Twitter set for more layoffs as Musk mulls next move Twitter CEO Elon Musk is considering more layoffs – including sales and commercial partnerships – as whoever remains following an exodus of software engineers enjoyed a "hardcore" weekend helping the tech industry veteran in a "code review" of the social media platform. Reports suggest roles in sales, partnerships, and similar …
shaped like a dachshund. I like it, I think it sums Space Karen up perfectly.
Oi! Our dachshund wishes to express her extreme displeasure at being used in the same sentence as Musk, let alone in a comparator!
Let's not forget - they were originally bred as hunting dogs (dach is German for badger) and the minitures were bred for going down rabbit burrows (hence the short legs, big feet and loose skin). They are terriers by nature and, the non-messed about ones, still retain that nature.
Ours is a rescue and is *very* much what a dachshund should be - feisty, fearless and owns the ground she stands on. She's bigger than a miniture but smaller than a standard. Having had a personality-vacuum of a miniture long-haired dachsund[1] in the past, this one is definately a proper dog.
[1] My wife was bought up with smooth-haired dachshunds.. her mother got the fluffy one a while after we got married, had her for a year or so then she (the MIL) died so we ended up inheriting the dog. She shared the house with 3 cats[2] and 3 other dogs (one GSD/Rottie cross[3], one Dobie/Rottie cross[4] and a staffie/JR cross[5]. The best description of that dachsund is 'meh' - I think all the inbreeding needed to fix the coat colour badly affected the nature and capabilities of the dog.
[2] The youngest of which took great delight in hunting the dachshund.. he tried that with the new one (even though the cat is 15 now) and discovered that she wasn't a pushover like the last one. He leaves her alone now.
[3] The most laid-back dog I've ever known. It took a *lot* of harassing from other dogs to get him would up.
[4] The boss. She kept the GSD-cross in order and stopped other dogs harassing him.
[5] Also inherited off the MIL. Lovely brindle - looked just like a miniture staffie. Much more staffie natured than JR.
Ah, yes. I read the first three Dune books. Dune was good; I read it as the serial in Analog, and liked it so much that I bought the book. (No, I didn't read it when first published; I got hold of the three issues of the the first part and the five issues of the second when I was in high school. And bought the book shortly thereafter). Dune Messiah had problems. (I should have got the five-part serial in Galaxy before I bought the book, I would never have bought the book.) (note that normal serials in Analog and Galaxy were three-parters; Dune had eight parts spread over 3 years, Dune Messiah had five parts. The fact that Dune was in Analog, the premier SF magazine of the time and still, while Dune Messiah was in Galaxy, which is dead and has been since about 1980, should have been a red flag.) Children of Dune was good, not as good as Dune, but better than Messiah. God-Emperor stunk. I never finished it. Nor have I even started any Dune books since then. Herbert wrote a total of six Dune books, and his son cranked out more based on plotlines left when Herbert the elder died. I have no more desire to read them than I want to read the hordes of 'Tom Clancy' books emitted by various persons since Tom Clancy died. (Frankly, Clancy had been in steep decline since Sum of All Fears and I didn't buy any of his newer stuff in hardback.)
Good point, I liked them both actually.
The Lynch one for its glorious weirdness and baroque set design.
The recent one because it felt truer to the book and just spectacular visuals the bit flying over the city was alsmot vertigo inducing in imax.
Plus Denis Villeneuve is in my good books for not fucking up the Bladerunner sequel.
Buy twitter, decimate the workforce, see a mass exodus of users and employees, lift some bans, decimate the workforce further, and hey look! We're in the run up to the 2024 US Elections! Twitter runs, but barely, as most staff have quit or been shown the door. Now anyone can attack or abuse or even take over Twitter. It will be a dumpster fire...
Is that the way it works? I can understand a company's debts effectively disappearing when it goes bankrupt, but I would have thought that the $x billions of debt raised to buy Twitter would be Musk's personal debt, not Twitter's.
...or maybe it doesn't work like that over in the States?
