as horrible...

Crunch happening in the games industry isn't a defense of it happening elsewhere. It shouldn't be happening in the games industry either.

[lawn]

Having then pull 80+ weeks is bad no matter where it is.

The game dev work environmental is notoriously shitty, that doesn't make it okay to make it shitty elsewhere.

[waaveshine]

Yes it is common in the gaming industry. That is not a good thing nor a justification for it happening elsewhere.

[Tiktaalik]

It is no longer common at all.

[seanmcdirmid]

Lex Luthor would never make so many stupid comments on social media. Musk is more cartoon villain than comic book villain. But I think the Joker once lampshaded that a CEO was more evil than he would ever be. Its probably somewhere in the Even Evil has Standards trope (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvenEvilHasStand...).

[krapp]

Lex Luthor did, however, take forty cakes. That’s as many as four tens. And that's terrible.

[metabagel]

He hasn’t communicated with the employees. He has left them twisting in the wind. They’re finding things out from his tweets instead of through proper company channels. It’s unprofessional and disrespectful.

[gonzo41]

I don't think you should diminish the great work of Lex Luther by associating Musk with him. Musk is not a genius, he just got rich with first mover advantage in Online banking (paypal) and disrupting a lazy industry (Cars but electric!).

The real measure of Musk will be seeing how well this all goes. If he's really is smart, this may work. But by all accounts we're seeing what taking 44 billion dollars and setting it on fire looks like.

[AYBABTME]

Turns out this guy who consistently beat all odds and pushes progress further than imagine, is just completely randomly involved in all these events, as CEO but that's just a detail. And obviously he's a fraud, there's someone else all this time really running the show, probably a lizard.

Elon is brash, tough to work with and doesn't behave in upstanding ways, and I don't think I'd want to work for him; he's a jerk. But all this doesn't make wishful denial become true.

[ClumsyPilot]

> Turns out this guy who consistently beat all odds

Where is the Hyperloop? Since he announced it China has build 3 thousand miles of high speed rail.

How many cars travelled through boring company tonnels?

How many years ago was Full Self Driving meant to be released?

> doesn't behave in upstanding ways

He was sued for sexual harrasment, unfair dismissal, dangerous working conditions, defamation, reneging on signed contract, by SEC for lying to investors, and countless others.

If an average person broke this many laws, their life would be ruined.

[AYBABTME]

Yes, isn't that all proof that he's clearly not just a mere average joe? Everyone fails, he fails less than most all of us, and he does really daring things.

We can dislike him all we want for all his flaws, he's going to be in history books. If he wasn't so ruthless about achieving his goals, the moonshots he did achieve would have been failures as well.

We can dislike someone and still recognize their impact, people aren't black or white. Nuanced opinions are possible.

[kshacker]

He fails less because he got lucky at some time and made his money, and then after that he acts like a bully and tries to beat down any opposition. Selling company at 420, what was he penalized? Other allegations, what did he lose? If there was a genuine fear of him losing something substantial, I am pretty sure his attitude will change.

No one is questioning his impact, but the people do question and have the right to question the methods. But we live in a corrupt system, we can point fingers in many directions, and rightly so. He is just one of a breed.

[brandonagr2]

Why should he lose something for _allegations_? Don't we live in a society based on the concept of innocent until proven guilty?

[BeefWellington]

> Yes, isn't that all proof that he's clearly not just a mere average joe?

I'm not sure anyone ever considered him the average joe. He was born into privilege for a start.

[brandonagr2]

Why do you think the hyperloop should be anywhere? It was just an idea Elon threw out there for someone else to build, not a project he tried to build. (Don't confuse Boring Co Loop in vegas with an attempt to build high speed partial vacuum tunnel at human scale)

You are right that he is not an average person.

[COGlory]

>Musk is not a genius, he just got rich with first mover advantage in Online banking (paypal) and disrupting a lazy industry (Cars but electric!).

I'm not saying he's a genius, either, but first mover and disruption aren't exactly without foresight.

[gonzo41]

Yeah, but buying twitter isn't smart. It shows a glaring lack of critical thinking and foresight. So like most rich people. He got lucky in the past and the past may not be a measure of the future.

