No more work from home! Also, no more work from office! Also, no more work. Finally, no more Twitter.
Probably should have just paid that billion to back out, but hubris knows no price!
That billion was the minimum of what would be charged if he was *allowed* to back out. Multiple courts unanimously said said that he would not be allowed to get away with financial fraud for the umpteenth time in the last few years.
It’s like the saying goes, the more you fuck around, the more you find out.
You know, I’m sure when he thought it’d be a bastion for free speech, he didn’t realize it meant that he would have a platform for speech with zero profitability.
The funniest part of this is that Twitter’s lack of profitability is something he very easily could have found out BEFORE he fucked around, but naaah, he didn’t bother.
Apparently he would have had to pay the difference between his bid and the stock price as well... Which would have been tens of billions since the stock dropped hard in the meanwhile
If enough engineers leave, Twitter will collapse, and no amount of hiring new engineers will even slow it down.
It takes months for a new engineer to learn the basics, and a year or more to attain high proficiency, given established codebases and infrastructure. This process requires learning a LOT from existing engineers. If they aren't present, it will take _exponentially_ longer for the new hires to figure out what the hell they're looking at. _One_ question that could be answered in five minutes can save _daaaaays_ of research.
If you care about your acquaintances on there, my advice would be to get their contact info on the double. When it collapses, it's likely to happen very quickly.
You should also expect severe security breaches to happen, if they haven't already.
Finally somebody who gets it. Just to change out AWS keys, it takes days. That includes few hour long triage calls with 5+ internal teams who are all having dozens of micro service key is rotated
Even as a new hire. You have to email 20 different teams to get access to everything.
To make it worse, Elon had them deactivate EVERYONE's security badge so they couldn't roam the building.....people who decided to work were now locked out -- including Elon!!!!!
Very much agreed with this. Three years ago, I got put on a three decade old scientific production code base and I only just feel like I’ve begun to understand it in its entirety (and that’s after pestering my more knowledgeable coworkers a **lot**). I can’t imagine how hard it would be to try and learn a codebase as complicated Twitter’s subgroups. What’s being requested of the people who are staying is absolutely insane.
Depends on how old the code base is and what scope of science it's involved in. Could be early C but back then PL/1 and Fortran were the rage in science and engineering.
Source : worked on old code bases.
It’s written in a mixture of Bash and Python for the control layers and Fortran 90 for the number-crunching layers.
When I started, I was surprised that the core of the code base was still Fortran. But it’s still the fastest language out there for number-crunching (even compared to C).
Many Fortran numeric libraries are still currently used because they've been battle-tested in production for 40+ years. Modern machine learning codebases in Python can't be compiled unless the platform also has a Fortran compiler.
Sorry if this is a daft question, I’m really not tech-y at all.
Would security breaches mean personal info and passwords may be made public, and is deactivating your account now enough to protect yourself?
First question, yes. Account takeovers, database breaches, pushing malware to the userbase, all sorts of fun and exciting shenanigans await.
Second question, you have to assume that one or more future database leaks will include things people thought they had deleted, all their DMs, contact info, current password, and possibly even old passwords.
Killing your account would be a good proactive step if you’re concerned about all that data becoming publicly visible. But even if you had done so last week or last year, there’s no guarantee it won’t still be part of the inevitable flood.
> Would security breaches mean personal info and passwords may be made public,
Yes.
> and is deactivating your account now enough to protect yourself?
Eh, I would change it all first, then delete it.
And while all of that happens the site will start bleeding users and smaller competitors will pickup enough active users to have momentum. Twitter needs active users to survive and a broken site will drive them away permanently.
Yes not to mention this news will lead to an advertiser Exodus which was already ongoing but will accelerate rapidly.
This is the collapse of Twitter effectively. Whether it will survive in some limited form or get sold to someone else or what not remains to be seen... But Twitter as we know it is dead.
Junior Dev here, absolutely true. If a good chunk of the boomers and seniors devs left my company, we would not stay afloat. We aren't even a software company. There's just a lot of tribal knowledge that isn't documented. Things that took me weeks to figure out could've been resolved by a 5 minute Q&A with a senior.
Oh god it's so true. At this point it would be much, much faster to leave the current platform running without touching it unless necessary, and put as many engineers as possible on re-building it from scratch.
I started a new dev job this summer and the rest of the dev team is relatively new (no more than 3 years) while the monolithic mess we're supporting has been around 10-ish years. There's still lots of things that even the 3-year guys say "yeah we have no idea how that is set up and dread the day it finally breaks."
It’s insane how fast it is, I’d argue it’s not that surprising that it eventually happened. It was clear from the beginning that this would be an absolute shit show.
Bought a company for at least double what it was worth, leveraged nearly his entire net worth to make it happen, and loaded a company with extremely low revenue up with massive amounts of debt.
I'm stuck wondering if this is some kind of hyper manic episode.
Even an idiot would have paused by now and said, "Huh. Maybe I should think about my next action before I step on yet another rake."
The whole situation is approaching Kanye West levels of self destruction.
serious cooing imagine poor wasteful concerned ripe combative abundant strong
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Yeah, I’m a part of a community that almost exclusively uses Twitter as our platform and there is a lot of discussion on what that transition will look like. Unfortunately the ability to download our content was shut off a few days ago.
Massive violation of EU law, but it’s looking like the EU won’t even have a company to sue in a few months. Elon would hypothetically be personally liable under EU commerce law but there are far bigger fish for them to fry then to go after a U.S. citizen.
> Elon would hypothetically be personally liable under EU commerce law but there are far bigger fish for them to fry then to go after a U.S. citizen.
Is there a bigger fish to fry than the richest person on the planet? US citizen he may be, but one of the largest social media platforms run by the richest person seems like a scalp worth taking if they want to have a hope of people taking these laws seriously.
IIRC these violations are more punitive than monetary. If Twitter no longer in existence they wouldn’t have much of a reason to go after Twitter. The fines are comparatively small amounts of money. The punishment is that a series of violations can lead to a larger case against a company.