I'm not all that up on finance, but someone who is had an aha moment a few weeks ago when we talked about Twitter. Apparently by doing this he managed to extract capital out of Tesla and Space X that he would otherwise never had access to, and it appears there are many tricks to avoid getting a personal hit from a bankruptcy.
With his money I suspect his accountants and lawyers know pretty much all of them, and if not he can always ask Trump for advice who has spent his entire life successfully skating past rules and regulations (and who's rather familiar with bankruptcies), which may explain why they're mates.
Thanks, but I must stress it was an assumption. I personally don't know enough of these financial shenanigans to assess if that's the game, I'm a mere mortal who has no chance of escaping the clutches of Mr Taxman.
Us mere peons don't get to play such games with other people's money..
It is perfectly legal, and unfortunately common practice, to do just this. A good example was the "purchase" of Manchester United by the Glazer family who subsequently transferred the debts used for the purchase to the club. Basically, the company "signs" an agreement to take on the debt. Musk won't have done this without his backers knowing, because that might make future financing more difficult. Apparently, they've already sold the debt on, at a discount, and the loss gets offset against tax.
Cocktails all round, except for the poor sods getting their pink slips…
You mean just like his boss - Donald J Trump
I guess that musk wants to be Trump Mk2 for all the good that will do him. He can't run for POTUS and anyway, Ron Desantimonious is lined up to get that job so what?
anything that will allow him to buy whole countries. Where else does the richest man in the world go?
Don't say Mars unless he goes with Trump on a one-way ticket.
I don't think so. According to Barron's - "At the most basic level for Musk, a Twitter bankruptcy would mean he loses some $25 billion—roughly the amount of equity capital he put into the purchase. That amounts to about 10% of his pre-Twitter purchase wealth." If Musk goes personally bankrupt, that's a different story. Surely Musk would let Twitter go bankrupt before sinking all of his own personal fortune into it.
The interesting question is, if Twitter declares bankruptcy because it cannot meet it's debt payments, then what happens. Musk might be hoping that he can maintain control of Twitter through the bankruptcy, and come out with lesser yearly interest payments - which currently run about 1 billion a year.
Oh yeah, the 3 months severance that Musk "promised" employees who didn't sign the hardcore declaration?
The bankruptcy laws line up (“prioritize”) creditors in the order in which they will be paid off. Creditors who are owed wages, salaries, or commissions are given a high priority for repayment. Each individual employee of a bankrupt business is given a priority of up to $11,725 (as of 2010, and adjusted every three years thereafter) of the wages they earned up to 180 days before the company filed for bankruptcy. However, “secured creditors” are first in line, and therefore ahead of employees, for repayment. (Secured creditors are banks or other commercial lenders who are entitled to repossess or seize property if payments are missed.) Because secured creditors are generally owed the most money (usually for property and equipment loans), there often is not much money left over to give to the creditors, such as employees, who are in line after them. Sometimes, creditors in line behind secured creditors may only receive a penny for every dollar they are actually owed.
I wouldn't be surprised if the joy of reneging on that promise will be a motivating factor.
Great Lord Musk is using the 'Truth Social' system as a model for the new Twitter.
- No expensive premises to run
- HQ is a PO Box Number
- Zero staff or the appearance of that.
Then
- banning anyone who dares criticise the dear leader (Trump for Truth Social, Muck for Twitter)
Do you have actual reports of people being banned from Twitter just for criticising Musk? (As opposed to, e.g., impersonating him.)
I saw a story a few days ago about an astronomer who tweeted a picture of a meteor trail, and was suspended for posting "intimate content without the subject's consent". This happened three months ago, i.e. pre-Musk, and her account was reactivated last week, i.e. post-Musk. It gave me a slightly more cynical take on the stories of carnage among Twitter's moderation team.
Don't get me wrong, I think Musk is an idiot who got into one of those online dick-sizing contests, then was horrified to discover that his idle boasts might be legally binding. But I also think Twitter was far from well before he came along, and he might do worse than simply tearing it down and rebuilding on the ruins.
