I appreciate this considerably more nuanced and thoughtful view of the modern history of Twitter.
So much coverage of Twitter since the Musk acquisition is entangled with partisan politics, ultimately in part thanks to Musk provoking such a reaction. That makes this post feel ever more illuminating and thoughtful—it avoids the partisan pitfalls and irrational extremism seen in virtually every other article on the topic.
I too don't agree with many of Musk's decisions with Twitter/X. I don't like the new name and thus far refuse to use it. I don't like the ads I see as a Twitter user. I have not (yet) paid for Twitter.
But on the other hand, I am thoroughly disinterested in the unhinged vitriol I see so often from Musk's haters. The incessant lazy discourse about how Twitter is dying, for either technical or other reasons. The ridiculous blindness to the awfulness of other social networks when critiquing Twitter (have you ever seen Reddit or Facebook?).
It's a shame journalists have been largely unable to cover Twitter as well as this former insider and I am thankful to Crawford for publishing this.
Yeah, this is great, cuts through a lot of the BS and kneejerk hate.
> At times it seemed he trusted random feedback more than the people in the room who spent their lives dedicated to tackling the problem at hand.
feels related to
> Management had become bloated to accommodate career growth and the company culture felt too soft and entitled for my own taste [...] Twitter often felt like a place that kept squandering its own potential
Aside from the feature changes, it seems about the same to me. I think it largely depends on who you follow and whether you use the "Following" or "For you" tab. I recommend the "Following" tab since this allows you to manage your feed by, unsurprisingly, selecting who you follow.
Understood. I have no doubt it would become exhausting to follow people who are distracted by such meta-topics. I take some joy out of unfollowing people who are overly obsessed with topics I find uninteresting.
It had been going downhill since before Musk, he's not to blame for the start of that. But it's certainly spiraled and become unusable since the acquisition.
musk has a vast amount of power and influence due to his wealth, links to several corporations, links to other rich people, and his control of a social media site.
I believe that someone with that much power has an obligation, a responsibility to improve the world for humanity. Whether elected or not.
he instead chooses to do what he does. That is why I dislike him. he could offer so much more but messes around "trolling" the world like a 13 year old insulated from consequences.
I don't care for his tweets or his political thoughts, but I personally think he has done more good through his companies than most others with similar resources. In my opinion, when Gates was still running Microsoft, he did considerably less "good" for humanity than Musk is doing now. And Musk's contemporaries (Zuckerberg, Bezos, et al) don't seem to be interested in doing much good either.
It's easy to be an armchair critic and say you would do more good if you had those resources at your disposal. But I will admit that I have never worked and will never work a quarter as hard as any of the names I've mentioned here. Despite my criticism of Gates, for example, he has done more good with his resources post-Microsoft than I expect I would have been able to do with the same.
Sorry, but... what is Musk doing for humanity now?
SpaceX makes a business out of space, which will use more and more energy, which is exactly the biggest problem of humanity right now (fossil fuel is not unlimited, and CO2 is killing the planet).
Tesla makes heavy vehicles that use a lot of energy, too. And somehow, some people think they are "green" because they are electric, but the truth is that driving such a heavy vehicle for (usually) one person is the opposite of green.
Now let's be honest, his contemporaries are not helping humanity either. But if we talk about humanity, we would be better off without SpaceX, without Tesla, without Facebook and without Amazon. Let's not forget that.
Gates, post-Microsoft, seems to be working hard to make good things, I have to say.
> I am thoroughly disinterested in the unhinged vitriol I see so often from Musk's haters. The incessant lazy discourse about how Twitter is dying, for either technical or other reasons.
> but I personally think he has done more good through his companies than most others with similar resources.
It's always odd to me how people say Musk is doing good though his companies without backing it up while criticizing how people are critical of Musk as if it's unhinged.
Compared to average finance billionaire #293 bragging to their golf buddies how they got the Toys-R-Us bankruptcy to pay for their third private yacht he has definitely done his duty for improving the world, even if he's lately been acting like a major idiot while doing it. Yes I know there are other tech billionaires who do better, but for every one of them there's a mile of those who instead actively work to make the world worse for their own self interest
Also, we surely needed some more ass-licker for Russia, as if we don’t have enough already, or some high position person shittalking about covid. Definitely a good gal..