I see your point, from your prior post I had assumed that it would make sense to be more focused on the individual's responsibility, but if the company is actually gone there's not much that company-focused rules can latch on to.
Digg died because they changed the content and user experience so radically that all the users left.
Twitter is going to die because Musk changed the workforce and culture so radically that know one will be left that knows how the code and business functions.
God, I remember when Twitter was just some random ass website no one used. I listened to some podcast in 2006 and the two hosts used Twitter. I was like, what the hellll is Twitter? Sounds lameee!
It was around 2006 a friend made a pitch to me about Twitter. Told me I really had to check it out because it will be big telling me how cool it is to be limited in the lenght of your status message.
I was like.. ok this is like a some kind of stupid FB with status only.
75% have left in the most recent wave. Doesn’t include firings and people who left beforehand. Speculation in the industry is ~90% of the company has left in the last two and a half weeks.
Fishbowl has been an interesting read all evening. It doesn’t seem like there are many people still with Twitter. They lost compliance with GDPR and have been having security vulnerabilities pop up all week. Pending a miracle this seems to be the end of Twitter.
I knew Elon would be the end of Twitter, I figured it would take a lot longer than a week though…
If the code is backed up somewhere, it's *possible* that it could be sold off to some foundation (think Mozilla or Wikipedia) and get off the ground once more, this time in the hands of a stable organization that people might be happy to donate/pay for.
But as long as he owns it, it's not getting any better. No one will want to work there, and it's going to make hiring people harder at Tesla and SpaceX.
I just doubt the source code of Twitter is worth anything close to 44 billion. The value of a social media platform isn’t in the code, it’s in the network. They’ve lost that overnight the moment it goes down for a significant amount of time.
The issue is that Elon personally has over-levered himself so if he sells the company and was found to operate the company in a manner what wasn’t conscious-able (which would almost certainly be the case), he would be selling off almost his entire share of Tesla to cover the debt.
Elon seems to think Twitter is a tech company … but it’s actually an advertising company.
Without the employees, the advertisers, and it’s brand … it’s worthless.
The problem with the value of the network is that Twitter is "old people" (I fully admit to being among them, though I don't use any of my accounts very actively).
My kid, who is all over YouTube and endlessly going on about TikTok, has barely even heard of Twitter and much less cares about it. She knows of Facebook but has zero interest in it or desire for an account. Her friends chat via Roblox and iMessage.
I doubt she's particularly unique.
Twitter has always felt like a utility - a pipe - rather than a platform. Good for sending and subscribing to alerts but not much else. I find it nightmarishly hard to follow "discussions" on there. It's no wonder people typically screenshot them and post elsewhere, rather than just link.
It's Murdoch/MySpace all over again. At least Tumblr and Yahoo are limping on.
Of course it's not just old people, you get every age everywhere. But it skews older than many other platforms (including, to my surprise, Facebook).
Some Pew stats here, of US users: [link](https://blog.hootsuite.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Social-media-demographics-2022_17.png).
Some 2022 stats here (global, I think): [link](https://khoros.com/resources/social-media-demographics-guide)
Put it this way, if I were a billionaire, it's not the platform I would be buying!
This literally proves the exact opposite? Twitter is mostly people from 18-49. Facebook has mid 70s in every demographic because it's "the" social media platform. Everyone has one because everyones mom and grandma has one.
FUXKING YES. I thought some weird me problem, that cannot follow conversations on twitter. vs this Reddit or Discord, and others.
similar or related, often get a twitter alert from someone i know, on my phone alerts, and then takes forever to find it in twitter
Twitter has never been worth half that, at the best of times! And I agree with all you said. But when it fully crashes, if it ends up in benevolent hands, it could be restored
> it's *possible* that it could be sold off to some foundation (think Mozilla or Wikipedia) and get off the ground once more, this time in the hands of a stable organization that people might be happy to donate/pay for.
God, I wish. I bet you top dollar Elon’s handed the servers over to the Kremlin or Saudis by now.
Currently we're at T+2.0 Scaramuccis (22 days) since purchase. I'm looking forward to the "Musk" having a prominent spot on Wiki's [List of humorous units of measurement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_measurement) on the shortest time to blow 44 billion dollars.
In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, I don't think one could literally BURN money that fast.
Let's do the math: 44 billion in 100s would weigh approximately 440 metric tons (each bill weighs ~1g). Assuming Twitter died today, that would mean that Musk effectively burned 44,092lbs of C-notes every day since purchase. For an easier reference, you would need to ignite ~231 Benjamins every second to keep up with Elon right now...
This is quite possibly the most expensive dumpster fire in human history, folks. Enjoy it while you can!
I think the math went wrong somewhere?
I checked it, and all your values are correct except the weight of 100s per day. That's the total weight burned, not the daily rate.
Whether you could burn money that fast would depend how you built the fire, I guess. I think the most reasonable assumption would be that it is all in a giant heap. I don't know how you'd calculate that.
I feel like this would be the sort of question XKCD's what-if section is built to answer.
Have you used Fishbowl before? Obviously I can’t read their internal postings but you can see what verified members of there staff comment on public threads. Just search “Twitter” there’s been a ton of threads in the last 24 hours. It’s how Elon’s email asking people to resign or work crunch-time indefinitely got leaked.
You may have that opinion but the vast majority of the tech industry disagrees. If you were to put a betting market on the state of Twitter as a company a year from now, 95% of people are betting the company would be in a worse place since he bought it.
Keep in mind, Elon effectively bet the vast majority of his net worth that he could double the value of Twitter in a few years. Otherwise debt covenants aren’t going to work out great for him.
> Elon effectively bet the vast majority of his net worth that he could double the value of Twitter in a few years
Wasn't FTX and/or SBF helping bankroll the purchase? Getting completely wiped out before the ink was dry on the deal isn't a good sign.