Then you don't know much about Twitter and free speech, but apparently you are a fan of shadow banning: Twitter’s Former Head Of Trust & Safety Explains Why, For All His Billions, Elon Musk Can’t Magically Decide How Twitter Will Work
Nice tidbit at the end, one of Musk's first moves was to encourage the moderation team to censor more stuff! But Musk is pro-free speech so how is that even possible?????
Where did I say I was a "fan" of anything? All my anecdote says is that moderation (and appeals) were broken even before Musk got involved. There's no way it should take three months to resolve an appeal against an image being wildly misclassified by an automated filter.
Even if the vote was fully legitimate, there's still the very strong likelihood that 50% is not an adequate enough result to justify the action. Yes, there was a small majority in favour, but surely the barrier should be higher, especially considering the quite appallingly obvious pretensions.
It reminds me of another, similar, close to 50/50 vote that had disastrous consequences and left strongly divided opinions in the UK's recent history.
That's xkcd is a bit of a paper tiger. People like Kathleen Stock OBE have essentially been "cancelled" for saying things that upset a very small number of very loud people. It's happening all over the place.
It's not a case of "nobody hearing a single word", it's more a case that he's not allowed to speak in many of the modern day public squares of the internet, Twitter being a quite important one. Therefore quite a lot of people are not hearing some of the words he has to say.
This is not to say I'm a fan of trump, as I think a large proportion of what he says is total rubbish. However I will defend his right to say that total rubbish.
And to all those people who were saying "It's a private platform, they can do what they like"... well, what's changed? They can do what they like, as long as it's what YOU like? Now you don't like it, they shouldn't be able to do what they like?
However, if he's only allowed to say those things on Truth Social, then he's really only going to be speaking to his own people. Preaching to the choir. And that choir is going to get very angry because they believe their man is being suppressed. Better to let him say what he wants to say, and let others openly debate that. And if he spreads misinformation, then by all means highlight that.
OTOH, I think it's a bit much to allow people like Kanye (or Ye) on there after the things he's said, which are actual calls for violence.
This is not to say I'm a fan of trump, as I think a large proportion of what he says is total rubbish
People talking total rubbish is not a problem
Deliberate malicious misrepresentation of reality (as 'facts' and 'truth' have become politicised) in order to advance his own agenda, with no regard to the consequence to others - is a problem.
"it's more a case that he's not allowed to speak in many of the modern day public squares of the internet,"
But Twitter isn't a public square. It's the "public square" inside a privately owned shopping centre/center/mall which is operated under the rules of the owners and management. No skateboarding, no photos, no handing out leaflets etc., etc., etc., without approval by the management.
What about if that megaphone is essentially the only way of hearing somebody?
Suppose twitter dropped all democrat candidates a month before the election? Suppose Google decided not to return any search results for Republicans or had Chrome block all Republican candidates sites?
Suppose the credit card companies and banks decided they would only process donations for their preferred candidate
At some point these monopolies have to be regulated in a different way from a bakery not making a gay wedding cake.
The latter two are monopolies. Twitter is not. It has more rights to do arbitrary things, both positive and negative, than the others would. Financial institutions are prohibited by law from doing that. Google has an obvious monopoly position in search and a significantly dominant market position in browsers, and it knows it would face extreme lawsuits if it did so, which unless they managed to tame the governments making them would likely result in their company being broken apart with a sledgehammer. Twitter does not have a monopoly in social media (the Facebook properties are larger even though they are separate products, for example).
What about if that megaphone is essentially the only way of hearing somebody?
So anybody in a stadium should have access to the announcer's mic so that they can give their opinion? "Bad call Ref, are you blind, or just stupid!"
Suppose twitter dropped all democrat candidates a month before the election? Suppose Google decided not to return any search results for Republicans or had Chrome block all Republican candidates sites?
Suppose the credit card companies and banks decided they would only process donations for their preferred candidate
Suppose they did and all their customers went somewhere else? Twitter didn't dump Trump because they were offended by what he said. Proud Boys, stand back and stand by didn't get him booted. He got booted because Twitter was worried they'd lose advertisers if they didn't. Note how fast big customers are suspending their Twitter ad campaigns right now.
At some point these monopolies have to be regulated in a different way from a bakery not making a gay wedding cake.
