Allegedly Oracle did this years ago when they had layoffs-- employees were let go, then asked if they wanted to return. Apparently, if they said no, the company considered the exit a resignation instead of a layoff, and would refuse severance. If oracle was then taken to court over the lack of severance by former employees, those employees' refusal to rejoin the company could be used to avoid an unfavorable ruling for Oracle.
My coworker relayed his oracle layoff story to me, which is where I got this bit of info. Would love if someone else had a verifiable source.
Notably, Larry (the lawnmower?) and Elon appear to be on good terms and aligned on the twitter thing, judging by this text exchange where Larry offers $1B to help secure the Twitter deal and upgrades to $2B with no compunction after a gentle prod from Elon:
Elon: I would like to understand the technical details of the Twitter codebase. This will help me calibrate the dumbness of my suggestions.
Parag: I wrote heavy duty software for 20 years
Parag: I used to be CTO and have been in our codebase for a long time.
Parag: So I can answer many many of your questions.
Elon: I interface way better with engineers who are able to do hardcore programming than with program managero/ MBA types of people.
...
Elon: Crypto spam on Twitter really needs to get crushed. It's a major blight on the user experience and they scam so many innocent people.
Bret: It sounds like we are confirming 7pm at a private residence near San Jose. Our assistants reached out to Jehn on logistics. Let me know if either of you have any concerns or want to move things around. Looking forward to our conversation.
Parag: Works for me. Excited to see you both in person!
Elon: Jehn had a baby and I decided to try having no assistant for a few months
I run little snitch and block all outgoing connections from my mail client except the imap/smtp ones. It shocked me that my company’s HR emails included tracking to see if I opened them!
Just playing dumb might not be enough of a reason if you actually open it.
This might make sense if they were still enrolled in the company email system, and there was some period where it had been communicated that there was some was some expectation that they'd make themselves available for contingencies.
If they're locked out of the company's email system and they'd been told 'this is your last working day,' and they didn't check their personal email/answer the phone ("whoops! must've gone to the spam folder!"), I don't think Twitter has a leg to stand on when it comes to forcing them to come back on the threat of lost severance. Their last contact with the company told them they didn't work there. It's pretty black and white.
Just all around sloppy lawyering on that separation notice, imho.
IANAL but severance isn't required by California law so I'd think that if their employment contract promises some, the situation completely depends on what else the contract has to say about conditions where it can be taken away. "Severance offers" in my experience are a new contract they throw at you at the end, they offer some cash and maybe benefits awhile and you have to make some new promises in return.
> Today is your last working day at the company, however, you will remain employed by Twitter and will receive compensation and benefits through your separation date of February 2, 2023.
> During this time, you will be on a Non-Working Notice period and your access to Twitter systems will be deactivated.
> While you are not expected to work during the None-Working Notice period, you are still required to comply with all company policies, including the Employee Playbook and Code of Conduct.
It seems like a refusal to go off of the “None-Working Notice” would be treated the same as any other refusal to follow assignments and it would make legal sense that it would turn to a termination rather then layoff.
If Musk really wanted to screw people over with loopholes, he'd buy JAMS and companies that use them for arbitration. Screw someone over directly, then get the arbiter so rubber stamp it.
Apparently, Twitter instantly lost ~15% of their 2023 revenue because of their poor showing at NewFronts where a lot of upfront ad buying is done. And with Musk firing the very teams the advertisers care about e.g. ethics, brand safety, human rights the industry is turning against them. Decade of painstaking work by Twitter to attract these advertisers gone in a week. And even worse Musk fired many of the relationship managers and so the company can't smooth things over.
It really isn't inconceivable with this trajectory that Musk could bankrupt the company within a year.
Elon is understanding why Twitter had to seem so "woke". It turns out that "woke" consumers make for the most lucrative demographic to serve ads to. I don't believe he had to reckon with advertiser psychology to this extent at Tesla or SpaceX.
> It turns out that "woke" consumers make for the most lucrative demographic to serve ads to.
Does this mean that “woke” people are people that work hard and have money to spend, while the non “woke” dont? What does this say about the “non woke” crowd?
What is even woke?
Am i “woke” because i don't want to buy products advertised on a platform where people are insulted on a daily basis due race, gender or sexual orientation and i want people to freely express their personality without risk of verbal or written injury?