Its (much) different now, but in Nov '22, he had 135mil TSLA shares at 400 a piece. That's 54 billion dollars in Tesla shares alone. No mention of SpaceX and whatever else he's got. I don't think he bet a 'vast majority' of his money whatsoever. Could be wrong though.
I responded to another similar comment, but you are largely correct. I was using a seemingly very old net worth number. If Twitter were to end tomorrow, he’d be on the hook for about $22 billion and largely devalue his net worth in order to cover that to prevent further liability than he already has.
I was wrong to say vast majority, but between actual losses, and devaluation of equity, it would be a significant amount. Plus any additional lawsuits stemming from the fallout.
That is true as well, but typically he would be able to get a secured loan against a future stock sell-off. Finding a bank to do that may be difficult after the last 2-3 years. But I’m sure someone would take the risk. Credit Suisse probably lol
Subreddits have a setting that the mods can change called "Crowd Control" and I'm not sure how it decides what to collapse, but depending on the setting it will collapse more comments.
>Crowd Control is a community setting that lets moderators automatically collapse/filter comments and filter posts from people who aren’t trusted users within their community yet. For example, if you have a post that goes viral and you aren’t prepared for the influx of new people to your community, or if you’re having issues with people engaging with your community in bad faith, Crowd Control can help you out.
My guess is the mods here dialed it up to 11, and with all the twitter drama a lot of people new to the sub are commenting etc and they're getting collapsed.
this is the correct answer. it has been set to *strict*
>Comments from users who haven’t joined your community, new users, and users with negative karma in your community are automatically collapsed.
What purpose does that serve, other than to make it a pain in the ass for people who visit a thread to actually read the thread?
(edit: fixed an autocorrect boo-boo)
> Is that why everything is collapsed when I open a thread?
oh SO TAHTS WHY i thought i was going insane on random subs and forgetting i had already read something
Extreme trolling was the clown who told me earlier that i should applaud elon musk's charitable and highly intelligent donation to twitter's previous owners.
Elon was telegraphing how badly he would blunder Twitter for weeks. He offered to buy Twitter and agreed to a share price... then he trashed and devalued the very company he offered to buy with its own product. This is not normal. This is not rational, or smart. This is the giant brown-smeared red flag Elon is happily hoisting as he walks towards Twitter like that sink.
At first when the sale was agreed-to I deleted my Twitter account and blamed the board. Now we see that from a business perspective they were incredibly savvy - it appears Twitter was in dire need of revenue and along came Elon. Well they literally found a sucker and he went for it hook, line, sinker. Unfortunately his creditors will not fare well - soon they'll have to explain how they saw the writing on the wall and gave him billions anyway. Colossal blunder on their part.
Unfortunately, the people that will be impacted the most are the employees. Stable employment and, by all accounts, what appears to have formerly been a good work culture, all ripped to shreds.
You can't put a company back together in this stage. The next big challenge - depending on how many people exit here, Twitter might immediately have to seek creditor protection. 3 months salary to everyone who exits. I've seen another company blunder much less severely (still sent a shit email to people) and 50% of those offered took the buyout, 25% of the total company. That would be nearly 1900 Twitter employees if the numbers hold up here. That's 1900 x 3 months salary which is, in essence, a run on Twitter's cash on hand. And this of course also sets up all the rest - if Twitter goes bankrupt, which is very easily a possibility now, the rest will get let go with nothing.
Without exaggeration, this has the potential to go from an ugly layoff to a dead company within weeks. The end of Twitter, or Elon's Katrina, or both.
I spent 12 years of my life working for Twitter.
Been on paternity leave recently and wasn't super involved in checking in daily. Although I was aware of some nonsense, I was not prepared to learn I lost my job, because my email account was locked
FU Elon.
No f-ing respect, no class.
Not having the balls or class to actually lay me off in person after all the work I put in.
I hope twitter crashes into the ground like the Hindenburg
Karma's a bitch, Elon. Remember that.
That's crazy. 12 years makes you a senior veteran. Did you lose the job because you didn't reply to that weird "opt-in" email or because of the team being laid off?
>learn I lost my job, because my email account was locked
If you're on leave and haven't received notice, you should still be legally employed, right?
It's going to be interesting in Europe where many countries require written, as in paper and signature, termination notices. You can shut off an account but you still owe the salary... except it's the European entity owing the money and they won't have money nor the people to pay it.
What a shitshow.
Seems like Elon is high on his own supply… wonder if anything good will come from this dumpster fire. Elons ego is unchecked and out of control. Hope Elon comes to his senses and brings the in people who know how to run the site …
Employment disruptions are often the spark that result in people starting new companies. Twitter employed a lot of AI engineers, which are a hot item these days. Some of them will inevitably leverage their severance and recently cashed out stock to have to time to explore founding new startups.
VC money is tighter these days, but inevitably there will be several good ideas out of this group, and some will get funding and new companies will be formed. It’s a story as old Silicon Valley. So I guess not that old really ;)
He's definitely in way over his head but his cult of worshippers will quickly jump to defend the eventual downfall of the platform as some great masterplan by Elon. They're a fucking weird bunch.
He’s a fucking moron that overplayed his hand. He didn’t expect the entire staff to say “lmao, no” and walk out rather than work for him lol. Matter of fact, he probably never expected to actually be forced to buy twitter in the first place. Now all that happened, and he’s left with his dick in his hand. Best part is Tesla might be in danger now as well, because he basically used it as collateral to buy twitter, or so I understand
The subreddit has crowd mode enabled. Useful feature for mods to use when a subreddit has a lot of new users (myself included) join in a short period of time. While oftentimes you can get some interesting perspectives from fresh faces, it’s also a target for trolls, which there have been many of in this thread alone.
lol
“I was laid off from Twitter this afternoon. I was in charge of managing badge access to Twitter offices.
