[whiskey14]

It seems that Musk at this point is completely unaware that he is a walking contradiction.

On one hand, he is a technologist. Forward thinking and driving towards the future.

On the other hand, he is an old fashioned factory owner. He views his workforce as pure labour and can't accept that he can't force his employees to work under his total control. He also can't accept the gain in life capital for his employees in working from home for his workforce and that the future of work for humanity is probably decentralised offices and WFH, not middle managed, over the shoulder, supervised, centralised offices.

[jstx1]

Cutting edge technologist for the investors, old school factory owner for managing people. Makes perfect sense if you're trying to extract the max amount of money.

[SturgeonsLaw]

Similar to the formula Bezos is using. They are both making a lot of money doing it, just like the robber barons of the Gilded Age did.

[LegitShady]

Not letting people work from home doesn't make you a robber baron.

[whiskey14]

True, but the fact that technology is going to reinvent everything, including work seems to be an oversight. I'm not sure an old school factory owner is going to attract the best people in a highly skilled industry

[shapefrog]

> Makes perfect sense if you're trying to extract the max amount of money

Offshoring everything to the third world makes perfect sense to the old school factory owner too.

[ukoki]

The cheapest way to downsize is to have employees quit of their own accord. Removing benefits like WFH incentives this.

[tailspin2019]

> The cheapest way to downsize is to have employees quit of their own accord. Removing benefits like WFH incentives this.

This is why I found reading his published chat messages [0] so interesting.

From the horse's mouth (the horse in this case being Jason Calacanis) to Musk, when talking about restructuring:

> "2 day a week Office requirement= 20% voluntary departures"

So it does seem possible that this could be at least partly driving this.

As an aside: The other interesting nugget in the msg logs was discussion about taking Twitter private to restructure (because it would require haemorrhaging users while they cleaned up bots etc. - and also likely because you wouldn't be able to take such aggressive actions re. mass sackings in quite the same way when public) and then going public again once this restructuring process has been completed.

[0] https://danluu.com/elon-twitter-texts/

[torben-friis]

This is exactly why in my country the law uses the concept of 'acquired rights'.

Basically, if an employee is consistently given a perk for a certain time, said perk implicitly becomes part of the contract and taking it away allows the worker to quit receiving the same compensation as if they've been fired.

[zeroonetwothree]

Seems like that could just make companies hesitant to give out any perks in the first place.

Law of unintended consequences and all that.

[mrguyorama]

Most high GDP countries don't have a business culture of optimizing for maximum cash in the owners hand at all possible costs, and indeed, even are interested in giving their employees a fair shake. Most places understand that employees are valuable and deserve dignity and respect, and have taken steps to ensure they get it.

[notfromhere]

Stating a remote policy in your contract and then forcing an RTO is basically constructive dismissal

[harshalizee]

Curious, which country(s) is this?

[DonsDiscountGas]

Except that you lose your best people this way, rather than average/worst.

[zeroonetwothree]

Or maybe a mix? Although maybe Musk thinks the in person workers are the best.

[cmeacham98]

People that quit voluntarily are always skewed towards the high end, because better employees have an easier time finding another job with similar benefits/pay but has that one thing they want.

The only way this would make sense as a downsizing tactic would be if you believe that employees that prefer to work remote (enough to the point where they would consider quitting) are significantly worse than the average Twitter employee.

[praptak]

The worst will stay and do so with a vengeance.

[whiskey14]

So do you think he'll eventually bring back WFH for Tesla and Twitter when they want to increase headcount?

[tailspin2019]

Based on reasoning in my other comment [0] I think this is highly likely.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33544756

[watwut]

> he can't force his employees to work under his total control

That is because he actually can force them to be under his control.

> He also can't accept the gain in life capital for his employees in working from home for his workforce and that the future of work for humanity is probably decentralized offices and WFH, not middle managed, over the shoulder, supervised, centralized offices.

I don't think he cares about their lives. Meanwhile, long hours in office have multiple advantages for controlling CEO like Musk. The people are removed from outside influences (friends, family, time to read) and closed in his own echo chamber. Whatever he wants to normalize, it will be harder for them to see is not normal outside of that bubble. It is another variant on what cults, monasteries, armies etc do ... the more they isolate you from outside influences, the better you surrender own agency.

Plus, people not comfortable with above self exclude. It is win win win for ceo. Not necessary effective, but produces strong loyalty and obeisance. Which has advantages also for productivity.

[whiskey14]

I get what you’re saying but does that produce the most effective, creative and innovative workforce required to compete in the technology industry?

[watwut]

Creative and innovative - absolutely not. Effective - mostly not, except in some situations. There are many ways how to be ineffective tho, this is one of them many. I think that you dont need to be super effective to compete in the technology industry.

Will he be able to compete? I dont know. Musk twitter moves seem incompetent overall to me. But so far, his charizma and money (to certain people) did allowed him to get quite far in his previous companies. He did treated his previous employees pretty much the same way.

[MrMan]

if you look at musk and his friends talking about how to restructure twitter it looks less incompetent. if you remember that he is under a mountain of financial pressure you can also see that these moves are for survival, not to make twitter more awesome. a decimated shell of a company is preferable, for someone who just massively overpaid for a non-growth company, to a much larger organization with higher cost structure.

I dont understand why he wanted twitter and I think the incompetence is in the way he pursued the deal, but once one is saddled with such a problem the steps to get out from under it (or at least minimize the damage) are clear. forcing employees out is necessary.