Is it maybe that brands understood that being associated with the types that loiter our social networks and scream abuse at passers does not sit well with sane people like us?
A combination of (0) having disposable income, as you said, but also (1) lots of free time to browse social media, which in combination with making money might mean maybe not working so hard; (2) low enough standards to spend a lot of free time on social media, and in case of twitter probably not "connecting with family back home"; (3) suggestible/gullible enough to click on ads instead of doing product research; (4) not technically competent enough to just block ads; (5) maybe, conspicuous-consumption/status/consumerism focused enough to buy the kind of high-margin products that justify ads.
How these are weighted I dunno. But yeah, sounds pretty much like chattering class ;)
I wouldn't expect working hard to correlate with having a lot of money. Plenty of poor people work hard.
I also see your point that it doesn't make somebody a leftist or even necessarily progressive to be somewhat cautious of Twitter during a moment of relative upheaval. They are still a very small part of the digital advertising pie. And indeed there is some free marketing in deciding not to buy ads, when stories are written about that decision.
I don't think woke is the most lucrative demographic to serve ads to, but advertisers who buy ads on Twitter are likely selecting for Twitter. That is to say, Musk is destroying the Twitter branding, and so the advertisers that went to Twitter for its branding are now leaving.
So I think we can safely assume that since things have gotten nothing but worse for Twitter since that they didn't book those commitments. In fact we have seen a large exodus of those exact type of advertisers in recent days.
It really does look like Parag may have slipped Musk a poison pill.
Some of it was an accounting loss as I understand it. Eg last year they lost $200m-ish, but $600m of that was stock-based compensation. So they were cash flow positive.
Of course taking a company private means you can't use the market to pay your employees...
If someone who was laid off refused to go back, would that affect their compensation with the report that they are still technically employed until Feb 2nd?
"Today is your last working day at the company, however, you will remain employed by Twitter and will receive compensation and benefits through your separation date of February 2, 2023."[0]
Yes. This sort of thing is used all of the time to get rid of executives… you park the guy in gardening leave, gagged for 6-24 months. When the person gets replaced permanently, nobody remembers the old guy. The only option is to quit, but that has consequences.
Laws around this aren’t written for professional/management employees. The rules are designed to protect tradespeople who get laid off every winter, etc.
Most of these employees don’t have contracts, so if you refuse to return or don’t like the terms, you’re resigning. And what’s happening inside of the company is that the political networks will be smashed and rebuilt. People will be sucking up to the new overlords to be made junior overlords. There’s no rules around rehire and the market is soft, so you’ll probably see the new power players bring back people loyal to them.
This is why I always eyeroll
at “10x” HN posters who think they can negotiate with big companies. When the chips are down, you’re a peon, and however smart you are, there’s another guy.
>Yes. This sort of thing is used all of the time to get rid of executives… you park the guy in gardening leave, gagged for 6-24 months. When the person gets replaced permanently, nobody remembers the old guy. The only option is to quit, but that has consequences.
Reminds of the Korean show 'Good Manager' where the company is trying to get the employee to quit rather than be fired, and keep making the work environment worse and worse in a comedic fashion, and he keeps finding ways to somehow get work down.
I've seen people who believe they are 10x gang, sometimes go on a long vacation, and when they return to their horror they realise nobody missed them.
Happens all the time. People are less important than they think. Even without this whole layoff business, people in big corps get themselves competing offers and go like 'give me a raise more than this, or I leave'. In every scenario that I saw people leave nobody missed them after 1 - 2 weeks.
As a general rule everybody can be replaced, and everybody can always find a new job somewhere and most do. This is with or without layoffs and happens in ordinary situations too. People leave all the time, many think they are 10x, and they get replaced. Nobody misses them.
My mom always said this to me. Very good advice over my long career. Don't get too uppity, because even if you are a star, most businesses will hire 3 people to replace you rather than deal with an uppity star.
Has Musk ever handled the operational aspects of the companies he claims to run? Does he really understand what it takes to make a company _work_?
For instance, my understanding of SpaceX is that he really should be seen as the initial financier of it to chase a crazy idea. Gwynne Shotwell is really the one in charge of day-to-day operations. It's just that Musk shows up for the fun bits and gets all the sound bites in.
I'm not saying that. Have a look at the tours. He seems to be very up on designs for each component of the rockets. What the current status is, tradeoffs of different options.