None of the entities that you have mentioned are monopolies.
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> Yes, there was a small majority in favour, but surely the barrier should be higher, especially considering the quite appallingly obvious pretensions
Anecdotally, pretty much everyone I know with any form of left-wing leanings has left Twitter. So I suspect that the platform as a whole has taken a lurch to the right, even before you consider the possibility that the recent chaos and gutting of Twitter's content monitoring teams has probably caused lots of trolls and the like to flock to the platform.
All in all, I'm somewhat surprised the vote was that close!
I'm not. I think it was only close because it would look rigged otherwise (that's also the secret to rigging elections - only possible if the results are fairly close) - who says there was actually a count? I think it was just made to look like a Twitter "vote" because Musk could thus absolve responsibility, the decision itself was made before Musk even completed the buy of Twitter.
@juice
"Anecdotally, pretty much everyone I know with any form of left-wing leanings has left Twitter. So I suspect that the platform as a whole has taken a lurch to the right"
It kind of depends what could be considered centre. Jumping right from Mao and Stalin could still leave you in socialist/communist territory.
Good job this voting and unbanning was decided by recommendations from Twitter's moderation council and advisory groups just the way that Musk announced a month ago.
And then when Trump said he was bigly fine where he was he unbanned Kanye West and Andrew Tate, again in line with Twitter's non-existent moderation council and advisory groups' recommendations.
And let's not talking about breaking down Twitter and rebuilding it in his image. It's almost as if Musk is a chronic narcissist who needs everyone's appreciation or something.
I think it really depends on what the vote is about and how many of the electorate vote and whether those voting are actually thinking about or just voting with their party/friends/peers.
An actual free and fair vote is incredibly rare for those reasons alone, never mind all the other reasons why people are swayed one way or the other without actually thinking through themselves. Democracy is the simply the least worst option. I think it was Heilein on one of his political rants that made a good point. If you have the right to vote, always go and vote, even if you support none of the candidates or their positions. At the very least, there's someone you want to vote against. A good argument for compulsory voting IMHO
If you're going to make the deciding line somewhere other than 50%, that's the kind of rule you need to announce up front before the vote, not just pull it out of your arse after the event because things didn't go the way you expected.
(Same thing applies to the Brexit referendum, by the way. How do you think the majority of voters would have felt if they were told, after the event, "sorry, 51% isn't enough"?)
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' I was not allowed to vote remain because I had lived outside the UK for too long despite the result directly affecting me."
And nor should you. The absence limit for the UK is 15 years. If you haven't lived in the UK for more than 15 years then you shouldn't have a vote. You left.
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"And nor should you. The absence limit for the UK is 15 years. If you haven't lived in the UK for more than 15 years then you shouldn't have a vote. You left."
On the other hand, that was part of the point of being in the EU. Being able to live and work in other parts of the EU without having all the palaver of emigrating and possibly changing citizenship. Brits living in the EU were and are still British Citizens.
It's just the crazies who see it as a free speech free for all lingering around the place now.
Nope. It's a lot of minorities who've been made unwelcome and/or feel unprotected from harassment on places like Mastodon. It's people from the global south who know Twitter has a far greater reach and visibility than other social media. It's people who favour the serendipity of Twitter(*). It's people like me watching the car crash through their fingers for shits and giggles but also with a professional interest in how it's actually going to fail. Oh, and "free speech"(**) nuts and anti-vaxxers and conspiracy loons, but they were always there, long before Melon Usk took over.
(*) I've seen comments like "On Mastodon you find people you know. On Twitter you find people you didn't know you needed to know."
(**) Quoted because it's religious dogma, not reasoned philosophy, for them.
" It's a lot of minorities who've been made unwelcome and/or feel unprotected from harassment on places like Mastodon."
That's a pretty clear indication that you've never used Mastodon. The place is pretty aggressively accommodating. Maybe you've been hearing about other platforms that are based on Mastodon (it's open source), but Mastodon's most populated servers have pretty clear guidelines and moderation.
That's a pretty clear indication that you've never used Mastodon.
