[zeroCalories]

It's worse than that. Elon is a notoriously bad employer, and the only people that put up with him were the people that shared his vision. Pretty much the only people that will work for him now are second rate researchers and people that think gooner AI and racism is a worthwhile mission.

[vessenes]

There's some texture here. Elon's enriched pretty much everybody who's ever worked for and invested with him. He makes money for people throughout his orgs. Many ex-employees have said to me: "incredible opportunity, made great money, worked insanely hard, once is plenty".

[NeutralCrane]

My ex-Twitter employee coworkers beg to differ. They made plenty of money before Elon came around. Once he was in the company, one of them actually hired a personal attorney to confirm that he wasn’t going to be burned by the things Musk was asking him to do, before he finally decided it wasn’t worth it to work there anymore and left.

[tptacek]

I think Musk is odious but I think there's a lot of complicating evidence to the story of what happened at Twitter. And: very smart people, like Dan Luu, were complaining about their culture long before Musk arrived.

[keeda]

Is there anything from Dan Luu you could point me offhand at about Twitter's culture? The only thing I recall was a blog about technical issues but that didn't seem to have much bearing on the culture.

My understanding is Twitter always had cultural issues but it was not very different from other tech companies of the time, and what most of us would consider "directionally correct." I have it on pretty good authority from a very senior engineer who left before Elon took over (so no grudges other than, you know, "because Elon") that a lot of the things he said publicly about Twitter's technology was highly misleading or downright false. Like, IIRC, something about them not having CI/CD. Total lie.

[tptacek]

I have no idea what Musk did or didn't say. I don't pay attention to him; I think he's odious. But he did cut more than half the entire workforce and the service works as well as it ever has, which is pretty damning. I'm not willing tie myself into the pretzel required to explain how antebellum Twitter was well-managed given that.

There's some fraction of that workforce that supported projects intended to make Twitter a viable standalone business, which it probably no longer is. Backoffice / line of business projects intended to support advertisers, that sort of thing. But I don't think you can explain a RIF of Twitter's scale that way.

(I'll try to dig up the Luu post I'm thinking of.)

[tasty_freeze]

Many of the workforce he laid off were content moderators -- I've read it was a serious effort with a large number of people doing thankless work. There is now way more anti-Semitic content on X, more racial insults, etc.

[KaiserPro]

I don't really think thats true.

The deal with tesla is that there is a relatively small employer pool, so you can be fairly bad employer but still get good outcomes. The same with spaceX. Sure early tesla had some stories about it being fun, but there was/is a darkside.

The issue with xAI is that researchers have a whole bunch of other employers to choose from. Even at meta, where it used to be fairly nice for researchers, the pressure of "delivering" every 6 months lead to bad outcomes. Having someone single you out for what ever reason the boss had a bad day, is not how good research gets done.

We have seen (A few of my friends were at twitter when it was taken over) that Musk has a somewhat unusual approach to managing staff (ie camping at work). Some researcher love that, assuming that they have peace to research, and are listened to. But a lot don't.

[vessenes]

I think we are saying the same thing. He builds trillion dollar companies that are labor efficient; nobody said they are good places to work.

[Freedom2]

Many ex-employees have said to me that working for Elon did not enrich them at all, either financially or professionally.

[hermanzegerman]

He's a notorious cheapskate and Tesla is known for firing people shortly before their stock options vest

[rconti]

What about all the ones who are suing him for shortchanging them?

[jamespo]

There's probably a lot of survivor bias going on there

[vessenes]

Undoubtedly. With 2.5T in value between tsla and sx that’s a lot of value for survivors.

[sumeno]

What % of that is owned by employees that aren't named Elon Musk?

[raw_anon_1111]

Ask the people at Twitter..

[cladopa]

You mean the 80% of the workforce that was fired and the company continued running just fine?

Usually just firing 3 to 5% of any company workers have terrible consequences for the company that does it.

It does not speak so well about the workers.

[mattbillenstein]

He also cut 80% of the traffic... And the fact that it kept running with him willy nilly pulling network cables is a credit to the work they did to make it resilient to failure.

[iknowstuff]

Source on pre/post traffic numbers?