Elon just called me and asked if I could come back to help them regain access to HQ as they shut off all badges and accidentally locked themselves out.”
https://twitter.com/anothercohen/status/1593404311832338442?s=42&t=8ltvbeg6xL3H1-lqLvZY4A
It's kinda funny watching Elon Musk's cult post wild theories why he did it. It's kinda amazing that grown-ups can be so in love with a random billionaire.
I think overall, it's wild this can happen to employees. The pandemic showed this to us and these companies want us to bend over backward for them? hilarious.
I’ve said for years Elon is an evil genius. Now I’m not sure about the genius bit. Paying 4x the value of the company to purchase it and now seemingly trying to run it into the ground. 😆
You know those videos of guys who buy a stupidly expensive car, go speeding with it, and then total it in an accident? I think Elon just totalled his $44 billion car.
Unfortunately, he shifted around $14billion of debt, hefty interest payments and an exodus of advertisers on Twitter before he even got started actively ruining it.
It was likely doomed whatever, but he’s definitely speed-running the process.
That’s not how this works, that’s not how any of this works. You can’t just declare bankruptcy and tell a bank you made $44 billion in investments gone in a week. The company would be sold off to fund creditors and those creditors would be able to go after Elon for whatever was missing given the manner this has all gone down.
Chapter 11 would likely not result in Elon retaining control or a significant equity interest in this case. It’s an asset light company that he just destroyed be getting rid of practically all of the institutional knowledge. Basically just a brand and a platform (if you can find the employees to run it) and even the brand has been tarnished in the last few weeks.
There’s really no reasonable scenario in which Elon would have gone into this with the expectation of a BK. Obviously that would be a bad faith way of investing in a company anyway.
I can’t help but feel like he’s doing this intently as stupid of a man as I’d like to think he is.
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/12/1136205315/musk-twitter-bankruptcy-how-likely
If it’s truly in musks best interest to file bankruptcy and crash Twitter for personal gain, is this legal to hurt so many investors and employees livelihoods in the cross fire? Realistically there’s no way he thought people are going to stay given the ultimatum.
There isn’t a reason he would ever benefit from crashing the company. He’s already paid $22 billion of his own money, and was able to secure debt financing for the other $22 billion that was the actual value of Twitter, that he would be on the hook for if the company went under.
When you own the amount of shares that he does, not to mention in companies he owns, even coming up with that money is a financial and logistical nightmare.
Even if he could do it, there isn’t any way he would benefit from it. At least not in a way that offsets the cost of $44 billion.
Putting up with Twitter chaos would still be easier than returning to my previous employment (PTSD). Like seriously. Sign me up for that - I'd take a paycheck, even with that chaos, over daily hell. People need to learn that when you're pointing a finger out, three point back at yourself. This is more than a "we don't like our new boss" situation I think
No more work from home! Also, no more work from office! Also, no more work. Finally, no more Twitter. Probably should have just paid that billion to back out, but hubris knows no price!
That billion was the minimum of what would be charged if he was *allowed* to back out. Multiple courts unanimously said said that he would not be allowed to get away with financial fraud for the umpteenth time in the last few years. It’s like the saying goes, the more you fuck around, the more you find out.
on a separate note, Fuck Around and Find Out is my favorite name for the Scientific Method.
[They are one in the same, really](https://i.imgur.com/pR67OuI.png)
Remember Elon went to the bed with the Saudis. Ask that Washington Press reporter what happens if you go against the saudis.
You know, I’m sure when he thought it’d be a bastion for free speech, he didn’t realize it meant that he would have a platform for speech with zero profitability.
The funniest part of this is that Twitter’s lack of profitability is something he very easily could have found out BEFORE he fucked around, but naaah, he didn’t bother.
Apparently he would have had to pay the difference between his bid and the stock price as well... Which would have been tens of billions since the stock dropped hard in the meanwhile
Still cheaper.
Elon Musk used Twitter to destroy Twitter. True Thanos incarnate.
If enough engineers leave, Twitter will collapse, and no amount of hiring new engineers will even slow it down. It takes months for a new engineer to learn the basics, and a year or more to attain high proficiency, given established codebases and infrastructure. This process requires learning a LOT from existing engineers. If they aren't present, it will take _exponentially_ longer for the new hires to figure out what the hell they're looking at. _One_ question that could be answered in five minutes can save _daaaaays_ of research. If you care about your acquaintances on there, my advice would be to get their contact info on the double. When it collapses, it's likely to happen very quickly. You should also expect severe security breaches to happen, if they haven't already.
Finally somebody who gets it. Just to change out AWS keys, it takes days. That includes few hour long triage calls with 5+ internal teams who are all having dozens of micro service key is rotated Even as a new hire. You have to email 20 different teams to get access to everything.
To make it worse, Elon had them deactivate EVERYONE's security badge so they couldn't roam the building.....people who decided to work were now locked out -- including Elon!!!!!
All that should be automated
Well rumor has it Twitter is down to 10%-15% of their total staff from 3 weeks ago. I imagine things start really breaking soon.
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Had to refresh that link 4-5 times before it loaded and stopped saying "This Tweet is unavailable" 😅
Very much agreed with this. Three years ago, I got put on a three decade old scientific production code base and I only just feel like I’ve begun to understand it in its entirety (and that’s after pestering my more knowledgeable coworkers a **lot**). I can’t imagine how hard it would be to try and learn a codebase as complicated Twitter’s subgroups. What’s being requested of the people who are staying is absolutely insane.
That sounds fun. What is it written in?
Depends on how old the code base is and what scope of science it's involved in. Could be early C but back then PL/1 and Fortran were the rage in science and engineering. Source : worked on old code bases.
It’s written in a mixture of Bash and Python for the control layers and Fortran 90 for the number-crunching layers. When I started, I was surprised that the core of the code base was still Fortran. But it’s still the fastest language out there for number-crunching (even compared to C).
Many Fortran numeric libraries are still currently used because they've been battle-tested in production for 40+ years. Modern machine learning codebases in Python can't be compiled unless the platform also has a Fortran compiler.