I'm reporting what various people are saying on Twitter about why they are not switching to Mastodon.
Mastodon's most populated servers have pretty clear guidelines and moderation
And various groups regard those guidelines and moderation policies as discriminating against anything that isn't a white US middle class lifestyle. Reporting their lived experience which includes major harassment and death threats from neo-nazis gets moderated for not having content warnings because it'll upset the bourgeoisie, continued attempts to speak of their experience gets them kicked off.
Even if they find a site that will let them speak, the harassment they receive from the far right cannot be mitigated as easily as on Twitter. There's no equivalent of Block Party for Mastodon.
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Well I was disappointed. Was expecting a clever visual pun alluding to "world's biggest a**hole" but it's just a fanboi Frankentribute. Goats need horns, for a start, and the strapon is far too big for the body. And I fully expect the smoke and flames will come out entirely the wrong end. Not even good enough for a cheesy Hammer Horror reboot!
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I'm with you brother! (on the Tesla thing)
I also won't buy a Tesla, but my reasons are mortgage, heating bills and ski holidays, which are far more important than a stupid go cart (and the "cheap" ones don't even look very good - a more shite Mondeo anyone?)
I won't be closing my Twitter account any time soon, it's far too entertaining. (and no more toxic than it was 2 months ago really)
"On May 28, 1937, the government of Germany—then under the control of Adolf Hitler of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party—forms a new state-owned automobile company, then known as Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung des Deutschen Volkswagens mbH. Later that year, it was renamed simply Volkswagenwerk, or “The People’s Car Company.”"
THAT founder!?
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/volkswagen-is-founded
A true code review for something the size of Twitter couldn't take place in a weekend. What Musk called a code review was just getting down some diagrams showing the API flow between all the various services that collectively make up Twitter. I doubt they look at a single line of actual code.
That's like the difference between conducting an x-ray inspection of each and every weld, rivet, and fastener in an airplane versus getting someone to draw up high level blueprints of how all the airplane's components are installed in relation to each other.
Maybe he's still embarrassed and put-out over the whole "RPC" thing, wanted to crib enough buzzwords from the remaining engineers to look like he knows what he's going on about.
Elom doesn't strike me as someone who can ever let something go, to say nothing of not taking himself too seriously.
Just because he gets rid of the vast swathes of purple haired layabouts. Do you really think anyone is going to miss the Sub-Junior Director of Diversity of Vegan Yoghurt Availability? Those who remain are likely very much enjoying their new found focus of, err, doing their job, without worrying about some trust-fund communist reporting them to some other trust-fund communist for not attending the 19th 'diversity' meeting of the week.
There is so much wrong with this post that I'm at a bit of a loss for words about where to start. Yes, there seems to be an overwhelming sense of entitlement, about how valuable and indispensable everyone is because of their amazing and unique knowledge. The pure white light of such brilliance does tend to blind people to the realities of employment, especially in 'at will' states such as California. Twitter is neither unique nor isolated -- I've witnessed several business cycles going back decades, but as most of the people working there would be far too young to have remembered the 1990s and the dotcom boom. And crash.
The jibe about the 'sub-director' is unwarranted and doesn't really describe the defensive stance that companies need to take these days because there's quite an industry dedicated to finding torts and profiting off them. A typical 'for instance' is a nephew's company (in the UK) where a sexual harassment complaint leads to the employment of consultants to investigate, counsel and generally feed off the company (to the tun of 90K and counting in a very few weeks -- everyone deserves thousands a day for their wisdom) -- and that's even before the lawyers have got involved 'negotiating' a settlement. We -- that's all of us -- have birthed a monster, a parasite that feeds off the promise of a big payday.
Finally, there's all this BS about 'trust fund communists'. Its true that the entitled -- and secure -- can spout revolutionary sounding rhetoric but that has absolutely nothing to do with the labor movement or socialist politics. If you want to experience the realities then try forming a branch of a union at your workplace to see what happens. This kind of gibberish merely demonstrates how thoroughly people have been brainwashed -- they just don't know who the good and bad guys are, they just follow along with the program with its two minutes hate. Its very Orwellian. A cliche, of course, but then few have read the book (but we've all seen one of the various movie 'treatments').