[theonething]

> He got lucky in the past

The mental gymnastics people on HN perform to diminish Musk's real achievements deserves 10s across the board.

I mean if you hate the guy just say so (for extra credit, explain why). Don't lie about his achievements and intelligence. They are so obviously real. Yes, luck is involved too, but it's not the only thing by far. He fucken self-learned rocket science in 6 years.

> When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn't come just from hanging out with people.

Robert Zubrin - aerospace engineer

> Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.

He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.

He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years.

Kevin Watson - Head of Avionics, Launcher

https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...

[marcusverus]

Thats what they said about Tesla and SpaceX.

[gonzo41]

Musk is a good project manager if you think that crash or crash through is a good project management methodology. And Telsa and SpaceX (Which is supported by defence industry) are very different in their offerings than twitter.....

[marcusverus]

So he lead first new major US car company in a century and started the first viable private rocket company in 50 years, but you’re concerned that he won’t be able to figure out how to make Twitter profitable?

Is that your honest opinion?

[JeremyNT]

Does it need to be a good financial outcome for it to be smart?

I view the whole thing as Elon getting bored and wanting a new toy to play with. When you have as much wealth as he does, a loss hardly really matters. If he can make it profitable somehow, that's just a bonus.

[rootusrootus]

> first mover advantage in Online banking (paypal)

That's being generous. He's not a paypal founder. He started a different company, which merged a couple times into becoming part of paypal.

[parkingrift]

Yes he became the worlds richest man by luck.

Incredible. The man isn’t smart. Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink were just luck. And he was lucky with PayPal.

No, Musk is only a genius if he does it with a fourth, fifth, or sixth business. Perhaps then he’ll graduate from lucky to fortunate.

[theonething]

I made a related comment about HN mental gymnastics about Musk and his achievements here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33462201

It's just mind boggling to me that otherwise rational and intelligent people can discount reality in this way.

[rybosworld]

Just to play devils advocate:

Musk more or less got trapped into a deal with Twitter that was largely based upon numbers that were fabricated by executives.

From his perspective, the way to salvage this mess is layoffs. Some of the previous executives (Parag) have committed fraud imo, and should face consequences. They won't though.

Lot's of twitter employees will suffer. To varying degrees, many of them played a role in the house of cards that is twitter.

[EFreethought]

Musk did not get trapped into a deal. He thought he was being cute and it blew up in his face.

First he was on the board, then he wasn't. Then he thought it would be funny to agree to buy Twitter for a price that had "420" in it, then the markets declined and he sued to get out of a contract nobody forced him to sign.

Either something changed recently in Musk, he has been hiding the fact that he has had a few screws loose for years, or both.

I guess most people just get depressed when they hit middle age. When you are wealthy, you can knock up one of your employees and buy a company on a whim.

[sangnoir]

> the markets declined and he sued to get out of a contract nobody forced him to sign.

Small correction: he wrote an open "I declare" letter to Twitter 'canceling' the deal: Twitter got to Delaware court first (within days of his letter), and it took Musk's lawyers 2 weeks to file.

[abracadaniel]

Just another oddity to add: that employee he knocked up was apparently via IVF. So, very intentional.

[jef_leppard]

> Lot's of twitter employees will suffer

This is the only part of this I am speaking to because the rest is exactly what is happening. Musk messed up and now a whole lot of people are put in a terrible situation going right into the holiday season. It's unconscionable for one of the richest people in the world to behave this way.

[rybosworld]

I was alluding to the fact that the Twitter execs deserve a great deal of the blame. There are many guilty parties in this story. Elon is just one.

The Twitter executives have been up to shenanigans for quite some time it seems. That is imo, the actual main reason this deal has been so messy.

[iamdelirium]

Citations please. And don't cite Musk, he's not a neutral party to this. He's going to say anything that will make the old executives look bad.

Also, it was Musk who waive due diligence. This is ENTIRELY all on him.

EDIT: Since max depth was reach, there are _multiple_ comments about how he waived due diligence.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/06/in-letter-to-twi...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/musk-did-not-seek-due-diligenc...