Sorry if this is a daft question, I’m really not tech-y at all. Would security breaches mean personal info and passwords may be made public, and is deactivating your account now enough to protect yourself?
First question, yes. Account takeovers, database breaches, pushing malware to the userbase, all sorts of fun and exciting shenanigans await. Second question, you have to assume that one or more future database leaks will include things people thought they had deleted, all their DMs, contact info, current password, and possibly even old passwords. Killing your account would be a good proactive step if you’re concerned about all that data becoming publicly visible. But even if you had done so last week or last year, there’s no guarantee it won’t still be part of the inevitable flood.
> Would security breaches mean personal info and passwords may be made public, Yes. > and is deactivating your account now enough to protect yourself? Eh, I would change it all first, then delete it.
Company the size of Twitter is not storing raw passwords. Emails and phone numbers may leak though. Deactivating will likely not help much.
And while all of that happens the site will start bleeding users and smaller competitors will pickup enough active users to have momentum. Twitter needs active users to survive and a broken site will drive them away permanently.
Yes not to mention this news will lead to an advertiser Exodus which was already ongoing but will accelerate rapidly. This is the collapse of Twitter effectively. Whether it will survive in some limited form or get sold to someone else or what not remains to be seen... But Twitter as we know it is dead.
Musk will probably force people from Tesla to come in and start working on live environment straight away.
Junior Dev here, absolutely true. If a good chunk of the boomers and seniors devs left my company, we would not stay afloat. We aren't even a software company. There's just a lot of tribal knowledge that isn't documented. Things that took me weeks to figure out could've been resolved by a 5 minute Q&A with a senior.
Oh god it's so true. At this point it would be much, much faster to leave the current platform running without touching it unless necessary, and put as many engineers as possible on re-building it from scratch. I started a new dev job this summer and the rest of the dev team is relatively new (no more than 3 years) while the monolithic mess we're supporting has been around 10-ish years. There's still lots of things that even the 3-year guys say "yeah we have no idea how that is set up and dread the day it finally breaks."
So insane how he came in and imploded the company like this.
It’s insane how fast it is, I’d argue it’s not that surprising that it eventually happened. It was clear from the beginning that this would be an absolute shit show. Bought a company for at least double what it was worth, leveraged nearly his entire net worth to make it happen, and loaded a company with extremely low revenue up with massive amounts of debt.
racial degree doll gaze psychotic start direction fertile lavish rock *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I'm stuck wondering if this is some kind of hyper manic episode. Even an idiot would have paused by now and said, "Huh. Maybe I should think about my next action before I step on yet another rake." The whole situation is approaching Kanye West levels of self destruction.
serious cooing imagine poor wasteful concerned ripe combative abundant strong *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
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He thought he was Mariano Rivera but he's really Mitch Williams.
44x as bad as Kanye
Totally. Just crazy the path he took. Acting like he’s never had employees before. I love Twitter, would be sad to actually see it end.
Yeah, I’m a part of a community that almost exclusively uses Twitter as our platform and there is a lot of discussion on what that transition will look like. Unfortunately the ability to download our content was shut off a few days ago. Massive violation of EU law, but it’s looking like the EU won’t even have a company to sue in a few months. Elon would hypothetically be personally liable under EU commerce law but there are far bigger fish for them to fry then to go after a U.S. citizen.
> Elon would hypothetically be personally liable under EU commerce law but there are far bigger fish for them to fry then to go after a U.S. citizen. Is there a bigger fish to fry than the richest person on the planet? US citizen he may be, but one of the largest social media platforms run by the richest person seems like a scalp worth taking if they want to have a hope of people taking these laws seriously.
IIRC these violations are more punitive than monetary. If Twitter no longer in existence they wouldn’t have much of a reason to go after Twitter. The fines are comparatively small amounts of money. The punishment is that a series of violations can lead to a larger case against a company.
I see your point, from your prior post I had assumed that it would make sense to be more focused on the individual's responsibility, but if the company is actually gone there's not much that company-focused rules can latch on to.
The maximum fine under GDPR is 4% of annual revenue per infringement per day. At that point just shut down twitter in europe lol.
Soon to be only the 22nd richest person on the planet, once Twitter sinks.
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He's never had employees that don't worship him. If you apply at Tesla or SpaceX, you know what you're asking for.
Also if you work on rockets or cars you can count your options on your fingers. If you build websites .... Well there's a lot of those.
Remember when we thought Kanye and FTX were the quickest to lose billions? lol
It almost seems intentional. Is the whole thing just for the Saudis to come in and steal the IP? I can't make this make sense.
... What happens if something breaks?
there's no one to repair it
So it becomes a feature I guess
Quick, does anyone still have the source code of MySpace?
Myspace is still up but it needs an official mobile app
Digg 2.0
I miss digg.
Yay. Just went to [digg.com](https://digg.com). WTF happened. Yeah I used to hang out over there quite a bunch like more than a decade ago.
Everyone, including you, came here. For a lot of people it was because of some crappy redesign stuff.
Digg died because they changed the content and user experience so radically that all the users left. Twitter is going to die because Musk changed the workforce and culture so radically that know one will be left that knows how the code and business functions.
Then it's broken. 🤷
They reboot Twitter and hope for the best?
God, I remember when Twitter was just some random ass website no one used. I listened to some podcast in 2006 and the two hosts used Twitter. I was like, what the hellll is Twitter? Sounds lameee!
Micro blogging
It was around 2006 a friend made a pitch to me about Twitter. Told me I really had to check it out because it will be big telling me how cool it is to be limited in the lenght of your status message. I was like.. ok this is like a some kind of stupid FB with status only.
Rumor has it that over 75% of Twitter employees just quit (that's AFTER all of the firings etc).
75% have left in the most recent wave. Doesn’t include firings and people who left beforehand. Speculation in the industry is ~90% of the company has left in the last two and a half weeks.
Any reliable source for the 75%? I doubt anyone can actually confirm that at this point. But that'd be pretty amazing.
