Musk's Twitter clusterf*** continues

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Twitter: Musk digs himself into a deeper hole

Is Twitter being steered towards bankruptcy?

It's clear that Elon Musk has no idea what he's doing with Twitter, said Farhad Manjoo in The New York Times. Within days of taking over the social media giant he took private for $44 billion, he warned employees that "bankruptcy isn't out of the question." His reign "reached an absurdist peak" last week when he rolled out his Twitter Blue plan to allow anyone to buy a blue-and-white "verified" check mark for $8 a month. Musk had pitched his idea "as a way to add egalitarian sensibility to Twitter." But "if anyone could pay to be verified," wouldn't that mean "nobody was verified?" Musk apparently hadn't considered this. Within hours, pranksters had created "verified" accounts spoofing Donald Trump, Pope Francis, Tesla, and O.J. Simpson. A tweet sent by a verified — but fake — account impersonating pharmaceuticals giant Eli Lilly declared that "insulin is free now," sending Eli Lilly's stock plunging. Musk then suspended the Blue program and Twitter rolled out gray "Official" badges for "really authentic accounts." The new gray badges lasted just a few hours before Musk said he would kill those, too.

Turning Twitter into a subscription-dominated site was Musk's big idea for profitability, said Matt Ford in The New Republic. "What could go wrong?" Well, now we know. As much as Musk and conservatives loathed the blue check mark as a "status symbol," it "actually served an important verification service." Opening it up to anyone without requiring proof of their identity "has erased any trust or confidence" in the platform. What's to stop a person who realizes that he "can short a company's stock, impersonate a journalist, tweet that the Justice Department indicted that company's CEO for securities fraud, and reap the rewards of any price drop?" You almost wonder if he is "deliberately steering Twitter toward bankruptcy," said Parmy Olson in Bloomberg. This week, he cut "a large number of the company's contract workers without warning." Many of those workers were content moderators. So now advertisers have yet another reason to stay away.

Talk of bankruptcy is premature, said Paula Seligson and Lucca De Paoli, also in Bloomberg, but "his comments shouldn't be entirely discounted." Musk borrowed about $13 billion from banks; Twitter has to pay interest on that debt, and interest rates are rising. The company had $2.7 billion in cash as of June 30, which should keep it afloat "for a good amount of time." However, "Twitter reaps almost all its revenue from big brands," said Jennifer Saba in Reuters, "and those big advertisers are already looking for an excuse to put the brakes on spending" amid economic worries. Musk is giving them that excuse.

Tesla is becoming Twitter's collateral damage, said Therese Poletti in MarketWatch. Shares in the electric-car maker, which Musk also leads, are down 49.6 percent this year. The concerns for investors "go far beyond Musk selling stock" to finance his purchase. He has reportedly "pulled more than 50 Tesla engineers" to help run Twitter. Many people have "bought into the Tesla story because they believe Musk is a genius." The chaotic mess at Twitter is rapidly eroding that myth.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/twitter-musk-digs-himself-into-a-deeper-hole/ar-AA14iGe5

Twitter Desperation Surfaces As Elon Musk Calls For Engineers 'Who Can Actually Write Software'

A historic workforce reduction followed by mass resignation has put Twitter's new CEO Elon Musk on the backfoot, to the point of desperation, it seems. Tech journalist Zoe Schiffer got her hands on an emails sent out by Musk to the remaining employees at Twitter, asking "anyone who can actually write software" to report in the company's San Francisco based headquarter on Friday.

According to multiple reports, Twitter's offices have been closed and employee badge access has been revoked until Monday, while Musk was personally said to be patrolling the office premises with his close confidantes. This came after Musk gave employees a deadline to either commit to his Twitter 2.0 dream that will be all about hardcore engineering, or bid their goodbyes to the company with a three-month severance package in their hands.

Insider and Fortune reported that not many are willing to join Musk on his quest to reinvent Twitter, with anywhere between 1,000 and 1,200 employees calling it quits. It appears that Musk was not anticipating the mass departure, which has left Twitter with just over 2,000 employees, down from over 7,000 just a couple of weeks ago. It appears that Musk is growing anxious, calling the entire workforce to join on a team call — especially the coding talent — and also asked them to furnish the most relevant piece of code they have written at Twitter.