[mattbillenstein]

I don't have it at hand, but if you look at all the products and apis they cut - and then all the users who abandoned it in the first few months, I think that's how this was derived.

[keeda]

I don't understand this take. Do people think engineers go in to work to turn handcranks to keep the machines running? It's actually a credit to the automation built by the engineers he fired that it kept running!

At the time I joked that like Chaos Monkey, we should have an "Elon Monkey" to "fire" arbitrary people by sending them on mandatory vacations with no connectivity to see what falls over.

[spullara]

the people that built the infrastructure that runs twitter left before he showed up. most of it was written by a half dozen people that left around 2016.

[watwut]

It was significantly worst, could not keep ads, became overrun by bots. The quality went down significantly. And earnings too.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Ask the people at Twitter

The ones with stock options in, now, SpaceX?

[sroussey]

Poor SpaceX employees whose options got diluted by Twitter. :/

[raw_anon_1111]

Stock options aren’t magic. I bet you that the remaining Twitter employees won’t see a higher comp than equivalent employees at BigTech companies between their cash + RSUs when SpaceX IPOs.

Aren’t employees also subject to a lock out period where they still can’t sell their stock until $x number of months after an IPO unlike employees of public companies that can sell as soon as they vest?

Honest question, I’ve worked for public $BigTech but haven’t been at a company pre IPO

[htrp]

180 day lockup period is standard

[rconti]

No, the ones suing his ass.

[Zigurd]

> Elon's enriched pretty much everybody who's ever worked for and invested with him.

I'd wager you were saying the same thing about bitcoin until last year.

[mediaman]

I'm unclear what statement this is trying to make.

Is it meant to draw equivalence between crypto and Tesla/SpaceX? That each has roughly similar (i.e., low) value to humanity, or value as businesses?

Is it that the metric of whether a person makes others money is invalid?

The comment seems coy, possibly to avoid making any claim at all, but it must not be that because that wouldn't be very sporting.

[iamacyborg]

He’s saying that it’s easy to say good things when the market’s on an upswing.

[Zigurd]

I'm also saying that almost all of TSLA's price is roughly the same as all of bitcoin's price, which is to say vibes-based. It's a fandom. A cult.

[LZ_Khan]

After seeing the type of people he hired for doge.. yikes.

[hooch]

Was doge ever anything more than a "get root, grab the data, and run" operation?

[boc]

Maybe, but destroying USAID was an unforgivable sin. Short of nukes, rapidly turning off direct medical and food aid that people in critical need have relied on for years is objectively one of the fastest way to kill millions of people.

[pstuart]

Don't forget the destruction of USAID and countless projects that had the word "diversity" in its work.

[markdown]

I think more important than that was shutting down all investigations into Musk's companies.

[joquarky]

It's pretty obvious now.

[yoyohello13]

It was obvious at the time too.

[GeorgeTirebiter]

Karparthy worked for Elon for, what, 5 years? How did he do it, if Elon is Ivan the Terrible?

[cmorgan31]

Mate, wouldn’t it make sense that these rules are applied via hierarchy? If Elon respects Karparthy he almost certainly gave him a longer leash and Karparthy’s output was strong enough to not warrant intervention. It’s clear he did not want to stay long term so I’m not sure this is a strong line of thinking.

[GeorgeTirebiter]

It's possible. I don't know. My tone comes off as support Elon, and I do not, at all. I've seen first-hand almost all of these tactics while I was at <Elon Company>. I'm observing that some people seem to do OK at Elon's companies, and for many years, and never seem to get the boot or be abused in other ways. Therefore, Elon is probably not quite as bad a manager as he is made out to be. This is all I am saying. Since I have firsthand knowledge, I believe my opinion has value. Those that disagree? Show me your Source of Truth. Thank you.

[cmorgan31]

I don’t believe Elon is even remotely related to a people manager. He’s a stakeholder and operator which require different skill sets. He finds folks who will manage to o bring the empathy he tends to lose in his pursuit of his next project. I believe your evidence may be anecdotally valuable but let’s be clear about the dynamic of a founder/ceo.

[jazzpush2]

Karpathy makes great educational content. It's not clear what industry (or academic) research he did even now, five years later.

[ai_critic]

Gooning and racism have been a cornerstone of humanity since we descended from the trees, for better or worse.