Comment by zeroCalories
16 hours ago
It's worse than that. Elon is a notoriously bad employer, and the only people that put up with him were the people that shared his vision. Pretty much the only people that will work for him now are second rate researchers and people that think gooner AI and racism is a worthwhile mission.
There's some texture here. Elon's enriched pretty much everybody who's ever worked for and invested with him. He makes money for people throughout his orgs. Many ex-employees have said to me: "incredible opportunity, made great money, worked insanely hard, once is plenty".
My ex-Twitter employee coworkers beg to differ. They made plenty of money before Elon came around. Once he was in the company, one of them actually hired a personal attorney to confirm that he wasn’t going to be burned by the things Musk was asking him to do, before he finally decided it wasn’t worth it to work there anymore and left.
I think Musk is odious but I think there's a lot of complicating evidence to the story of what happened at Twitter. And: very smart people, like Dan Luu, were complaining about their culture long before Musk arrived.
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I don't really think thats true.
The deal with tesla is that there is a relatively small employer pool, so you can be fairly bad employer but still get good outcomes. The same with spaceX. Sure early tesla had some stories about it being fun, but there was/is a darkside.
The issue with xAI is that researchers have a whole bunch of other employers to choose from. Even at meta, where it used to be fairly nice for researchers, the pressure of "delivering" every 6 months lead to bad outcomes. Having someone single you out for what ever reason the boss had a bad day, is not how good research gets done.
We have seen (A few of my friends were at twitter when it was taken over) that Musk has a somewhat unusual approach to managing staff (ie camping at work). Some researcher love that, assuming that they have peace to research, and are listened to. But a lot don't.
I think we are saying the same thing. He builds trillion dollar companies that are labor efficient; nobody said they are good places to work.
Many ex-employees have said to me that working for Elon did not enrich them at all, either financially or professionally.
What about all the ones who are suing him for shortchanging them?
Ask the people at Twitter..
You mean the 80% of the workforce that was fired and the company continued running just fine?
Usually just firing 3 to 5% of any company workers have terrible consequences for the company that does it.
It does not speak so well about the workers.
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> Ask the people at Twitter
The ones with stock options in, now, SpaceX?
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He's a notorious cheapskate and Tesla is known for firing people shortly before their stock options vest
There's probably a lot of survivor bias going on there
Undoubtedly. With 2.5T in value between tsla and sx that’s a lot of value for survivors.
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> Elon's enriched pretty much everybody who's ever worked for and invested with him.
I'd wager you were saying the same thing about bitcoin until last year.
I'm unclear what statement this is trying to make.
Is it meant to draw equivalence between crypto and Tesla/SpaceX? That each has roughly similar (i.e., low) value to humanity, or value as businesses?
Is it that the metric of whether a person makes others money is invalid?
The comment seems coy, possibly to avoid making any claim at all, but it must not be that because that wouldn't be very sporting.
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After seeing the type of people he hired for doge.. yikes.
Was doge ever anything more than a "get root, grab the data, and run" operation?
Maybe, but destroying USAID was an unforgivable sin. Short of nukes, rapidly turning off direct medical and food aid that people in critical need have relied on for years is objectively one of the fastest way to kill millions of people.
It's pretty obvious now.
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Don't forget the destruction of USAID and countless projects that had the word "diversity" in its work.
I think more important than that was shutting down all investigations into Musk's companies.
Karparthy worked for Elon for, what, 5 years? How did he do it, if Elon is Ivan the Terrible?
Mate, wouldn’t it make sense that these rules are applied via hierarchy? If Elon respects Karparthy he almost certainly gave him a longer leash and Karparthy’s output was strong enough to not warrant intervention. It’s clear he did not want to stay long term so I’m not sure this is a strong line of thinking.
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Karpathy makes great educational content. It's not clear what industry (or academic) research he did even now, five years later.
Gooning and racism have been a cornerstone of humanity since we descended from the trees, for better or worse.
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