I didn't downvote you, but you might not be aware that Paypal like Google is known to have been Less Evil back in the day. So much so that--and I'm going completely by memory so I might fuck this up--Douglas Crockford went to Paypal when he was pissed off with a patent play Yahoo made and took a moral stand, quitting in protest. It was one of those companies that had a rep of putting developers first.
Now how much genetic material Paypal retained from Musk's x.com I have no idea and whether Musk was responsible for any of "the good stuff" in Paypal during those years is debatable (See Founders At Work for the windows/linux debates).
Sergey Brin and Larry Page: Google (made near-infinite knowledge reachable), Chrome/Chromium, GMail, YouTube, Android (powers billions of handsets), Google Maps …
If you credit Musk directly for all the aforementioned things, why not them? And yes, Google bought some of those properties, but so did Musk. What’s the difference? Marketing?
(I don’t actually think Larry and Sergey “most benefitted humanity” or deserve a bunch of humanitarian awards, but I’m curious why they’re not credited with Google’s achievements in the way Musk is with his companies.)
I think there is a ‘but for’ aspect, without google it’s reasonable to expect the some other search engine could have evolved into the same thing. Given the scope and scale of the investment required to get Tesla and SpaceX to a viable state it seem that only a somewhat crazy person could would even attempt that. It’s difficult to find an optimum level of crazy, and is often difficult to distinguish between crazy and stupid. That said, I do think Elon would be even more successful if he was a bit less crazy and a bit less stupid.
By that logic, why couldn’t someone have done the same with electric cars and rockets? Were we never going to go into space again? Did the Nissan Leaf not already exist?
Launching Google was a low stakes endeavour. Nobody was willing to put as much on the line as Musk did with SpaceX and Tesla. It's likely all of it would have happened at some point, but certainly not as quickly and effectively as it has thanks to Musk.
In the 20+ years Google has dominated search, who has come along and iterated a “better” version? Bing? Is the capital and scope required not approachable, as you suggest?
Similarly, since Tesla helped demonstrate a valid market for electric cars, how many automakers have released competitive (and to some, better) EVs? If the capital requirements and scope were too large, where did Rivian and Polestar and numerous other upstarts come from?
That is first movers advantage that gives rise to a network effect which acts as a powerful moat for a natural monopoly. Another search company could have been google without the need of a crazy person. Which is to say a google like company was probability inevitable, if not google then something like it.
Re SpaceX: it had massive government funds going for it. So surely, no one else could do it, because they don’t have the funds to lobby for taxpayer money that hard.
I still think we should have just given it to NASA, a private entity has no business in space.
That's a good answer, although it's arguable their best contribution was in the prior century with search and page rank, whereas this century has been dominated with contributions to the ad space.
PageRank was developed in 1998. I assure you Google did not immediately come out and crush search. Altavista, Yahoo, and Lycos might have all been bigger properties during 1999.
Heavy electric cars and rockets are making the biggest problems of this century worse.
We don't need more rockets or space tourism. And instead of building heavy EVs, Tesla should help the US build public transports. That is, if they want to help humanity.
Electric cars being heavier have an impact in that it causes more wear and tear on roads. But they're absolutely dwarfed by the wear semis cause.
Even when the electricity comes entirely from coal, electric vehicles are more efficient than ICE vehicles, so every EV deployed reduces greenhouse gas emissions.
> and rockets
Rockets impact on emissions is a rounding error on the global scale. The number of launched would have to increase by 1000 times to start approaching the airline industry, and with the move to methane fueled rockets it's possible to synthesize the fuel from CO2 in the atmosphere using carbon free energy, creating a closed loop.
> Tesla should help the US build public transports
It doesn't work like that. You can't just say "let's build more public transport" and it will magically happen tomorrow. There are a ton of barriers to expanding many forms of public transport, primarily public funding, which they do not control. And when it comes to thing like rail, that's compounded even more by right of way.
The fact of the matter is that the US is a car heavy society, and building EVs is the fastest way to reduce transport emissions without (ignoring incentives) directly having to rely on public funding.
As an added bonus, building up an EV production line allows you to relatively easily export them to other markets around the world. You can't export a rail line to another place.
> Electric cars being heavier have an impact in that
In that moving a heavier weight takes more energy. We don't need to slightly reduce our energy consumption, we need to drastically reduce it. Meaning that in any country that did not make the same mistake as the US (being to build their society around individual cars), heavy EV are clearly not enough. We need to use public transports, (e-)bikes, and small EVs for those who don't really have a choice. As far as I understand, a Tesla is basically a sports car. There is no place for sports cars where we are going. Of course I understand it is harder for the US, both because of culture (SUVs are the norm, right?) and infrastructure.