Probably this means he spends his 30 hours/week of SpaceX time sitting in on technical meetings and the other departments get neglected.
my point is that he is knowledgeable - but the heavy work, the real work is done by the professionals. At best he learns what is going on, at worst he is hindering progress.
If you're going to lay off half the company, presumably you do it mostly by team, cutting parts of the org that are not a priority anymore. You're not reviewing everyone as an individual. So it's not surprising that there are people on laid off team X that are still desirable to the company, that they might try to get back. Another option would have been to take more time and do more of a re-org, moving the people they want to keep around. That has downsides too.
If you're going to kick yourself in the balls, presumably you kick them both at the same time with your favored leg, making use of the increased precision of that leg's motor skills and balancing as needed on the other. You're not going to jump in the air and try to kick each individual testicle with both legs at the same time. So it's not surprising that there is outsized damage to the lowest hanging testicle due to undue force in an attempt to get both in a single kick.
Another option would have been to kick one's balls "Tai chi style," moving the foot ever so slowly toward the groin. But if you're not used to doing that you're just as likely to strain a muscle or trip.
It was rumored (not 100% confirmed IIRC) that the Twitter layoffs were done by stack ranking number of lines of code written, which disproportionately affected orgs that did not need to commit a lot of code.
Thinking about today, you're going to keep a small fraction of your 10x employees, the ones who implement a feature a week and don't need to look back on code that just works; also you're going to keep juniors who have no idea what they're doing and write pages of inefficient code where a senior would make a library call. You're going to lose the 10x refactor wizards who delete more than they write, the firefighters who don't really change linecounts, and your 1x developers who think before they type. Might as well just give everybody a typing test.
Thinking about tomorrow: this establishes a hilarious incentive. A nonzero fraction of people who know that this was the criteria will change their behavior to suit. More lines of code, you say? Coming right up! I've met some people who work / worked in shops where the number of commits per day was the ruling metric. The smart ones wrote scripts to carve their commits into plausible but small chunks.
Wow, that's both believable and sad. So the new CTO of Twitter will be the programmer who went through and changed all the tabs to spaces, and then back again when yelled at, as an intern. Or backwards if Twitter favors spaces.
No, the problem is that it is UN-believable. Some tech reporters did a double-take when they heard it from others, and were unwilling to report on this until they got multiple corroborations of this madness.
In addition, Tesla engineers were probing Twitter for "top talent", and also involved in reviewing the printed out on paper code.
If I were at Twitter, I would be deeply humiliated by this treatment. A bunch of Tesla "stars" rolling in hard to rate the "Twitter clowns". Fuck. That.
I don't think it's _literally_ unbelievable; notably, IBM used to use lines of code written for compensation purposes back in the 80s. It would indicate that whoever was making the decisions was pretty incompetent, though; even IBM eventually figured out that it was a terrible idea.
Well, first of all, if the Tesla engineers are so brilliant, how come no one brought up the fact that LOC is a useless and even a bad metric?
And print out? Printing code was acceptable and common in the 80s and even all the way into the late 90s. Who prints out code nowadays? Is there even a button to do that in most IDEs? Don't know, never cared to look.
What kind of Mickey Mouse operation is this? It's like they literally pulled managers from the 1987 GE to do this "merger".
Honestly, I'm not sure why anyone would expect them to be. AIUI the pay isn't great, and upper management is... well, see his behaviour on Twitter, so I'd kind of expect anyone who was any good to just leave.
Isn’t it a good idea to avoid spreading this until it’s 100% confirmed? It’s one of those ideas that we’d love to believe is true, but it’s pretty unbelievable anyone would actually do something so monumentally stupid.
I agree that it’s possible, but this rumor has somehow become a little too close to “accepted truth.”
Agreed. There are plenty of monumentally stupid decisions being made (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588676939463946241) that we don't need to pile on unproven ones. Threatening your potential advertisers is even more stupid and I wouldn't have believed it if if it wasn't an Elon Tweet made in public.
Including the very thread IMO, firing and then saying WHOOPS.
Eh, I’m not gonna partake in it, but I’m also not going to judge someone who treats stories about musk with the same reverence for the truth that musk holds
They probably did completely cut some teams entirely but also kept some entire teams deemed critical (or maybe that's the ones they want to return). Besides that it generally comes down to instructing every group to pick out X percent (in this case 50) to cut and get it done. I've been at places where they did the required layoffs even in critical groups that never stopped hiring people and had to even step up hiring afterwards.