The bot thing was an entire hail mary to stop the purchase. It doesn't matter if Twitter lied about the bots.

[rybosworld]

It's odd to ask for citations then provide none for your own claims.

Regardless, I was referring to twitter whistle blower that confirmed the number of spam accounts is fabricated: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22186683-twitter-whi...

There is a LOT of fishy stuff in these documents. The twitter executives have committed fraud but it seems like they'll be getting away with it.

[aw1621107]

Can you point out where in the report it is claimed that the number of spam accounts is outright fabricated? The closest I can find is that Mudge accuses Twitter leadership of not knowing and/or not being interested in the total number of spam bots, but that is a very different accusation than fabricating the number of spam bots.

In addition, the number of spam bots is more or less a red herring - the only representation regarding bots that Twitter made during the acquisition was the false/spam/etc. rate among its mDAU. There was no representation made as to the total number of bots on Twitter, nor the percentage of all Twitter accounts which are bots.

That Musk focused on a different number is more or less entirely on him, and is a significant reason his lawsuit never really went anywhere.

It's also important to note that data scientists Musk hired failed to find evidence that supported his "wildly higher" claim - one firm found an 11% "fake user number" at an 80% confidence interval, while the other found a 5.3% spam accounts as a percentage of mDAU at a 90% confidence interval. Hardly the kind of evidence one would want to have when accusing Twitter of lying, let alone fraud.

[jcranmer]

Actually, from what I recall of Mudge's claims, it basically validates Twitter's mDAU metric. Mudge's complaint boils down to he thinks the mDAU metric is the wrong thing to measure in large part because it focuses too much on measuring value for advertisers rather than the health of the platform.

[whymauri]

>Some of the previous executives (Parag) have committed fraud imo,

In what way?

[bpodgursky]

Internal chats (some screenshots floating around) that show the publicly cited bot % was known to be flawed and they have no idea how many active users are on the platform.

[rybosworld]

Page 8 of whistleblower report covers the issue of spam accounts: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22186683-twitter-whi...

[heartbreak]

Trapped into a deal? Are you serious? No one held a gun to Elon Musk’s head and told him to buy Twitter. He did that on his own accord.

He should have just left them alone. If the executives were so incompetent, he’d have gotten a better deal by waiting for them to fail. Or shorting the stock like a normal investor.

[rybosworld]

Yes, trapped in a deal.

The deal was always contingent on the confirmation that bot accounts were accurate. This was a precondition from the beginning.

Twitter did in fact lie about the bot numbers and Musk somehow caught wind of it and tried to back out.

I know it’s popular to hate the guy but facts matter more than your disdain.

[lmm]

Facts such as: a) he voluntarily waived due dilligence b) he explicitly claimed he was buying twitter to fix the bot problem c) no-one has ever shown that twitter were lying about bot numbers, and the only way you can pretend they were is if you pretend they were claiming their mDAU number was their user account number.

[rybosworld]

> no-one has ever shown that twitter were lying about bot numbers, and the only way you can pretend they were is if you pretend they were claiming their mDAU number was their user account number

This is entirely false. Read the whistleblower report:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22186683-twitter-whi...

“The company could not even provide an accurate upper bound on the total number of spam bots on the platform. The site integrity team gave three reasons for this failure: (1) they did not know how to measure; (2) they were buried under constant firefighting and could not keep up with reacting to bots and other platform abuse; and, most troubling, (3) senior management had no appetite to properly measure the prevalence of bot accounts—because as Mudge later learned from a different sensitive source, they were concerned that if accurate measurements ever became public, it would harm the image and valuation of the company.”

[lmm]

Even what you quoted, taken at face value, says that twitter never lied about bot numbers.

[aw1621107]

> Twitter did in fact lie about the bot numbers

Did it? At least based on what was shown in court, that seems hard to believe, especially given data scientists he hired failed to produce mDAU spam numbers significantly off from what Twitter had, let alone off to the point where fabrication becomes a likely explanation.

[rybosworld]

> Did it?

Yes.

Whistleblower report: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22186683-twitter-whi...

[RestlessMind]

> The deal was always contingent on the confirmation

Any citation for that? I thought Elon waived most of the contingencies.