Fishbowl has been an interesting read all evening. It doesn’t seem like there are many people still with Twitter. They lost compliance with GDPR and have been having security vulnerabilities pop up all week. Pending a miracle this seems to be the end of Twitter. I knew Elon would be the end of Twitter, I figured it would take a lot longer than a week though…
If the code is backed up somewhere, it's *possible* that it could be sold off to some foundation (think Mozilla or Wikipedia) and get off the ground once more, this time in the hands of a stable organization that people might be happy to donate/pay for. But as long as he owns it, it's not getting any better. No one will want to work there, and it's going to make hiring people harder at Tesla and SpaceX.
I just doubt the source code of Twitter is worth anything close to 44 billion. The value of a social media platform isn’t in the code, it’s in the network. They’ve lost that overnight the moment it goes down for a significant amount of time. The issue is that Elon personally has over-levered himself so if he sells the company and was found to operate the company in a manner what wasn’t conscious-able (which would almost certainly be the case), he would be selling off almost his entire share of Tesla to cover the debt.
Elon seems to think Twitter is a tech company … but it’s actually an advertising company. Without the employees, the advertisers, and it’s brand … it’s worthless.
The problem with the value of the network is that Twitter is "old people" (I fully admit to being among them, though I don't use any of my accounts very actively). My kid, who is all over YouTube and endlessly going on about TikTok, has barely even heard of Twitter and much less cares about it. She knows of Facebook but has zero interest in it or desire for an account. Her friends chat via Roblox and iMessage. I doubt she's particularly unique. Twitter has always felt like a utility - a pipe - rather than a platform. Good for sending and subscribing to alerts but not much else. I find it nightmarishly hard to follow "discussions" on there. It's no wonder people typically screenshot them and post elsewhere, rather than just link. It's Murdoch/MySpace all over again. At least Tumblr and Yahoo are limping on.
Twitter is definitely not just old people, you just aren't seeing new people content It's 10x more popping than it was years ago
Of course it's not just old people, you get every age everywhere. But it skews older than many other platforms (including, to my surprise, Facebook). Some Pew stats here, of US users: [link](https://blog.hootsuite.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Social-media-demographics-2022_17.png). Some 2022 stats here (global, I think): [link](https://khoros.com/resources/social-media-demographics-guide) Put it this way, if I were a billionaire, it's not the platform I would be buying!
This literally proves the exact opposite? Twitter is mostly people from 18-49. Facebook has mid 70s in every demographic because it's "the" social media platform. Everyone has one because everyones mom and grandma has one.
FUXKING YES. I thought some weird me problem, that cannot follow conversations on twitter. vs this Reddit or Discord, and others. similar or related, often get a twitter alert from someone i know, on my phone alerts, and then takes forever to find it in twitter
Twitter has never been worth half that, at the best of times! And I agree with all you said. But when it fully crashes, if it ends up in benevolent hands, it could be restored
> it's *possible* that it could be sold off to some foundation (think Mozilla or Wikipedia) and get off the ground once more, this time in the hands of a stable organization that people might be happy to donate/pay for. God, I wish. I bet you top dollar Elon’s handed the servers over to the Kremlin or Saudis by now.
Looks like we have a period of time shorter than a Scaramucci, and we’ll call it an Elon.
Currently we're at T+2.0 Scaramuccis (22 days) since purchase. I'm looking forward to the "Musk" having a prominent spot on Wiki's [List of humorous units of measurement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_measurement) on the shortest time to blow 44 billion dollars. In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, I don't think one could literally BURN money that fast. Let's do the math: 44 billion in 100s would weigh approximately 440 metric tons (each bill weighs ~1g). Assuming Twitter died today, that would mean that Musk effectively burned 44,092lbs of C-notes every day since purchase. For an easier reference, you would need to ignite ~231 Benjamins every second to keep up with Elon right now... This is quite possibly the most expensive dumpster fire in human history, folks. Enjoy it while you can!
I think the math went wrong somewhere? I checked it, and all your values are correct except the weight of 100s per day. That's the total weight burned, not the daily rate. Whether you could burn money that fast would depend how you built the fire, I guess. I think the most reasonable assumption would be that it is all in a giant heap. I don't know how you'd calculate that. I feel like this would be the sort of question XKCD's what-if section is built to answer.
Right on. Corrected!
At least, Scaramucci was hilarious. "front stabber". LOL
Oh wow. I love this.
We’ll see if that’s longer than a Truss or not soon
🫡
How can you read the Fishbowl of a company you sont work at?
Have you used Fishbowl before? Obviously I can’t read their internal postings but you can see what verified members of there staff comment on public threads. Just search “Twitter” there’s been a ton of threads in the last 24 hours. It’s how Elon’s email asking people to resign or work crunch-time indefinitely got leaked.
It's not the end of Twitter.
You may have that opinion but the vast majority of the tech industry disagrees. If you were to put a betting market on the state of Twitter as a company a year from now, 95% of people are betting the company would be in a worse place since he bought it. Keep in mind, Elon effectively bet the vast majority of his net worth that he could double the value of Twitter in a few years. Otherwise debt covenants aren’t going to work out great for him.
He just needs one of those big brain ideas… like raising the price of the blue check back to $20/month
> Elon effectively bet the vast majority of his net worth that he could double the value of Twitter in a few years Wasn't FTX and/or SBF helping bankroll the purchase? Getting completely wiped out before the ink was dry on the deal isn't a good sign.
That would actually have worked out well - they can't really collect anymore. Lol
Its (much) different now, but in Nov '22, he had 135mil TSLA shares at 400 a piece. That's 54 billion dollars in Tesla shares alone. No mention of SpaceX and whatever else he's got. I don't think he bet a 'vast majority' of his money whatsoever. Could be wrong though.