Still it's never too late to start building better infrastructures, I suppose.
> Even when the electricity comes entirely from coal, electric vehicles are more efficient than ICE vehicles
What do you mean by "more efficient"? That a Tesla produces less CO2 using electricity made from coal than a small ICE vehicle? How in the world did you get to that conclusion?
> so every EV deployed reduces greenhouse gas emissions.
It's more complicated than that. If you throw away a recent, small ICE vehicle in order to deploy an EV, I am pretty sure it doesn't reduce much. You have to consider the entire life of the vehicle (and seriously, coal?).
> The number of launched would have to increase by 1000 times to start approaching the airline industry
Which is the goal of SpaceX and every other company going in the space business, right?
> it's possible to synthesize the fuel from CO2 in the atmosphere using carbon free energy, creating a closed loop.
At scale, I very much doubt it remotely adds up. And all the carbon free energy you use to do that, you don't use it to replace fossil fuels elsewhere. It just doesn't work.
> It doesn't work like that. You can't just say "let's build more public transport" and it will magically happen tomorrow.
Fair enough. On the one hand you need less companies like Tesla and SpaceX, and more public investment into transport infrastructure.
> As an added bonus, building up an EV production line allows you to relatively easily export them to other markets around the world. You can't export a rail line to another place.
That is an interesting, US-centered approach. First, all the countries that have good public transports should just not import Teslas. Because those countries don't depend that much on cars, they can just improve their public transport infrastructures.
Maybe the US could learn a bit from those countries when they look into their public transports ;-).
What did he actually do with regards to electric cars and rockets, besides getting richer? I do give credit for being good at hyping up shit, less good at actually delivering that.
I would give him credit for pushing past the catch-22 in electric cars that people would not buy them until the charging infrastructure was there and the infrastructure was not going to be built up until there were more electric cars.
He was able to make the upfront investment in the charging infrastructure to get EV momentum going (Even thought it was probably largely other people's money involved). Legacy car makers might never have been capable of reaching that point, being tied to different profitability timelines.
As if Musk doesn't encourage the vitriol. He's banned antifascists and unbanned right wing trolls, and he's a right wing troll himself. This is what he created, and maybe it makes business sense, polarization and anger generates engagement. But it doesn't make sense to blame the users, thats just what the platform is now.
> The incessant lazy about how Twitter is dying, for either technical or other reasons.
I'm absolutely shocked by the appetite people have for weekly stories proclaiming that their enemy is on the verge of being vanquished. So angry, and so incoherent and belligerent when confronted or even ignored. This is a person, not a demon. Also, a person with fairly median-of-the-road politics. He's gross because he's rich and you can't become rich without being unethical, and you can't remain rich without continuing to be, but there's 1000 other guys like him, most a bit less successful (government teat.)
It's bizarre behavior coming from people who are behaving increasingly strangely. I won't be surprised if they're his biggest backers 5 years from now, because he was their ally during some invasion, or helped to defeat some left-wing politician who they used to love until the television and the President said it was time to hate them.
I remember Tea Party people like this, but I honestly thought that kind of sensitivity to media could only thrive in fairly rural or exurban, churchy areas. Instead it's all the people who moved back into the city from the suburbs in the 90s-2000s and their dopey kids, ready to stand up for their DLC and W. Bush Republican kings. They just refuse to consume any information that upsets them. They think of it as assault, which is causing them trauma.
It's a social grouping that demands the right to be traumatized by what they just watched on television. Enough of the rant.
I think he's making a bunch of crazy, thoughtful plays borne out of the desperation of getting some worth out of this thing he was forced to vastly overpay for because of his own dumb mouth. But the valuation could have been wrong; it may not have predicted radical changes like Musk is trying, it was just assuming that this stable social network that was already half-merged with government was going to putter along as it was.
Charging more for participation seemed inevitable, and keeping that pricing structure fairly flat would make people more likely to get used to it. Those things also massacre trolls, socks, and spammers, and allow celebrities/influencers to exclusively interact with people who are willing to sign what they say, and to clean up their timelines. They also stopped both giving away their DM service for free (or at least split it into a premium/free plan), and stopped having a backend that allowed people who abuse by DM free access to the eyes of the people they wish to abuse - if you're not blue, you go to another tab or non-blues can be blanket blocked altogether i.e. if you want to talk to me, do it in public.