Coders, Assemble!


Musk's email to employees asked them to join the meeting in person, telling them "If possible, I would encourage you to fly to SF to present, in person." What Is truly bizzare is that Musk asked the engineers to send the details of code they had pushed in the past six months or arrive to the meeting with screenshots of the "most salient lines of code" they had written recently.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/twitter-desperation-surfaces-as-elon-musk-calls-for-engineers-who-can-actually-write-software/ar-AA14jlVj

Elon Musk’s ‘chainsaw’ approach to Twitter won’t work, says early SpaceX investor and former Facebook executive

Elon Musk is ‘well outside his depth’ at Twitter and a ‘bullying management culture’ won’t work there, says a former Facebook executive.

An early investor in SpaceX, Chris Kelly is “mostly an Elon fan,” but said that strategies that worked at Musk’s other companies won’t translate at Twitter. Kelly made the comments at Big Ideas Live, and Sky News event held Saturday in London.

"He's able to do some pretty amazing things, but has got into an area that's well outside his depth and thinks a bullying management culture can change it—and that's not going to work at a company like Twitter,” said Kelly. "I've certainly seen some driving management moves from Elon at Tesla and SpaceX before, but I'm surprised this was the approach. He should have taken a much more measured approach when he was taking over.”

Sharing Kelly’s sentiment was Dex Hunter-Torricke, a former SpaceX communications head who now advises Facebook on moderation as part of Meta's oversight board.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/elon-musk-s-chainsaw-approach-to-twitter-won-t-work-says-early-spacex-investor-and-former-facebook-executive/ar-AA14jqqY

[LetMyPeopleVote]

1. I hope that the advertisers follow through with their plans to abandon twitter

Link to tweet

[Cha]

3. Well we knew that was

coming if Muskratfuck bought the place.

I read he had offered to let Dt back on before but he declined saying he wanted to stay on his Gaslit Social...

Now Dt.. could be another NAIL in musky's twitterverse.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

10. Yup. However, massive effort to block him which felt

Great. Plus he's not posting.

[PortTack]

2. Bankruptcy? Yes. Shutting it completely down?...yes. Was it the plan? Yes

Twitter is used world wide to disseminate information. Yes, there’s disinformation, but there’s still a lot of ppl out there spreading truth. He and his Saudi backers among others want to put an end to it. Can’t can’t have the little ppl pulling the curtain back and exposing their lies.

[2naSalit]

4. +1

[usonian]

5. Found on Hacker News. SPECULATION warning, but mighty interesting.

https://democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=17392261
But when you're dealing with a crazy person, why not?

The theory is that he is tearing down twitter to make it a payments system.
And WHY NOT? IIRC, he was one of the PayPal "mafia" (that's official slang, not my invention)
AND he has been rumored to be the IRL Satoshi Nakamoto, inventor of blockchain.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33668165
Elon Has to Destroy Twitter

I wonder if he is destroying Twitter intentionally. No one could make so many bad (stupid, ignorant, mean, etc.) decisions in a row by accident without someone stepping in for the sake of investors. Maybe by bankrupting it he can get out of having to pay anyone back? Could this all just be for the sake of attention?

But maybe the math works out - get rid of 80% of the staff (though losing the payroll department seems like a needless complication), risk losing maybe 50% of the advertising, and suddenly there is profit again.

Twitter has to be torn down to be rebuilt as a payments system (__Crytter__: Crypto + Twitter) like he seems to want. I think this was a really shitty way to do it. No one with any self-respect is going to work for Twitter for any reason other than money now. Which it doesn't have yet.

If my non-technical manager asked me for screenshots of "salient code" that I've done and a bullet list of tasks I've completed in the last 6 months so we could have a technical interview, I'd know deep down in the cockles of my heart that nothing I show them is going to help either of us. They're incapable of understanding the technology and I'm incapable of not rolling my eyes hard enough to make noise. If working unpaid overtime at high levels of performance for an indefinite (but obviously lengthy) period of time is the cost of working for that manager, they can bloody do it themselves while I find a job where I am respected, not bent over and told to bring my own lube. And if these things are a direct result of them alienating and driving off my friends and coworkers with unannounced layoffs and unreasonable demands, then I'd be doubly sure to get my confident, self-respecting ass out of that martyr's chair and find a better opportunity (which will be a very low bar indeed at that point) as quickly as possible. Three months of severance is great (assuming it gets paid - I hate that I have to wonder how many people are going to get screwed out of it) and should be plenty of time to find something enjoyable.

