What the author is describing isn't even an email caste. It's a phony email caste. There was and still is in many places a genuine email caste of product managers, account managers, customer service directors, and so-on, that, for all of their meetings and draining of engineering hours, managed to add some value to the company.
Based on this Reuters article[0], it was more around $5.3B, but they were only losing 200M/yr.
> It's not clear how much of the $5.29 billion debt Twitter had before the acquisition was refinanced or remained with the company. It's also not clear how much of the $2.7 billion in cash that Twitter held as of the end of June it got to keep once it went private.
OP is making a point that Twitter is now saddled with ~13 billion in debt, with 1.2B in interest payments now required over the next 12 months[0].
> Musk and his co-investors collectively cut a check for more than $30 billion of their own money for the Twitter deal. That money would be at risk if Twitter required a debt restructuring down the line.
"Once he got access to the company’s finances, the Tesla boss realized it was losing millions of dollars every day, and that many of its employees weren’t doing much work at all."
Once he took possession of the company, he had to demonstrate that it was somebody else's fault that the finances make no sense.
Yeah he obviously knew all this by the time he took over it was why he was trying to get out of the stupid deal he'd done without full due diligence - and besides that - 3/4 of the $4M a day Twitter is losing is the $1B a year interest from Musk's bad deal
and besides that - 3/4 of the $4M a day Twitter is losing is the $1B a year interest from Musk's bad deal
To be honest, that's what seems so disingenuous about this article. Why, on Earth, would you fail to mention the fact that the boss is, for the most part, trying to fix losses that he, himself, incurred?
The debt from the acquisition has made that situation much worse, however, not better. It's like he bought a car with a flat tire and promptly drove nails into the other three.
[EDIT] Better version: it's like he bought a car with a flat tire and financed the purchase by selling the other three tires.
First of all Twitter is SF based, and is NOT a Silicon Valley company. It's frustrating how many people get this wrong, and most of the times when it suites a particular narrative.
Secondly: Not to say that Twitter, or other tech firms, don't have a bunch of people who are not very productive/contributing - but is this a problem unique to tech companies and not every other company that grows beyond a point?
Are pharma companies, car manufacturers, utilities, CPG, etc etc all running a perfectly well oiled machinery. Or, is it just that the people who have been on the outside looking in with jealousy suddenly get to vent their rage during times of such correction since it gets them eyeballs.
That's a common misapprehension among people that don't live there.
For anyone in the Bay Area, Silicon Valley is some ways south of San Francisco.
That said, a lot of startups are in SF, because Silicon Valley is too expensive (though SF itself is catching up because of the second dot com boom/bubble), so it's not surprising that outsiders lump the two of them together as a hub of Bay Area tech activity (which they are.. but they're just two distinct geographical areas).
IDK about elsewhere but East of the Rockies, at least, yes, they're basically used interchangeably in many contexts and nobody cares that a "Silicon Valley" story may in fact be about a company based a few miles from actual Silicon Valley. Sorta like how nobody outside New York cares about the distinction between the boroughs except maybe Manhattan, so including or excluding that information, versus just calling it all "New York", makes no difference to them (/us). In fact I bet a lot of folks think "Manhattan" and "New York (City)" are perfect synonyms, and really, it doesn't much matter that they do.
> I mean you can die on that hill, but I'd hazard a guess that nearly everyone considers SF a part of Silicon Valley
Well, unless you're from the SF Bay Area (or just Bay Area). SF is a city. SF Bay Area (or just Bay Area) is a broad region. Silicon Valley is San Jose, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Redwood City, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Cupertino.
The oil states have a huge problem with this - an oversupply of educated but useless people. The government ends up as the employer of last resort. Egypt used to guarantee a Government job to anyone who completed college. Then the oil ran out. There's been much unrest ever since.
In the US, only about half of college graduates have jobs that require a college education.
Craigslist has about 50 employees. If you really had to, you could probably run Twitter with a very small staff, and the computing outsourced to AWS.
> If you really had to, you could probably run Twitter with a very small staff, and the computing outsourced to AWS.
Why didn't they though? Why did they become a monster that, as we are seeing right now, can survive easily with about half of its employees gone in a heartbeat?