> but facts matter

true, they do. And the fact here is that Elon backed out of the legal fight and purchased the company. Why do you think that happened?

[aw1621107]

> Any citation for that? I thought Elon waived most of the contingencies.

IIRC it's kind of true. Section 7(b)(i) of the merger agreement [0], which is part of the section describing the conditions under which the merger will take place, states:

> each of the representations and warranties of the Company contained in this Agreement (except for the representations and warranties contained in Section 4.2(a) and Section 4.2(b)), without giving effect to any materiality or “Company Material Adverse Effect” qualifications therein, shall be true and correct as of the Closing Date..., except for such failures to be true and correct as would not have a Company Material Adverse Effect

And Section 4.6 of the agreement describes Twitter's representations regarding its SEC documents and financial statements. Among other things, it states:

> As of their respective dates... none of the Company SEC Documents at the time it was filed... contained any untrue statement of a material fact or omitted to state any material fact required to be stated therein or necessary to make the statements therein, in light of the circumstances under which they were made, or are to be made, not misleading.

At least by my reading (and the general sense I got from more knowledgeable commentators), this basically means that Twitter represents that its SEC filings contain no material inaccuracies, and that the merger shall take place unless those filings contain inaccuracies significant enough to cause a Company Material Adverse Effect.

So in one sense, the deal depends on Twitter's numbers being not too inaccurate - if Musk could prove that Twitter's numbers were wrong and that that inaccuracy was enough to cause a MAE, then he would be able to back out of the deal.

What is incorrect, though, is the implication that the deal could not go forward until Musk checked Twitter's numbers. The deal basically assumes Twitter's numbers are correct, with the default action being that the merger will happen. The onus was on Musk to prove Twitter's numbers incorrect to the point that it will cause a MAE; otherwise, he must go through with the deal. Proving a MAE is an incredibly high bar - from what I've seen from other commentators, a MAE has been found once in the entirety of Delaware's corporate legal history, and given how Musk's evidence was turning out during trial it seemed extremely unlikely he would have been able to successfully argue that claim.

[0]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312522...

[hagbarth]

If that's even remotely true, he could have continued the court case. Presumably he would have won. Facts matter in a court case, and I think Elon's legal team told him that the facts weren't on his side.

[rybosworld]

Because it’s exceptionally difficult, if not impossible, to obtain accurate bot account metrics without data that is exclusive to the company.

Factor in that Twitter did not have processes in place to accurately count the spam accounts themselves. The truth is that there is not currently an accurate count of Twitter’s fake users.

Page 8 of this whistleblower report goes into details: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22186683-twitter-whi...

[jcranmer]

> Because it’s exceptionally difficult, if not impossible, to obtain accurate bot account metrics without data that is exclusive to the company.

Which is why the court ordered discovery that forced Twitter to give him that data.

[vkou]

The only thing that deal was contingent on was his financing, and the contingency that would trigger if he failed to come up with it was him owing Twitter a billion dollars.

[raydev]

> Musk more or less got trapped into a deal with Twitter that was largely based upon numbers that were fabricated by executives

What numbers were fabricated?

[rybosworld]

The fake account numbers.

Page 8 of whistleblower report: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22186683-twitter-whi...

[raydev]

I read through it, can you please quote the part where Mudge says Twitter lied about their mDAU count, or lied about their count of bots on the platform?

Mudge says Parag is lying about not being incentivized to remove spam, and then tries to do a sleight of hand thing by saying Musk is right because Musk is confused by what he sees in his own replies on the site vs what Twitter is actually reporting in their SEC filings. Those are two separate numbers, and Twitter only reported one.

[khazhoux]

Elon's takeover began 6 months ago, and he's never hidden his disdain for how the company is run. All those PEOPLE with lives and families would have been smart to take the hint and start interviewing instead of waiting to see if Elon would spare them.

[recursv_thnkng]

He made a joke offer and attempted to back out of the deal for 6 months straight. Nobody knew if it was going through or not.

[Ekaros]

Doesn't matter, either case started to look bad for Twitter. Either stock price drop or Elon being forced to buy.