All of it sounds like an adventurous way to get money out of people's pockets, and give them some satisfaction in exchange. I don't know if people will pay for twitter, but the way that the internet is going at this moment, people are going to be paying for everything. Web3 but the only crypto involved is the Web Integrity API...
> I'm absolutely shocked by the appetite people have for weekly stories proclaiming that their enemy is on the verge of being vanquished.
Probably the worst outcome of Musk acquisition of Twitter is the weekly stories of how Twitter is Dying; Netcraft Confirms. Reminiscent of Reddit's Bernie is Winning, Ron Paul is Winning, Trump is Losing, etc. etc. More Wunscherfüllung than reality.
Many statements also far divorced from truth. Don't understand purpose. Reality is Twitter did not immediately collapse after senior engineers fired. Did not collapse after advertisers withdrew. Did not collapse after Threads launched. Did not collapse after nth prediction of collapse.
Surely posteriors must be different from priors given evidence, but Twitter is always D+14 from collapse due to various reasons. Clearly incorrect and low quality prediction.
Anyway, Esther Crawford tweet was good. People jumping on her were always wrong. She gave it a solid shot, good for her. No shame in trying.
Just like the daily articles I see proclaiming “Ukrainian counteroffensive will take Moscow by the end of the week” or “Putin will have Zelensky’s head on a pike for CNN’s cameras tomorrow”.
When the reality is that nothing much is happening aside from Ukraine slowly getting put through the meat grinder, and we likely won’t see any major action until mid-next year as the weather changes.
People have a psychological thirst for “bad” people to be punished, and by golly it had best happen now.
"At times it seemed he trusted random feedback more than the people in the room who spent their lives dedicated to tackling the problem at hand."
But also
"Twitter moved at the speed of molasses and suffered from bureaucracy"
I think this blog points at a common issue in the tech world. Many want to have a hand in the majority of decisions, but also deride at how slowly things end up moving. It's very hard to have it both ways.
That and every company generally operates the same way. Tech is not special and humans are pretty consistent.
It seems like the author really just wants their ideas to be listened to without having to put the political effort into making them listened to. Previously that effort was playing the bureaucracy and now that effort was kissing up to Musk.
Awesome post with a lot of hard-earned wisdom. It reads like a moment where a lot of "taking a step back to examine things" was done.
> Most people were good at their jobs but it was nearly impossible to fire poor performers — instead they got shuffled around to other teams because few managers had the will or resources to figure out how to get them out.
> Often it was a small cross-functional team of intrinsically motivated people who made the biggest impact by challenging some core assumption.
> I learned a ton from watching Elon up close – the good, the bad and the ugly. His boldness, passion and storytelling is inspiring, but his lack of process and empathy is painful.
And many, many more. Really spoken like someone clever, someone with a lot of understanding, someone observant, and someone very, very smart.
> I think of life as a game, and being at Twitter after the acquisition was like playing life at Level 10 on Hard Mode.
Is it safe to assume theyre a multi millionaire with a large financial buffer throughout this saga? AFAIK they were on a do-not-fire list for that very reason. I understand the compensation and golden handcuffs may be under an NDA which could explain why her wealth and compensation is never referenced as part of the story.
A wealthy person who wins even when theyre laid off yields a different perspective entirely. I think tech product development could use fewer of those types personally. It completely removes failure from the equation.
Having also been part of an acquisition in 2020, I found her assessment of Twitter internally was spot on, and was something that I believe isn’t discussed enough in the context of the Elon acquisition.
There was a great sense of shared vision and purpose internally, but this also masked a fair amount of cynicism / political machinations (launch a feature we don’t actually believe to prove it won’t work — Fleets), engineering tech debt (I worked on the iOS client) leading to extremely long product / dev cycles, and ultimately the most destructive, a sense of complacency about it all. It was ultimately why I left, even before the Elon drama.
It reads like something half-generated by GPT and half-written by literally any product manager from an S&P 500 company, with a slight tech lean.
Yes, big orgs move slow.
Yes, top performers don't like bureaucracy.
Yes, sometimes companies get sold and there are sweeping changes.
Yes, people stay at companies for the paycheck.
Yes, leaders are sometimes eccentric/erratic but also funny/charismatic (it's almost like people are complex and not a simple myers-briggs automatons).