[tinrobot]

8. If we can't trust him with our tweets, I doubt we'll trust him with our money.

Social networks and banking both run on trust.

He has none.

[TheBlackAdder]

6. Twitter will now be exposed to hiring hackers & nation state actors to further compromise the site.

[usonian]

9. Most, if not all of the staff that was guarding things went bye-bye.

He thinks he can break the laws of physics.
OPERATIONS ARE VERY COMPLEX.
article
Elon Musk vs. Physics

[tinrobot]

7. "...asked them to furnish the most relevant piece of code they have written at Twitter"

That just proves he has absolutely no concept of software engineering.

It's like asking a novelist to come up with their best sentence. It's pointless and means nothing unless you read the broader work.

If he keeps doing stuff like this, Twitter probably will go bankrupt.

[Buns_of_Fire]

11. My most relevant piece of code for Twitter 2.0:

10 PRINT "ELON IS A JERK"
20 GOTO 10

So, do I get the job?

[usonian]

12. I Was the Head of Trust and Safety at Twitter. This Is What Could Become of It.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/18/opinion/twitter-yoel-roth-elon-musk.html

In appointing himself “chief twit,” Mr. Musk has made clear that at the end of the day, he’ll be the one calling the shots.

It was for this reason that I chose to leave the company: A Twitter whose policies are defined by edict has little need for a trust and safety function dedicated to its principled development.

So where will Twitter go from here? Some of the company’s decisions in the weeks and months to come, like the near certainty of allowing Mr. Trump’s account back on the service, will have an immediate, perceptible impact. But to truly understand the shape of Twitter going forward, I’d encourage looking not just at the choices the company makes but also at how Mr. Musk makes them. Should the moderation council materialize, will it represent more than just the loudest, predominantly American voices complaining about censorship — including, critically, the approximately 80 percent of Twitter users who reside outside the United States? Will the company continue to invest in features like Community Notes, which brings Twitter users into the work of platform governance? Will Mr. Musk’s tweets announcing policy changes become less frequent and abrupt?

In the longer term, the moderating influences of advertisers, regulators and, most critically of all, app stores may be welcome for those of us hoping to avoid an escalation in the volume of dangerous speech online. Twitter will have to balance its new owner’s goals against the practical realities of life on Apple’s and Google’s internet — no easy task for the employees who have chosen to remain. And as I departed the company, the calls from the app review teams had already begun.

Short: a major threat could be the app stores. Apple and Google could ban the app if twitter continues with the racist and antisemitic trolling. Apps are the mainstay of twitter, rather than those who access it via browsers.

[usonian]

13. ONLY 56 ways that twitter could fail

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1593541177965678592.html

As an SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) and sysadmin with 10+ years of industry experience, I wanted to write up a few scenarios that are real threats to the integrity of the bird site over the coming weeks.

For context, I have seen some variant of every one of these problems pose a serious threat to a billion-user application. I've even caused a couple of the more technical ones. I've been involved with triaging or fixing even more.

[drray23]

14. this needs to be an OP.

I have seen so many posts with people saying, come on its just a website and an app how many people do you really need to run it ?
Of course they have no idea of the backend that is behind the web page or app they are using to read twits. They think a "coder" is just a person writing lines of codes all day. In reality software engineers are much more than that. Designing and maintaining a system of that size requires complex engineering, coordination between subsystems, etc.. Writing code for it is the last and simplest step that you do once you have a solid design meeting specifications.

[usonian]

15. Sure. Copy and paste are easy enough.

Anyone who has built a computer system has had panics galore. Especially networking. Various networking geniuses I have worked with have had routing loops, have seen user-run systems on the network broadcast that they are the entire network’s router to the outside, have left ports open to attack, have designed systems that propagate a failure instead of routing around it, and countless others, and I ran small potato systems for the most part.

And BGP can take down the entire internet. Great design.

Will do. Thx.