The answer is because promotions depend on growing your org. This is extremely common in big tech and known as empire building. You’d be hard pressed to find a company where this isn’t the case.
Investment, too. Investors want to see activity, and you're better off showing useless activity than none.
Plus, you don't grow to a tech behemoth (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, et c.) by running smart & lean. You might get bought by them that way (cf. WhatsApp, and maybe even Minecraft) but you don't become one of them. So if leadership/investors thought Twitter had a shot at joining the big-boy club, maybe that's why.
> This is extremely common in big tech and known as empire building.
Great companies focus on business performance not headcount. I'm more impressed with leaders that generate more positive metrics per dollar. Sometimes it takes headcount, but most of the time, a really great exec can make more revenue/growth/market share happen with the same or less headcount.
When I wanted to leave Saudi Arabia and bring my dog I had brought there, it took about 15 signatures from Arabs in various offices around the ministry of agriculture. Everyone wants to be not management but upper management.
Lord what a fawning article. They laid off plenty of engineers, including folks that apparently were necessary. I'm sure they laid off some folks who were doing very little work, but seems pretty clear they also laid off plenty of contributors. Seems like the author started from two perspectives - Elon Musk is a genius and anyone who isn't an engineer doesn't add value to tech companies and just went from there. Neither point is supported.
This is a terrible article. The author contributes nothing to the discussion other than to fawn over Musk and attack straw men through pseudo-intellectual prose. It also appears to have factual information wrong. The article is not worth being on HN if this is the discourse it provides.
At least the author managed to grind a bunch of political axes like equity, diversity, inclusion, ESG, climate-change(!), perceived censorship, and so on. Checked all the usual culture-war checkboxes.
Not overtly but they do seem to be a fan. They literally described his actions on Twitter as "pok[ing] the first hole in the digital Berlin Wall erected over the past half decade." Which makes it sound like he's made momentous steps forward but as far as I'm aware all he's actually done so far is let you pay for check marks and laid a bunch of people off (the latter of which he also tied into 18th century France, aka shortly before the French revolution).
> In many accounts, Musk is engaged in a war against “the cathedral” [...] Musk has now supposedly poked the first hole in the digital Berlin Wall erected over the past half decade.
This is couched in the language of describing reports which are in circulation ("many accounts", "supposedly"), but without endorsing them. Indeed the author is going to present a different view. The next paragraph continues.
> Yet there is another aspect of the Musk takeover that has little to do with free speech or even ideology [...] As a recession looms, Silicon Valley is shedding the non-essential workers it acquired when unlimited venture funding made turning a profit an afterthought. Musk happens to have taken the helm at Twitter just as this reality is asserting itself.
The author downplays the previously presented narratives. Musk's role is minimized and the titular trend (the "Email Caste's Last Stand") is brought to the fore.
> Musk paid $44 billion to acquire Twitter, and all indications are that the platform isn’t worth anything close to that.
This is rather the opposite of a fawning endorsement.
> So he proceeded to do what most executives would do in this situation [...] The abrupt firing of thousands of employees solicited a new wave of outrage from Musk’s haters. But even if you remove him from the equation, Twitter couldn’t have gone much longer without massive layoffs. The same thing is happening across Silicon Valley.
Again the author downplays Musk's agency; his actions are an inevitable result of the current environment.
> Musk is engaged in a war against “the cathedral”—that is, against the dominance of professionals who have sought to make the internet more restrictive
> Musk has now supposedly poked the first hole in the digital Berlin Wall erected over the past half decade.
> the revolt against his leadership is the last stand of a cohort of activist hangers-on
> So he proceeded to do what most executives would do in this situation: He laid off some of his workers.
> solicited a new wave of outrage from Musk’s haters. But even if you remove him from the equation, Twitter couldn’t have gone much longer without massive layoffs.
And this is just the first three paragraphs.
If you read the whole thing and came away with "this is neutral and objective" then I don't know what to say.
Dude. I'm preoccupied with "matters of diversity" because they govern whether I'm in the room, and whether I get paid.
So is every other diverse engineer.