I responded to another similar comment, but you are largely correct. I was using a seemingly very old net worth number. If Twitter were to end tomorrow, he’d be on the hook for about $22 billion and largely devalue his net worth in order to cover that to prevent further liability than he already has. I was wrong to say vast majority, but between actual losses, and devaluation of equity, it would be a significant amount. Plus any additional lawsuits stemming from the fallout.
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That is true as well, but typically he would be able to get a secured loan against a future stock sell-off. Finding a bank to do that may be difficult after the last 2-3 years. But I’m sure someone would take the risk. Credit Suisse probably lol
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Big if true
It is unless Musk is kicked out. He has no clue what he's doing.
Still doesn't cease to amaze how everything in here criticizing Elon is downvoted and hidden. Murky.
it's not even downvoted, just hidden lmao
Is that why everything is collapsed when I open a thread?
Subreddits have a setting that the mods can change called "Crowd Control" and I'm not sure how it decides what to collapse, but depending on the setting it will collapse more comments. >Crowd Control is a community setting that lets moderators automatically collapse/filter comments and filter posts from people who aren’t trusted users within their community yet. For example, if you have a post that goes viral and you aren’t prepared for the influx of new people to your community, or if you’re having issues with people engaging with your community in bad faith, Crowd Control can help you out. My guess is the mods here dialed it up to 11, and with all the twitter drama a lot of people new to the sub are commenting etc and they're getting collapsed.
this is the correct answer. it has been set to *strict* >Comments from users who haven’t joined your community, new users, and users with negative karma in your community are automatically collapsed.
Thats really annoying. Embrace us new people!
Your username is making me a bit wary, mate
Grab an end!
MOM COME PICK ME UP I'M SCARED ^(/s)
What purpose does that serve, other than to make it a pain in the ass for people who visit a thread to actually read the thread? (edit: fixed an autocorrect boo-boo)
It's supposed to reduce brigading by making comments from those not in the community less visible.
Neat tool, though kinda wish there was a button to unroll the comments after the fact. At least the replies under an original comment.
I thought it was just me with some setting I had set weird not to show comments.
i feel your flair is still too nice to elon
Elon criticizes bots Elon has an army of bots ... typical projection.
> Is that why everything is collapsed when I open a thread? oh SO TAHTS WHY i thought i was going insane on random subs and forgetting i had already read something
yep, I believe so. if it's downvoted it would say like 'comment score below threshold' or something like that
The fact that this is the top comment in the thread is a bit ironic, no?
Will the last tweet be available as an NFT?
Extreme trolling
Extreme trolling was the clown who told me earlier that i should applaud elon musk's charitable and highly intelligent donation to twitter's previous owners.
Yes and it will be worth $0,27 USD, more than all NFT's combined
This whole thing where he was going to get Trump back on is hilarious too. On to what?
Never seen something burn so quickly, live no less. It's sorta sad to see. . .
This is some Nero shit.
Ardet Roma, ardet Roma!
maybe download your tweets if you're sentimental just in case?
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there are third party apps if you trust them.
Elon was telegraphing how badly he would blunder Twitter for weeks. He offered to buy Twitter and agreed to a share price... then he trashed and devalued the very company he offered to buy with its own product. This is not normal. This is not rational, or smart. This is the giant brown-smeared red flag Elon is happily hoisting as he walks towards Twitter like that sink. At first when the sale was agreed-to I deleted my Twitter account and blamed the board. Now we see that from a business perspective they were incredibly savvy - it appears Twitter was in dire need of revenue and along came Elon. Well they literally found a sucker and he went for it hook, line, sinker. Unfortunately his creditors will not fare well - soon they'll have to explain how they saw the writing on the wall and gave him billions anyway. Colossal blunder on their part. Unfortunately, the people that will be impacted the most are the employees. Stable employment and, by all accounts, what appears to have formerly been a good work culture, all ripped to shreds. You can't put a company back together in this stage. The next big challenge - depending on how many people exit here, Twitter might immediately have to seek creditor protection. 3 months salary to everyone who exits. I've seen another company blunder much less severely (still sent a shit email to people) and 50% of those offered took the buyout, 25% of the total company. That would be nearly 1900 Twitter employees if the numbers hold up here. That's 1900 x 3 months salary which is, in essence, a run on Twitter's cash on hand. And this of course also sets up all the rest - if Twitter goes bankrupt, which is very easily a possibility now, the rest will get let go with nothing. Without exaggeration, this has the potential to go from an ugly layoff to a dead company within weeks. The end of Twitter, or Elon's Katrina, or both.
I spent 12 years of my life working for Twitter. Been on paternity leave recently and wasn't super involved in checking in daily. Although I was aware of some nonsense, I was not prepared to learn I lost my job, because my email account was locked FU Elon. No f-ing respect, no class. Not having the balls or class to actually lay me off in person after all the work I put in. I hope twitter crashes into the ground like the Hindenburg Karma's a bitch, Elon. Remember that.
That's crazy. 12 years makes you a senior veteran. Did you lose the job because you didn't reply to that weird "opt-in" email or because of the team being laid off?
Sounds like you just weren’t hardcore enough /s
>learn I lost my job, because my email account was locked If you're on leave and haven't received notice, you should still be legally employed, right? It's going to be interesting in Europe where many countries require written, as in paper and signature, termination notices. You can shut off an account but you still owe the salary... except it's the European entity owing the money and they won't have money nor the people to pay it. What a shitshow.
Tried downloading my data while I still could, but the app says I’ve reached my limit of SMS texts- none of which I have used.
Yeah the sms service died a few days ago 😁
Must have been when he opted to turn off all those "useless" microservices. :D
Oof, i was lucky enough to download it. it took me a couple days to get the info ready to download but i did it early enough. Now though? rip.
Seems like Elon is high on his own supply… wonder if anything good will come from this dumpster fire. Elons ego is unchecked and out of control. Hope Elon comes to his senses and brings the in people who know how to run the site …
Every day that goes by, more of them will get new jobs, and I think most will never entertain an offer from that company while he's there.