I understand some people need a job ASAP to support their family or medical care or such.
But if that’s not you taking your job back just seems like a really bad idea in a circumstance like this. How could you ever have faith in the company leadership again?
If you refuse to work 80h/week, what's the worst that could happen? Be fired again?
That's the thing, if you don't trust leadership anymore and they are asking you to come back after firing and going to pay you, that's the ultimate fuck-you: keep working as little as possible while searching for another job. You are getting paid to look for another job by the same leadership that tried to fire you.
It’s a head scratcher for sure. I remember when my employer (large old tech company) laid off one of my coworkers, he or his manager contested it and he got re-hired a month later. Why he went back puzzles me, but he’s still there 6 years later
I’m mostly thinking in the “will this company be solvent in 6-12 months” area of faith.
Yes you can be fired any day, but people usually aren’t. They can go many years without it.
This took a week.
How do you know it doesn’t happen again in a month when things are going worse?
And, more importantly, what’s the mental/physical toll of the stress something like this causes after happening once and then hanging over your head for the rest of your tenure?
Twitter is a public company, anyone can go and read their quarterly reports. They also have an investor relations website where you can find some information as well. This information is not a week old.
Are you surprised that a company that is losing money has a reduction in force?
How on earth is this abuse legal? What kind of power play is this? Has the world gone mad and we are all simply sitting and cheering while these people are dragged through the mud? How can we bring elon’s network of abusive entities to the ground? I am not spending any money on his products but how can we make significant impact? While i understand twitter needs to be made profitable I am now pissed off.
This is what most of the working world has had to deal with in the middle class and below for decades. It’s only sticking out as new because it’s happening to highly paid tech workers.
I agree it’s bad, but there hasn’t been a lot of worker solidarity in tech so I don’t think anyone should be surprised that it can happen to us too
You are right re solidarity, but thats because we didnt historically see such level of stupidity at such scale. Others layoff people too but in a professional manner. Instead Elon’s acting like a clown.
On the point of solidarity, i stopped using amazon when i learned about the abuse their warehouse workers are subjected to. Went from hundreds of £ a month in average to literally 0.
I didn’t even mean solidarity with other types of workers or unions. We’ve failed to have worker solidarity with each other. It might be my bubble but most of the time I see fellow tech workers looking down on anyone who hasn’t gotten a high comp, usually with the implication that if they were only competent the worker would be doing well.
As an industry we’re kinda assholes on average and have an overinflated opinion of our individual abilities and an underestimated importance placed on the situation that made us valuable
I've never seen solidarity in my 20 years in tech. I try at every job to instill some sense of class struggle and solidarity but a lot of the techies really believe they'll, eventually, become capitalists themselves.
Even outside of the US I still see a disproportionate amount of workers in tech being anti-union, anti-labour regulations, compared to most other industries. Probably due to the gold rush that tech has become the past 30-40 years, so many fortunes and wealth was created that still gives hope to many workers that they can make it at some point.
At the same time, we get so many privileges as tech workers that workers from other industries look at us more as part of the rich capitalists class than what we actually are: salaried workers. The class divide also happens from the other side, I had numerous conversations with blue-collar workers (friends, acquaintances) where I had to clearly spell out that I'm on the same team, that I defend the same values about work protection and dignity as they do. Divide-and-conquer between blue-collars and white-collars is very visible and I feel we need to shorten this gap to actually empower workers.
I don't think you can impact him any worse that what he is doing himself. The chaotic nature of his purchase, staff layoffs and general communications have already decimated Twitter's 2023 advertising revenue. We'll have to wait and see how much content will leave the platform.
I'm not too bullish on his new revenue plans either. I don't think there are that many people willing to pay $8/mo for verification and to avoid ads. Most people on Twitter are consumers of content and have no need for verification.
If I scream at my wife that she is an ugly, useless person, that is legal. If ten minutes later I say ignore that, I want to be with you, that is also legal. It would still be abusive.
So you’re suggesting Elon abused these employees privately? Because I’m not seeing any public abuse, especially not at any identifiable group of employees. I have no idea what your comment is supposed to mean.