Circumscribing these concerns as somehow fake or inauthentic, just some mandarins and policy wonks, is gutting. But that's just another day in this industry.
Would you want to hire someone that is preoccupied?
pre·oc·cu·pied (prē-ŏk′yə-pīd′)
adj.
1.
a. Absorbed in thought; engrossed.
b. Excessively concerned with something; distracted.
2. Formerly or already occupied.
3. Already used and therefore unavailable for further use.
Yes, I would. A rational agent is going to be preoccupied with survival. I only hire rational people.
Capitalism insists you be preoccupied with yours, as well.
My survival depends in part on diversity & inclusion efforts. As much as they can seem to cut against the grain of output, the industry was Not Okay Without Them.
...and, good lord. Bringing a dictionary definition to an idea-fight.
I was just saying, when you have a business to run, you need to run the business. I'm all for diverse teams. I also get that as one of the minorities life can be hard and I respect that, I'd love to help you get through it. But, if tech problems need solving, and you're not making a profit, do you need engineers that spend most of their time on diversity related matters?
Diversity should be normal, I agree and indeed perhaps some efforts should always be spend on such matters. But when is it enough?
That you've actually articulated the idea that one cannot be concerned with one thing, and spend your time doing another, suggests that you have zero respect for the fortitude and perserverance of your diverse colleagues.
You simply have no idea how strong we've all had to be. In part, because of patronizing attitudes like you've expressed here.
What you did wrong is consistently characterize your intellectual opponents as being dominated by "negative emotions," a thing you are still doing. This is how you lose arguments. This is how you lost this one.
Not talking about the Musk point, i don't like the guys and never liked most cargo-cult in general, be it Jobs, Musk, Gates, but also Linus or even Stallman, so i might have negative priors, i won't judge it on this.
The author take on French revolution is bullshit. And i don't even understand where it came from? I assume a lot here, because i cannot be in the author head.
The author read about Louvois for whatever reason, let's say an army fetish? (i'm projecting maybe). Then he misunderstood the impact of this army size on coordination and cooperation, especially at the time. Read about Autrichian war of succession and the fact that the biggest european army did not handle itself as it should have. Then he extrapolated a lot without reading any academic discussions and made himself an opinion.
I understand, i do that a lot in my HN comments, but if i wrote in a journal, i would be very careful about being correct about historical parallels. To me it's disqualifying the whole article, and this put "compactmag.com" in the "might be untrustworthy" category.
This is a fun polemic to read but rather short on evidence. Personally, I doubt tech companies bloat because of a social-minded desire to give "scions of the professional-managerial class" employment, but for the same reason any company does: managers wanted bigger teams because it enhances their status, and when times are good nobody complains.
I think the author of this piece fundamentally misunderstands what business Twitter is in. It’s not a tech company, it is a publisher. The technology is necessary and profitable only in so far as it enables Twitter to grow a valuable audience. And to be more specific, an audience that is valuable to certain advertisers.
Chris Sacco nailed this in the comments he tweeted recently. There are businesses where engineering can “get it right,” like cars and rockets, but Twitter is not one of those businesses.
It’s not clear to me why cutting back to only engineers would be a good strategy at Twitter. Twitter doesn’t make widgets for people to buy, it makes culture. Rejecting cultural topics in favor of lines of code seems like an internally-driven decision, not one that reflects a deep understanding of the customer.
skilled workers for a proprietary platform should learn that they work against their interests since anything they create is bound to the owner so instead of creating technical value they'll keep reinventing the wheel a company after another with small differences between them since all of those are interested only in trapping users inside their service model. As a result preferred workers are those with less skill who knowing that accept limited compensation and being treated like human-robots;
the lesson users should learn about proprietary platform is that they are at the mercy of the platform so NOTHING done with it should have a value since it might change or vanish overnight.
The juice of this note is simple: IT MUST BE FLOSS, services must be open protocols anyone can implement and keep up not tied to any company or developer in particular. That's is.
Beside that the sole comparison I see with the French Revolution is the fact revolutionaries / innovators in both cases are betrayed by those who led/hire them and in both cases such cohort of people allow betrayers to betray them.