Now I’m not one to promote the use of Twitter, but in this case Esther actually had a very nice video at the end where she reads out what her post said in her own voice and I think it comes out better that way. It is 15 minutes though, but you can just have it on in the background, most of it is just text from the post. The important thing is hearing it in Esther’s voice.
I looked earlier for it and didn’t see the video. Maybe she added it later or it didn’t load initially on my iPad?
Doesn’t really matter if it’s in the Medium post or the Twitter post, the video is worth watching/listening to.
Also logging in is apparently not a barrier to seeing Twitter now, at least through a direct link. I originally followed a TechMeme link and just double-checked, I’m not logged in anywhere.
I feel like both ends of it can be exhausting. Dealing with other people just not caring or executing poorly can easily burn you out or make you lose faith in your coworkers, but so can having everyone else working late hours and feeling the social and perhaps practical pressure to keep up. They're different flavors of exhaustion and burnout, but both can be dangerous.
Same. Possibly personality styles. When low performance, gap between personal identity of skill and output causes me pain. Prefer high-speed cultures. Feel accelerated by peers. In moments of doubt, feel invigorated by peers. Good feeling.
My experience has been that low performance cultures tend to have a lot of cynical naysayers that like to block things from happening. High performance cultures tend to have optimistic enablers who also know how to do a lot of things and are happy to share their knowledge.
It can be, but doesn't have to be. "High performance" is just too vague to try and draw inferences about individual companies.
I work somewhere with what I would consider a high performance culture. We all show up to work and consistently put in ~8 hours of high effort work. A few times a year that may mean some late nights, but mostly not, and folks usually take 4-8 weeks of vacation a year. Working around the clock is not rewarded. I find the whole setup fun and invigorating.
That said we do sometimes make a bad hiring decision and those people may end up working 80 hours a week to try to match the output everyone else. We have to let those people go.
It's easy for a high performance culture to lead to a lot of people posturing or over-working themselves. It can be for developer productivity what browsing Instagram can be for your self-image.
Money and fame can create psychological prisons which may worsen mental health conditions. We’ve all seen high profile cases of celebrities who end up with some combination of depression, paranoia, delusions of grandeur, mania and/or erratic behavior.
This is the first post I've seen that shows concern for the mental health of our leaders. I share that same concern for our elected officials, as they've been in survival mode since their popularity peaked on 9/11, just as I've run myself ragged to make rent. Political polarization has been on a steady upward climb since WWII. Now they spend so much time fundraising for reelection that they've all but abdicated their personal responsibility to do the right thing for the public. Regardless of what millionaires, billionaires and politicians say, it must be hard for them to look themselves in the mirror after doing so much for so long against the best interests of people and planet.
I view the Twitter > X situation as the cherry on top of wealth inequality. Where most of us were probably inspired to disrupt the status quo in the 90s and 2000s, now it's become just another game of survival. Whatever work I do today will just get diluted and corrupted by the status quo. It's not any one thing like the loss of Twitter driving that, but the rampant replacement of real tech by phantom tech, and more importantly the loss of our enterprising spirit as seen by the disappearance of affordable college and our industry getting replaced by finance and other rent-seeking ventures.
Understanding why wealthy and powerful people do the wrong things with their money may be one of the great problems of our time. On the other side of that is a world where tech does the work that people are forced to do today to survive, and we all begin to self-actualize and come full circle to a human being.
It's obvious that the author is very considerate and was hoping for the best, and even after being let go she has a nuanced and (to my reading) more positive stance on the company than I would expect.
And yet, there are several hints here that Elon himself is isolated in ways that I think most of us could never really relate to. When it comes to running a social media platform - something designed to connect people - this isolation might make it difficult for him to make the right decisions.
You can see this in actors, politicians, athletes, etc as well - being at the top of their game and being in the public eye makes them... weird. Their lives are far removed from the way most of us live, and it's impossible for us to really imagine ourselves in their shoes - and, maybe, vice-versa.
Often thinking about extreme outliers including billionaires makes me think of park ranger Roy Sullivan who according to Guiness World Records is the person struck by lightening more recorded times than any other human being. 7 times.
After the fourth time, Sullivan apparently started carrying around a can of water in his car at all times because his hair always caught on fire when being struck. He also started believing that a force was trying to harm him through lightening strikes and would potentially pick him out even if he was in a crowd of people.
Pretty much anyone can acknowledge that believing in such a force, or carrying around a can of water in case they get struck by lightening again is not reasonable behavior. Extremely rare events (and sequences of events) happen all the time. Given an infinite number of distinct, equally likely outcomes, all outcomes approach a probability of zero, yet one of them will still happen.