> So you’re suggesting Elon abused these employees privately
No, I didn't. It seems pretty clear that you think his public behavior was AOK. Many people, including me and the person you originally responded to, think Musk has little regard about the effect his behavior has on his new employees.
Most people consider getting laid off to be a significant disruption to their lives: their finances, their reputation, and often their mental health. Doing that to 3700 people (or whatever) and then a day later saying, "So do you want to work here or not?" doesn't cancel out what happened a day or two before. Do you understand the old phrase, "you can't unring the bell"?
If it were an honest mistake then it would have been easier to digest but it seems like this guy (musk) has no regard for people. If i was a twitter employee i’d go back, buy my time and sort out my finances, then leave for a better job mid project. Not illegal either but he should be treated with the same lack of respect.
It doesn’t matter what I think about his public behavior. If you have an example of Elon abusing his employees I’d be interested in seeing it. Posting Reddit-tier memes doesn’t seem like abuse to me. Unless you consider being cringe abuse.
You could argue layoffs are abuse. But you’d have to convince me Twitter’s specific implementation of layoffs are more abusive than any other company’s. From what I read, 3 months severance was offered, which they have no legal obligation to offer. That doesn’t seem abusive to me.
> If you have an example of Elon abusing his employees I’d be interested in seeing it.
I don't know how to say this any more clearly. Laying people off and then days later asking them to rejoin is just jerking people around. You might not agree, but that is exactly the abuse this subthread has been about. Not memes, not secret stuff that I claim to be privy to.
> You could argue layoffs are abuse.
This is exactly what I and the person you originally responded to were pointing at as abusive. But not just the layoffs; it was the layoffs then asking for a do-over just a day or two later. For someone worth $200,000,000,000 dollars, firing and rehiring hundreds or thousands of people might be seen as indecisive or fickle behavior, but to those employees it could be quite a lot of turmoil.
> But you’d have to convince me Twitter’s specific implementation of layoffs are more abusive than any other company’s.
Why? Does it need to be worse than any other company layoff to be considered abuse? Why is that your bar of "abusive"? It needs to be worse than any other company, so if other companies push this slowly it becomes progressively more ok to you?
Or should we consider other similar layoffs (buying a company, stripping it of workers to lower cost, increase gain for the capitalist) as abuse as well? I'm on the latter camp as it seems most on this thread are.
> From what I read, 3 months severance was offered, which they have no legal obligation to offer. That doesn’t seem abusive to me.
Does it become abusive for you when it's at scale? If you do that to 10-20 employees I might see it as less abusive. When you do that to 3k+ it is, morally, more abusive.
I don't think their point is that the situations are completely equitable but rather that your logic of "it is legal and therefore not abuse" is clearly not the case, as their scenario is abusive and likely legal.
Just because something is legal does not mean it's not abusive. Every time you play 5D chess with people's livelihood you are effectively abusing their good will. For Twitter: good luck retaining great employees. Also good luck finding other people willing to work there if through some sort of miracle Twitter survives.
there is no point in being a rich country if your citizens, on average, live like crap. you are not rich, a few select ones are wealthy beyond comprehension, there is a constantly shrinking middle class and most people live through hell every freaking day.
I was on the fence when it came to Musk before he started peddling dodgecoin and doing his dog and pony crypto show. that's when i knew he jumped the shark.
Before that I was considering a Tesla as my next car. And I was actually excited for SpaceX developments. Not anymore. It's a shame to see a clown digging the grave of really nice tech that thousands of people have worked for ages to create (Twitter, Tesla, basically everything Musk touches).
I'm glad you're seeing him for who he really is, but there wasn't a jump the shark moment. Remember when he tried to build a submarine to rescue those kids in the cave, then called an actual rescuer a "pedo guy?"
What's complicated is he's a bit like Travis Kalanick in that he needed an absurd amount of self-confidence to go build Tesla (or Uber). This is the same self-confidence that lead to some questionable decisions later.
i mean, everyone has their own perspective and can choose to look the other way / explain bad behavior. for me the shark moment was bitcoin.
you are right that he did many other things before that that I've maybe written off as eccentricities (although I admit looking back that the signals for who he is where there all along)
I hate the term quiet quitting. It implies that you're somehow not doing your job. If your employer is not firing you it means by definition that you are doing the job. Quiet quitting is one of those bullshit terms made up by corporate overlords to extract more labor out of you.