[prirun]

> I dont understand why he wanted twitter

The thing I read that made the most sense is that he never wanted it. He wanted to use the buyout as cover for selling a bunch of Tesla stock. No due diligence was done because he fully expected to just back out of the deal, but that didn't happen because he and his billionaire buddies were not so happy about getting deposed and dragging all their dirty laundry into the public.

[rohit89]

This take is parroted a lot but makes no sense because he already has a ready made excuse for selling shares with spacex.

[watwut]

It still looks incompetent. Especially in the area of treating advisers. And in the way he is rolling out new feature, no wait, he does not, cancel that out, actually it is going to be done ... nope, yes. Print out code on paper, nope, shredder it actually.

> you can also see that these moves are for survival

They don't seem like moves of survival. They seem impulsive, emotional and causing him damage.

> forcing employees out is necessary

He just had layoff. Literally, it is not like he would need to send midnight eamils about going back to office tomorrow to make them go.

[lakomen]

He's not a technologist, he's a ruthless capitalist playing with other people's money. Idk why he gets so much support. That guy is a wolf in sheep's clothing. He doesn't care about the planet, or the people, he cares about his bottom line and nothing else.

[infamouscow]

Do you have anything of substance to add besides ad hominem attacks that don't really even make sense?

Let's break this down:

> He's not a technologist, he's a ruthless capitalist playing with other people's money. Idk why he gets so much support.

Calling someone a capitalist isn't the dig you think it is, especially on a website run by a VC firm.

Musk has a track record for returning profit to investors.

> That guy is a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Calling someone the boogeyman convinces nobody. What exactly are you warning about?

> He doesn't care about the planet, or the people, he cares about his bottom line and nothing else.

Have you heard of Tesla EVs?

[helf]

> Have you heard of Tesla EVs?

Have you heard that didn't invent them or even start the company or even cofound it?

Anyways, yes, he has done a lot of good and is actually smart. But it has also gone to his head and the more power and wealth he accrues the more it shows. Like with most people.

Mindlessly bashing him is just as much of a waste of time as mindlessly sucking his knob.

It is all sooo boooooring.

[Gwypaas]

  > Tesla was founded (as Tesla Motors) on July 1, 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in San Carlos, California. [...] Ian Wright was the third employee, joining a few months later.[2] The three went looking for venture capital (VC) funding in January 2004[2] and connected with Elon Musk, who contributed US$6.5 million of the initial (Series A) US$7.5 million[10] round of investment in February 2004 and became chairman of the board of directors.[2] Musk then appointed Eberhard as the CEO.[11] J.B. Straubel joined in May 2004[2] as the fifth employee.[12] A lawsuit settlement agreed to by Eberhard and Tesla in September 2009 allows all five (Eberhard, Tarpenning, Wright, Musk and Straubel) to call themselves co-founders.[13]

  > Musk took an active role within the company and oversaw Roadster product design at a detailed level, but was not deeply involved in day-to-day business operations.[14] Eberhard acknowledged that Musk was the person who insisted from the beginning on a carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer body and that Musk led design of components ranging from the power electronics module to the headlamps and other styling.[15]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tesla,_Inc.

I would suggest going to the source rather than writing Reddit level comments.

[mrguyorama]

Getting given the title by a court settlement doesn't make you smart or a visionary, it makes you a petty asshole.

[TylerE]

Sounds like your're agreeing with GP?

He didn't actually found Paypal or SpaceX either.

[fassssst]

EV’s do not save the planet. EV’s are a way to profit off government subsidies.

[vkou]

Correct. The future of sustainable transportation is the electric trolley, the electric train, the electric bus, the electric scooter, and the electric bicycle.

It is not a largely-single-occupant two-and-a-half-ton electric sedan.

[slaw]

I prefer walking and public transportation.

[jmeister]

What if he(and others like me) believe that working in-person really is truly necessary for accomplishing great work?

[wolrah]

> What if he(and others like me) believe that working in-person really is truly necessary for accomplishing great work?

Well, it's his (and your) right to be wrong but that's a belief that was already on very shaky ground before 2020 and has by this point been absolutely proven wrong.

Unless your job actually requires physical interaction with or proximity to a thing or other people it can almost certainly be done equally well remotely.

Processes may have to be adjusted to account for remote workers and even the way people work when working remotely, but almost 100% of jobs that take place at a desk in front of a computer can and should be allowed to be remote.

The biggest thing that doesn't work in a remote environment is micromanagement, so bad bosses who feel the need to micromanage hate it, but those people are terrible so if they don't like it that's a good thing.

[zeroonetwothree]

I don’t know, it seems not much creatively came out of tech since 2020. It’s all continuing trends started before that or living on past glory. I think you could easily argue that creativity is down in the industry.

[JakeTheAndroid]

What are you using arrive at this opinion? What creativity existed in a measurable way before 2020 and what does that metric look like now? Who is less creative in this environment and in what ways are they less creative? What amount of creativity is necessary for a business to operate successfully or solve meaningful problems?

Not all problems require new or genuinely creative solutions either. And it seems really difficult to try and measure the creative output by individual contributors at any given company. You have no way of gleaning the micro decisions or solutions that people come up with for their internal issues. So this doesn't seem like one could "easily argue" this point at all, in fact it seems quite difficult.

Are you suggesting that product offerings are less creative as a whole? And if so, again what metric are you using to arrive at this conclusion? And are there really no trends of this same metric before 2020?

[lithos]

Why are you surprised? He wants employees in space and on Mars where he'll have even greater control (when employees start/leave employment, all information in/out of their station, the amount of mass employees will own, and even control when authorities are allowed on the station if at all).