Sullivan was of course struck by lightening again a few more times, one of which he apparently even used his can of water to dose out the lightening-induced fire in his hair.
Statistically Sullivan is anomolous even considering his highly increased likelihood of being struck as a park ranger in an area prone to thunderstorms.
Unsurprisingly Sullivan was deeply psychologically affected, became reclusive out of a fear of being struck again, and eventually died by suicide.
If your personal lived experience is the freakish outlier, there is an entirely rational perspective to view the world in a different way. To see coincidences in your life not as coincidence, but as something intrinsic to you. That is how we identify patterns in ourselves — strengths and weaknesses.
I think often for billionaires, they are Roy Sullivan's of business success.
Almost anyone can fathom that given a huge population of totally ordinary people, billions of them, a handful will become outrageously wealthy. Almost nobody can fathom they may just be an ordinary person after becoming outrageously wealthy.
What I think humans aren't really equipped to psychologically accept, is that they can simultaneously be struck by success so many times and still be a typical human. Their must be forces at work meaning these preposterously unlikely string of success cannot be coincidental.
But, we know effectively zero probability events (or sequences of events) of people being succesful must be happening all the time. Absolutely they may be the Virginian Park Rangers of success in that they work in the right place and the right time with the right behavioural quirks to be struck by success at a much higher rate.
But in hindsight getting struck by zero-ish probability events almost always feels, to the person being stuck, entirely caused by comprehensible, intrinsic forces rather than attributable to external factors and the nature of probability.
Musk thinking his instincts should be entrusted tight control of man-hours equivalent to all the lifetimes of a small country's population seems almost humble in that case. Why should the experienced insider have a say? How many times have they been struck by success? Surely not as many.
It's just the equivalent of Roy Sullivan carrying his can of water.
>I think of life as a game, and being at Twitter after the acquisition was like playing life at Level 10 on Hard Mode
I may feel hard but it's still easy mode compared to poor people in third world countries or people in warzones, especially if it doesn't matter to you if you get fired or not.
This just reads as you having to get to say what you just said. You’re explaining a very self-evident concept to a bunch of intelligent adults.
Yes, negating someone’s personal issues by saying someone has it worse can be unhelpful. No, working long hours when you don’t even care if you’re getting fired or not isn’t “playing life on hard mode at level 10”. Unless your hard mode level 10 is someone else’s Tuesday, of course.
At a certain threat level, you are on level 10 Hard Mode, especially if your life is in danger. So starving and starving and tortured are both level 10 Hard mode
If you can afford a sabbatical after you lost your job, you are not in Hard mode.
I don't invalidate suffering, but if your suffering isn't live threatening, you are definitely not on level 10 in Hard mode, that's more like level 8 in Medium. Especially if you can afford a sabbatical after you are fired.
I assume that by Hard Mode she meant "hard for an affluent Western democracy". I doubt she was pretending that working late is like getting shot at.
Nothing personal to you, I'm an equal offender with this stuff, but this kind of "well, actually..." nit-picking on HN drives me nuts. If you could harness the power of smart people to correct other people's lack of specificity, it would be better than fusion.
> At times it seemed he trusted random feedback more than the people in the room who spent their lives dedicated to tackling the problem at hand. I never figured out why and remain puzzled by it.
I think this bit here drives the love-hate views on him. Most mature orgs are overly bureaucratic with small visions and strongly conservative views about what can be accomplished. Some play-act at having big visions for marketing and ego, but internally few line employees believe that they are achievable, and there is rarely a plan that could achieve the vision.
Musk seems to come in - similarly to Trump - and simply disbelieves the expertise of the managerial class, and comes with enough accumulated power to bulldoze them instead of playing political games. The managerial class is the connective tissue of all but the tiniest of orgs, so encountering them is a given.
The pitfall to me is that he extends that to all expertise - engineering, science, marketing. His opening belief seems to be that most professionals are bullshit artists who spend their whole day lying to justify their jobs. And while the professionals are often wrong about what organizations of people can achieve, they are much less often wrong about how engineering needs to work, and they are hardly every wrong about the core science.
So my general view is that he is pathologically convinced that everyone but him is a parasite. And in a world full of managerial parasites, that's a pretty effective strategy.