Sounds like quiet quitting is the worst of the two. You still support the company by working there and at the same time don't agree with the values of the company.
If they fire you as an individual and then bring you back, certainly. If it's part of a layoff done this rapidly, its much more likely that it was just a categorizing error. So you probably don't have massive leverage.
That said, you definitely shouldn't accept a worse deal.
Ah, this must be the git bisect strategy for finding which employees they can get rid of without completely destroying the company. Elon will on average, only need to do O(log n) layoffs!
That's more correct, also I realize I just counted number of commits rather than lines added. Close enough though, not like anyone would make any decisions with this list right?
It does seem like this is basically what they are doing. The messages employees received did not include the actual paperwork, which the messages say will come in about a week. It could be interpreted as a strategy to "terminate" aggressively but with the option to walk it back a bit if the place falls apart within the week. It's a clever-sounding approach on paper. But there is a human element when dealing with people's livelihoods that might not have been sufficiently considered.
I was actually toying with this idea earlier today- since mass layoffs usually juice up the stock prices (not that it matters for Twitter now that they’re private again), what if a company did that only to quietly hire many employees back later?
This effectively happened at many companies unintentionally in 2020 between the initial lockdown onset mass layoffs and the later boom for tech companies.
Obviously the strategy for the first few weeks or months would have been formed months ago. Whilst DD for example is not performed for strategic reasons it remains critical to validating any strategic planning and decision making as those things are largely informed by what the information you have tells you about the business and it’s trajectory right now vs where you want it to be. So transition and short-term planning in all likelihood would have been finalised shortly after DD
I believe it was Musk that said Comedy is now legal on twitter. It was bold for him to post a joke while doing a comedy on Twitter considering he could've been flogged (or worse!) but I believe we shouldn't be retroactively looking for crimes he might've committed.
Before we get even more convoluted reasons as to why this is all part of Elon Musk's grand strategy and how business classes in the future will pour over every detail to understand the brilliance, can I suggest a simple explanation:
Elon Musk makes brash decisions and has no idea what he's doing here.
Side question: has there been an estimate of how many people were laid off? All I saw was NYT claiming a handful of sources said "50%," but WaPo was saying layoffs were going to happen before RSUs vest, and that never happened, so I don't find these sources all that trustworthy.
First, Twitter is has huge and oversized importance. It’s vey big in both the tech and journalism worlds. There’s a reason celebrities are on it and tweets show up on the news and in articles.
Second, it’s Musk. He’s famous, a celebrity (of sorts), and VERY VERY rich. Not only does he have haters, people seem to love watching the successful fail. “I knew it. He’s not so great. I could have done better.”
And finally, it’s just 100% nuts. This is not how the business world works. He over bid on a company as a joke (?) after getting high (?) with the price being a weed joke. Then he tried to back out and got sued. Then at almost literally the last moment he went through with it and has almost DESTROYED the company in a week.
It’s a perfect storm of WTF-hate-drama about a world famous company and a publicity hound.
I've been in tech for 20+ years now and never seen a situation like this.
In a single week, Musk has single-handedly put them on a course to bankruptcy. The firings have been sudden, indiscriminate, short-sighted and ineptly executed. Advertisers who Twitter desperately needs are fleeing the company in droves and may never come back. The level of debt is clearly unsustainable and its revenues are declining rapidly.
The only thing that comes close to this is the Digg V4 redesign.
If it is true that the economy is shrinking and we are heading into a recession, I would guess that many companies are going to pull back on advertising buys. Their hardest decision would be where to do that. Elon has answered that question for them and delivered it on a silver platter.
Once in a while I would take a week and block every single promoted tweet account. Major brands had the opportunity to advertise to me once and then I never saw them ever again.
The impact if it disappears is perhaps minimal (though I do think it’s a valuable place for many topics like programming, art and game dev among others).
However the real impact is if it becomes a service to push partisan agenda. Elon has already shown his biases multiple times and his duplicitous nature. He is very much on the cusp of being the new Murdoch.
Whether or not many Americans use Twitter is going to be irrelevant compared to the impact it will have on society.
However the real impact is if it becomes a service to push partisan agenda.
It already has? Do you remember the banning of the Hunter Biden laptop story right before the election. You know, that story that turned out to be 100% true?