I read through some of this author's other articles, and he has a really inaccurate view of technology workers. We're not VC-backed digital nomads spending our days eating artisanal hot dogs. Most of us are just nine-to-five workers with families and hobbies, and most of use work on relatively boring parts of code that keep the wheels turning. (Only a specialized few get excited about automating mass data migrations. I love it, but it doesn't make for interesting TikToks.)
63 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] thread"Once he got access to the company’s finances, the Tesla boss realized it was losing millions of dollars every day [...]"
He knew it would be losing $millions/day because he forced the situation that created the debt.
I stopped reading at that point, not interested in dissecting how a beat-sweetener slides into obsequious myth building.
No. He knew about the company's finances because that's part of M&A due diligence.
https://morganandwestfield.com/knowledge/due-diligence-check...
Word was prior to the takeover, their debt was on the order of $200M.
> It's not clear how much of the $5.29 billion debt Twitter had before the acquisition was refinanced or remained with the company. It's also not clear how much of the $2.7 billion in cash that Twitter held as of the end of June it got to keep once it went private.
0: https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/twitters-massive-reven...
> Musk and his co-investors collectively cut a check for more than $30 billion of their own money for the Twitter deal. That money would be at risk if Twitter required a debt restructuring down the line.
0: https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/twitters-massive-reven...
Once he took possession of the company, he had to demonstrate that it was somebody else's fault that the finances make no sense.
To be honest, that's what seems so disingenuous about this article. Why, on Earth, would you fail to mention the fact that the boss is, for the most part, trying to fix losses that he, himself, incurred?
[EDIT] Better version: it's like he bought a car with a flat tire and financed the purchase by selling the other three tires.
Secondly: Not to say that Twitter, or other tech firms, don't have a bunch of people who are not very productive/contributing - but is this a problem unique to tech companies and not every other company that grows beyond a point?
Are pharma companies, car manufacturers, utilities, CPG, etc etc all running a perfectly well oiled machinery. Or, is it just that the people who have been on the outside looking in with jealousy suddenly get to vent their rage during times of such correction since it gets them eyeballs.
For anyone in the Bay Area, Silicon Valley is some ways south of San Francisco.
That said, a lot of startups are in SF, because Silicon Valley is too expensive (though SF itself is catching up because of the second dot com boom/bubble), so it's not surprising that outsiders lump the two of them together as a hub of Bay Area tech activity (which they are.. but they're just two distinct geographical areas).
> I mean you can die on that hill, but I'd hazard a guess that nearly everyone considers SF a part of Silicon Valley
Well, unless you're from the SF Bay Area (or just Bay Area). SF is a city. SF Bay Area (or just Bay Area) is a broad region. Silicon Valley is San Jose, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Redwood City, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Cupertino.
Also: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=SF+vs+silicon+valley&ia=web
In the US, only about half of college graduates have jobs that require a college education.
Craigslist has about 50 employees. If you really had to, you could probably run Twitter with a very small staff, and the computing outsourced to AWS.
Why didn't they though? Why did they become a monster that, as we are seeing right now, can survive easily with about half of its employees gone in a heartbeat?
A bit premature to make this claim imo
Plus, you don't grow to a tech behemoth (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, et c.) by running smart & lean. You might get bought by them that way (cf. WhatsApp, and maybe even Minecraft) but you don't become one of them. So if leadership/investors thought Twitter had a shot at joining the big-boy club, maybe that's why.
Great companies focus on business performance not headcount. I'm more impressed with leaders that generate more positive metrics per dollar. Sometimes it takes headcount, but most of the time, a really great exec can make more revenue/growth/market share happen with the same or less headcount.
> In many accounts, Musk is engaged in a war against “the cathedral” [...] Musk has now supposedly poked the first hole in the digital Berlin Wall erected over the past half decade.
This is couched in the language of describing reports which are in circulation ("many accounts", "supposedly"), but without endorsing them. Indeed the author is going to present a different view. The next paragraph continues.
> Yet there is another aspect of the Musk takeover that has little to do with free speech or even ideology [...] As a recession looms, Silicon Valley is shedding the non-essential workers it acquired when unlimited venture funding made turning a profit an afterthought. Musk happens to have taken the helm at Twitter just as this reality is asserting itself.