We live in a culture of perpetual offence and constantly seeking something to make you angry. Your life doesn't have meaning unless you are 'fighting the system'. (albeit completely manufactured) It just happens that most of the people who fall into this category have had quite an easy upbringing and are the trust fund commies. Just look at Saint Thunberg. Calling for the destruction of the capitalist system that made her what she is. She could never have done what she did without a lot of money behind her.
Man, as a Christian, I wish no-one any harm, and I hope you do not take offence, but this reads like a bot-post. I used to use xrumer more than a decade ago to produce posts like this. If you are really not a bot, and can tell me the missing one of Rod, Jane and *****, then I'll respond more fully.
Man, as a Christian
If you really are one (which I sincerely doubt, based on your posting history) think on this:
"Wherever possible, try to live in peace with all"
Go on, look it up - it's in that book that you probably have never read without someone telling you what you have to believe..
(The Bible).
The GoP found out in the mid-terms that his endorsement is the Kiss of Death for candidates so he's a spent force politically. Noisy, yes, but not someone who needs open displays of fealty any more -- the base has moved on so other ambitious right wingers don't feel the need to kow tow to him and his family.
He would be the ideal GoP Presidential candidate in 2024. (If you're a Democrat, that is.)
Letting him tweet is just giving him a bit more rope.
Yes, I get the H1-B serfdom issue, and it's not uncommon for people in the US middle class to be living paycheck-to-paycheck and want to be sure of another position before leaving. (I wouldn't have much faith in Musk's severance-payment promises; that money has to come from somewhere, and the $12K or whatever that employees are prioritized from bankruptcy proceedings won't go far.) But actually want to work for this idiot? There can't be many left.
I've been reading Miller's Toy Wars (1998) about Hasbro and the other big US toy companies, and I'm struck by the difference between the execs he writes about and Musk. Those were people dedicated to their firms and employees, actual visionaries who created innovative products and marketing strategies. Ruth Handler cooked the books,1 but she was the co-founder, co-chair, and president of Mattel. She invented Barbie. She created her first business from nothing, peddling decorative boxes her husband made in a home workshop at local boutiques. Hasbro's Hassenfelds essentially invented using children's television programming to market toys. Maybe you think all of that contributes nothing to society, but hundreds of millions of children beg to differ. And it was innovation.
What's Musk done? Bankrolled Paypal (ugh) in the early years, and gone along for the ride on Tesla and SpaceX, while wasting money and energy on quixotic side projects. Any already-wealthy entrepreneur could have done that, and I don't for a minute believe Musk brought anything special to the party. He's a beneficiary of a historical moment, and someone else would have played that role if he hadn't been there.
In The Ascent of the A-Word (2012), a cultural history of the term "asshole" in US discourse, Nunberg remarks that Donald Trump is probably the quintessential asshole, as popular usage has constructed the term. I think Musk may have since refined the category. Sure, Trump managed to get himself (or was placed by his handlers) in a more dangerous position; but for sheer assholery I think Musk has him beat.
1Her 41-year (!) prison sentence was suspended, but she and her husband lost control of Mattel and about half their personal fortune was returned to the company. She went on to found a successful business making breast prostheses – she was a breast-cancer survivor herself.
the sheer ignorance of almost all the people commenting is astounding.
Has twitter gone down or even faltered as a result of all these people being fired?
no is the answer
in fact I have seen improvements.
Tweetdeck for example has not changed or improved for a long time, yet this week I saw some long awaited new features and improvement.
Twitter is now also more profitable than Facebook or Apple...
All this in just weeks....
It is clear that Twitter was just a moneypit and the previous execs did sweet FA and most of the people they employed, sat at home doing sweet FA, except prejudice, biased and unethical moderation, banning, and deleting.
Despite over 7500 staff, support tickets never ever got answered.
I have one ticket that I have been waiting a whole year for a reply to, and that is with me sending 35 follow up emails....
So Musk is just getting rid of useless dead weight that is sucking up money.
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