How very disingenuous of you. Anyone who paid attention knows that the issue was the conspiracies surrounding that event, which are most definitely not “100% true”.
Even today, it’s not “100% proven” that the laptop did belong to Hunter Biden.
So the goal was to curtail misinformation, which is clearly needed for folks like yourself.
I think it is a big deal to them because Musk does not appear to be completely subservient to the corporate-political orthodoxy. Same reason why Trump was made such a spectacle.
There are plenty of people with right-wing politics who are not "made a spectacle" like Trump. Trump and Musk are spectacles because they have made careers out of spectacle.
I don't know UK employment law, but I would be very surprised if the time of being layed off is not when you're told that you have been fired, but somehow the time when your backpay/severance pay ends.
This is actually another brilliant move by Elon Musk. While some users on here still continue to doubt him, this is showing excellent leadership skills and business acumen that many here fail to grasp.
Apple was on the verge of being bankrupt and had a ton of projects that were never going to go anywhere e.g. eMate, Newton, OpenDoc, Cyberdog. And they weren't contributing to revenue at all.
At Twitter we've seen the entire ethics, human rights, accessibility groups etc go. Which directly contributes to revenue since advertisers want these in place to mitigate brand safety risk.
In addition to the other context people mentioned (that Apple was in a very different state), Apple was also significantly larger than Twitter as a company with many , many more projects at hand spanning a much larger range of domains.
Apple had already laid off 2800 people the previous year, and Wall Street had already been expecting more layoffs. The article DHH cites even says the post-Jobs layoffs were less extensive than some had expected. The Twitter layoffs are far more severe.
Furthermore, the Apple layoffs were directly connected with the cancellation of specific projects. It was well known at the time that Apple was seriously overextended with huge, over-budget projects. The Next acquisition made some of these redundant. Jobs and Next brought a clear strategy for Apple and the base materials on which to execute that strategy.
DHH cites analysts with qualms about Apple's future and tries to compare them with coverage of Twitter today. But there's simply no comparing. If you read the contemporary coverage, nobody has any real concerns about Jobs. The critical ZDnet piece he quotes even acknowledges that the layoffs were necessary for survival. The theme of the skeptical analysis of the time was not "is he going too far", but "will it be enough".
DHH is right about one thing, though: "Twitter ain't Apple, Musk ain't Jobs".
It is quite possible that Musk has given California more in taxes than everyone commenting on HN today, combined. A quick search suggests [0] he has order-of-magnitude billions in Californian tax liabilities.
If he doesn't think there is value for money, it is appropriate that he moves. He doesn't have a moral responsibility to prop up California if he doesn't think they are spending his money effectively.
The shine really started coming off when his ego was bruised because he had his team spend a week building a submersible to rescue those kids trapped in a cave, but it was not suited to the task. One of those rescuers was vocal about it and so Musk repeatedly called him a pedo.
Then there were the overt stock manipulation games he played. He could get away with them because he is stinking rich. Most other people who tried that would have been charged.
How many years has he been promising fully autonomous driving just as soon as they finish polishing the software?
Then there was the boring company. The flamethrowers. The flopped solar roofs project. The cyber truck. The 18 wheelers that were due years ago. The string of dalliances with young girls. The names he gave his children. His juvenile meme/twitter practices.
There were many of people who didn't like Musk long before he mentioned buying twitter.
He's not the richest human on earth. That's probably the King of Saudi Arabia. Maybe Vladimir Putin.
Musk was praised when he was doing cool shit (neat cars and rockets). Now, he's wrecking something people like, and looking like a complete tit while while doing so. Somehow he's shocked that praise doesn't follow.
People made their companies some sort of missionary situation in their minds. This is dollars and psychology. Did you like the work? Can you get paid enough to come back?
Elon is making this transactional. If you are truly needed bad enough that they will come calling right after a layoff then soak them for 3x. It’s just business.
A lone positive sign of a course correction amidst all the recent chaos and clearly terrible decisions. Of which the worst was Elon threatening advertisers who don't advertise on Twitter. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588676939463946241
Even granting the 50% target was the right amount, it was very hard for me to believe in a single week you could accurately select that 50% and transition key company knowledge to the people left.
Surprising for this particular comment to be my lowest rated comment on HN, hah.
My coworker relayed his oracle layoff story to me, which is where I got this bit of info. Would love if someone else had a verifiable source.