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by aurelius83 1204 days ago
Now that Elon apologized is it ok to ask why Twitter paid a design firm at least 100 million for an acquisition when presumably they already had a design department and team that was internal to Twitter?
2 comments

The internal team was crippled by ineffective executives, so they acquired a new team... that got crippled by the same executives.

Also there's no evidence that it was $100M.

$100M, due on termination, which provides some color as to why the employee in question was asking Twitter HR to confirm their employment status.

https://mas.to/@fsinn/109984180905588540

https://twitter.com/williamlegate/status/1633176820072816640

The 100m amount is not based on anything concrete

“ typical acquihires in the engineering space are priced at $1 million / head, and his company had 50-100 employees from what I read. So the $100 million figure is an educated guess based on what I’ve seen to be industry standards”

https://twitter.com/williamlegate/status/1633183689659105288...

Amazing how easily a big round number gets shared as fact.

Sorry to repeat myself, but that tweet provides no evidence.
Incredibly, a whole bunch of news sites are using that tweet as evidence, and other sites are then using those sites as evidence of evidence.

e.g. [1] says "As per a buy-out clause included in the contract of Ueno’s acquisition" which links to [2] which, you've guessed it, links to that tweet as evidence of the $100m buyout / severance.

(As far as I can find, Twitter never disclosed the terms of the Ueno acquisition and no-one else seems to have published them either. Hilariously LeGate later explains his numbers to someone asking by saying, basically, "I pulled them out of my arse". A true Muskian move.)

[1] https://www.bosshunting.com.au/hustle/elon-musk-firing-halli...

[2] https://www.benzinga.com/news/23/03/31250643/elon-musk-backt...

Hiring a working, performing team is easier than making yours perform at the same level. Does it work? Few times, but the reasoning remains.

Apple acquihires tons of companies that we get to see the results after a few years.