The author downplays the previously presented narratives. Musk's role is minimized and the titular trend (the "Email Caste's Last Stand") is brought to the fore.
> Musk paid $44 billion to acquire Twitter, and all indications are that the platform isn’t worth anything close to that.
This is rather the opposite of a fawning endorsement.
> So he proceeded to do what most executives would do in this situation [...] The abrupt firing of thousands of employees solicited a new wave of outrage from Musk’s haters. But even if you remove him from the equation, Twitter couldn’t have gone much longer without massive layoffs. The same thing is happening across Silicon Valley.
Again the author downplays Musk's agency; his actions are an inevitable result of the current environment.
> Musk is engaged in a war against “the cathedral”—that is, against the dominance of professionals who have sought to make the internet more restrictive
> Musk has now supposedly poked the first hole in the digital Berlin Wall erected over the past half decade.
> the revolt against his leadership is the last stand of a cohort of activist hangers-on
> So he proceeded to do what most executives would do in this situation: He laid off some of his workers.
> solicited a new wave of outrage from Musk’s haters. But even if you remove him from the equation, Twitter couldn’t have gone much longer without massive layoffs.
And this is just the first three paragraphs.
If you read the whole thing and came away with "this is neutral and objective" then I don't know what to say.
There are lots of us "diverse" engineers who wouldn't have been given a first shot without such sensitivities.
So is every other diverse engineer.
Circumscribing these concerns as somehow fake or inauthentic, just some mandarins and policy wonks, is gutting. But that's just another day in this industry.
pre·oc·cu·pied (prē-ŏk′yə-pīd′) adj. 1. a. Absorbed in thought; engrossed. b. Excessively concerned with something; distracted. 2. Formerly or already occupied. 3. Already used and therefore unavailable for further use.
https://www.thefreedictionary.com/preoccupied
Capitalism insists you be preoccupied with yours, as well.
My survival depends in part on diversity & inclusion efforts. As much as they can seem to cut against the grain of output, the industry was Not Okay Without Them.
...and, good lord. Bringing a dictionary definition to an idea-fight.
Diversity should be normal, I agree and indeed perhaps some efforts should always be spend on such matters. But when is it enough?
You simply have no idea how strong we've all had to be. In part, because of patronizing attitudes like you've expressed here.
The author take on French revolution is bullshit. And i don't even understand where it came from? I assume a lot here, because i cannot be in the author head.
The author read about Louvois for whatever reason, let's say an army fetish? (i'm projecting maybe). Then he misunderstood the impact of this army size on coordination and cooperation, especially at the time. Read about Autrichian war of succession and the fact that the biggest european army did not handle itself as it should have. Then he extrapolated a lot without reading any academic discussions and made himself an opinion.
I understand, i do that a lot in my HN comments, but if i wrote in a journal, i would be very careful about being correct about historical parallels. To me it's disqualifying the whole article, and this put "compactmag.com" in the "might be untrustworthy" category.
Chris Sacco nailed this in the comments he tweeted recently. There are businesses where engineering can “get it right,” like cars and rockets, but Twitter is not one of those businesses.
It’s not clear to me why cutting back to only engineers would be a good strategy at Twitter. Twitter doesn’t make widgets for people to buy, it makes culture. Rejecting cultural topics in favor of lines of code seems like an internally-driven decision, not one that reflects a deep understanding of the customer.
skilled workers for a proprietary platform should learn that they work against their interests since anything they create is bound to the owner so instead of creating technical value they'll keep reinventing the wheel a company after another with small differences between them since all of those are interested only in trapping users inside their service model. As a result preferred workers are those with less skill who knowing that accept limited compensation and being treated like human-robots;
the lesson users should learn about proprietary platform is that they are at the mercy of the platform so NOTHING done with it should have a value since it might change or vanish overnight.
The juice of this note is simple: IT MUST BE FLOSS, services must be open protocols anyone can implement and keep up not tied to any company or developer in particular. That's is.
Beside that the sole comparison I see with the French Revolution is the fact revolutionaries / innovators in both cases are betrayed by those who led/hire them and in both cases such cohort of people allow betrayers to betray them.