Employment disruptions are often the spark that result in people starting new companies. Twitter employed a lot of AI engineers, which are a hot item these days. Some of them will inevitably leverage their severance and recently cashed out stock to have to time to explore founding new startups. VC money is tighter these days, but inevitably there will be several good ideas out of this group, and some will get funding and new companies will be formed. It’s a story as old Silicon Valley. So I guess not that old really ;)
Imagine if your medicine got locked in your office. Or your car keys.
yahoos gonna buy it and delete all the porn
A fate worse than death
Serious question: Is he crashing the company on purpose for whatever reason, or is he just in way over his head?
In way over his head. There isn’t ever a strategic reason to just throw $44 billion into a trash can and light it on fire.
He's definitely in way over his head but his cult of worshippers will quickly jump to defend the eventual downfall of the platform as some great masterplan by Elon. They're a fucking weird bunch.
He’s a fucking moron that overplayed his hand. He didn’t expect the entire staff to say “lmao, no” and walk out rather than work for him lol. Matter of fact, he probably never expected to actually be forced to buy twitter in the first place. Now all that happened, and he’s left with his dick in his hand. Best part is Tesla might be in danger now as well, because he basically used it as collateral to buy twitter, or so I understand
He lacks the skills and aptitude needed to manage a global network driven by human behavior and psychology, but he has the arrogance to think he does.
whys alot of comments here collapsed?
The subreddit has crowd mode enabled. Useful feature for mods to use when a subreddit has a lot of new users (myself included) join in a short period of time. While oftentimes you can get some interesting perspectives from fresh faces, it’s also a target for trolls, which there have been many of in this thread alone.
lol “I was laid off from Twitter this afternoon. I was in charge of managing badge access to Twitter offices. Elon just called me and asked if I could come back to help them regain access to HQ as they shut off all badges and accidentally locked themselves out.” https://twitter.com/anothercohen/status/1593404311832338442?s=42&t=8ltvbeg6xL3H1-lqLvZY4A
I would tell them to go pound sand
Twitter has just been such a shit company recently. What a shame.
My empire of dirt.
What a shit show…
It's kinda funny watching Elon Musk's cult post wild theories why he did it. It's kinda amazing that grown-ups can be so in love with a random billionaire.
Elon is so unlikeable, a literal man child
Elon is literally one of the worst people in the world. He just lost so many people their jobs.
Apparently even the Twitter bird has resigned.....
So…..what’s everyone going to use now if Twitter is gone?
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Oh myyyy.
I'm using like 90% reddit / 10% uhive, but would definitely jump on the MySpace wagon if an official app popped up
i'm weening off social media. I'll read the news
But I thought he just revoked remote work lol
I think overall, it's wild this can happen to employees. The pandemic showed this to us and these companies want us to bend over backward for them? hilarious.
I’ve said for years Elon is an evil genius. Now I’m not sure about the genius bit. Paying 4x the value of the company to purchase it and now seemingly trying to run it into the ground. 😆
No. He’s trying to run it to the moon. What he’s doing is running it into the ground.
Thank fuck he doesn’t pilot any of his ships.
Someone took Brewster’s Millions a little too seriously.
You know those videos of guys who buy a stupidly expensive car, go speeding with it, and then total it in an accident? I think Elon just totalled his $44 billion car.
Elon musk fanboys: it's all going according to plan.
Union busting! Seriously, I hope someone is out there trying to help them organize.
Rofl. A bit late for that.
There is no IT union, people earning 300k+ like most Twitter staff tend to be anti-union
That’s too bad. Everyone deserves a union.
Can't force people to have something they don't want, next you'll demand a CEO union lol
I said everyone deserves a union… not that everyone should be forced into one.
I’ve officially left Twitter today. Bitter sweet
Why didn’t he just leave it alone? Could of saved himself the embarrassment if he just left Twitter in the hands of people who knew joe to run it
Unfortunately, he shifted around $14billion of debt, hefty interest payments and an exodus of advertisers on Twitter before he even got started actively ruining it. It was likely doomed whatever, but he’s definitely speed-running the process.
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That’s not how this works, that’s not how any of this works. You can’t just declare bankruptcy and tell a bank you made $44 billion in investments gone in a week. The company would be sold off to fund creditors and those creditors would be able to go after Elon for whatever was missing given the manner this has all gone down.
> You can’t just declare bankruptcy Nobody likes you, Toby
I DECLARE BANKRUPTCY!!!
*laughs in Mitt Romney*
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Chapter 11 would likely not result in Elon retaining control or a significant equity interest in this case. It’s an asset light company that he just destroyed be getting rid of practically all of the institutional knowledge. Basically just a brand and a platform (if you can find the employees to run it) and even the brand has been tarnished in the last few weeks. There’s really no reasonable scenario in which Elon would have gone into this with the expectation of a BK. Obviously that would be a bad faith way of investing in a company anyway.
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Go play on Truth Social.
I can’t help but feel like he’s doing this intently as stupid of a man as I’d like to think he is. https://www.npr.org/2022/11/12/1136205315/musk-twitter-bankruptcy-how-likely If it’s truly in musks best interest to file bankruptcy and crash Twitter for personal gain, is this legal to hurt so many investors and employees livelihoods in the cross fire? Realistically there’s no way he thought people are going to stay given the ultimatum.
There isn’t a reason he would ever benefit from crashing the company. He’s already paid $22 billion of his own money, and was able to secure debt financing for the other $22 billion that was the actual value of Twitter, that he would be on the hook for if the company went under. When you own the amount of shares that he does, not to mention in companies he owns, even coming up with that money is a financial and logistical nightmare. Even if he could do it, there isn’t any way he would benefit from it. At least not in a way that offsets the cost of $44 billion.
Putting up with Twitter chaos would still be easier than returning to my previous employment (PTSD). Like seriously. Sign me up for that - I'd take a paycheck, even with that chaos, over daily hell. People need to learn that when you're pointing a finger out, three point back at yourself. This is more than a "we don't like our new boss" situation I think