Comment by vessenes
8 hours ago
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.
Is there anything from Dan Luu you could point me offhand at about Twitter's culture? The only thing I recall was a blog about technical issues but that didn't seem to have much bearing on the culture.
My understanding is Twitter always had cultural issues but it was not very different from other tech companies of the time, and what most of us would consider "directionally correct." I have it on pretty good authority from a very senior engineer who left before Elon took over (so no grudges other than, you know, "because Elon") that a lot of the things he said publicly about Twitter's technology was highly misleading or downright false. Like, IIRC, something about them not having CI/CD. Total lie.
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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..
> Ask the people at Twitter
The ones with stock options in, now, SpaceX?
Poor SpaceX employees whose options got diluted by Twitter. :/
Stock options aren’t magic. I bet you that the remaining Twitter employees won’t see a higher comp than equivalent employees at BigTech companies between their cash + RSUs when SpaceX IPOs.
Aren’t employees also subject to a lock out period where they still can’t sell their stock until $x number of months after an IPO unlike employees of public companies that can sell as soon as they vest?
Honest question, I’ve worked for public $BigTech but haven’t been at a company pre IPO
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No, the ones suing his ass.
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.
I don't understand this take. Do people think engineers go in to work to turn handcranks to keep the machines running? It's actually a credit to the automation built by the engineers he fired that it kept running!
At the time I joked that like Chaos Monkey, we should have an "Elon Monkey" to "fire" arbitrary people by sending them on mandatory vacations with no connectivity to see what falls over.
He also cut 80% of the traffic... And the fact that it kept running with him willy nilly pulling network cables is a credit to the work they did to make it resilient to failure.
It was significantly worst, could not keep ads, became overrun by bots. The quality went down significantly. And earnings too.
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.
What % of that is owned by employees that aren't named Elon Musk?
> 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.
He’s saying that it’s easy to say good things when the market’s on an upswing.