But he can't turn it off once he breaks through the connective tissue and gets to the actual expertise. It doesn't matter if you are an expert on cave diving, or scalable architecture, or the behaviors of your core customers. I think it says more about our organizations than it does about him that just spamming a strategy of saying "I think you're a parasite with no actual expertise" and only believing in someone in extremely rare cases can make you the richest man in the world.
>The pitfall to me is that he extends that to all expertise - engineering, science, marketing. His opening belief seems to be that most professionals are bullshit artists who spend their whole day lying to justify their jobs. And while the professionals are often wrong about what organizations of people can achieve, they are much less often wrong about how engineering needs to work, and they are hardly every wrong about the core science.
If you see the teardowns of the Tesla cars you see engineering designs that are not done in other currently selling products. In fact now we see competitors playing catch up by copying Tesla designs. That alone disproves your theory. Whatever he is doing, Tesla/SpaceX seem to be forward thinking in terms of engineering.
> Elon has an exceptional talent for tackling hard physics-based problems but products that facilitate human connection and communication require a different type of social-emotional intelligence.
This feels like the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. The author encountered Elon working in their area of expertise, saw that Elon was wildly incompetent, and recognized that in this specific case Elon Musk was not a great leader. But then they looked at other areas where they didn't have specific knowledge or expertise and still assumed that Musk was a genius leader in those other areas.
This right here is the million dollar question. I spent years following the Tesla drama and watching subs like /r/realTesla tear into Tesla's decisions. This sub was filled with "industry people" and well the naysayers have been screaming from the tops of hills since 2010 about Teslas mistakes. Most people ignored them because they are not in the auto industry. This quote from Bob Lutz explained it perfectly: https://youtu.be/GXJnS9RgKsg?t=2687
I watched how they managed to will the Model X into production when it should have never have been built. They dug themselves into a giant grave by insisting on those falcon wing doors but they survived. I watched how they totally botched the Model 3 launch when it should have been the crowning achievement that showed that Tesla was now an established car brand. The amount of drama that occurred at the time was insane: making cars in "tents" in the parking lot, having a terrible body design, trying to force automation in all the wrong areas. In all these cases, the naysayers were proven wrong by Elon's ability to outlast his/his team's mistakes but at the same time they also managed to challenge assumptions that the industry thought was "the right way" to do things. Now we have incumbents copying Tesla's approaches to solving some problems.
In the end who was right? I never really did get an answer to that. As a software guy I thought let me stay in my lane and trust the automotive industry people because thats what they do for a living. Before the pandemic I was so sure that following established industry insiders was the way to get insight. Now, I dont know anymore. But I can't reconcile the fact that as a software guy I know that the way Twitter was handled was a complete mess. Is this just another attempt at bungling along until it actually works? I guess the real deciding factor is does he have enough runway to keep plodding along until he figures it out?
I never worked at Twitter but I can relate to a lot of what was mentioned about the culture, especially the "you have to be a politician" bit. Seems like all large tech companies are the same after all.
I know we're not supposed to comment on the mechanics of the website or whatever, but did anyone else reach to click the X to make the login banner go away?
Every section about the CEO just makes me think of Gavin Belson from the Silicon Valley series, surrounding himself with "yes men" and firing people who make him feel like he might be a little wrong.
> Colleagues openly talked about how Twitter was being sold because leadership didn’t have conviction in their own plan or ability to fix longstanding problems.
I think, in this case, the colleagues were wrong. Twitter was sold because an idiot offered far more money than it was worth. If I have a coffee shop that earns me $100,000 in profit per year, and somebody offers to buy it from me for $10 million, I'm going to sell it to them even if I think the coffee shop is doing great and has the potential to grow.
Both are probably true: Twitter leadership could not focus or execute, and the Board also wanted to close the deal. What’s likely missing from the employee perspective is that Twitter’s inherent non-focus actually attracted fresh content and contributors at some scale. Also that the company burn rate and debt was a threat at a very different scale.
Agree that the offering price and foolishness of the buyer was too good to pass up, but the particularities of Twitter leadership also helped set up an opportunity cost in the overall deal. Twitter never pursued ads as ruthlessly as Facebook.
Yes. If Twitter had attempted to remain independent, they probably could have, but the board members would have spent the next several years of their lives in depositions for the inevitable shareholder lawsuits. The offer was so rich, they didn’t really have much of a choice but to take it.
The company was virtually static for a decade. It was a long running joke that they weren't able to ship and the article does a good job of explaining why.
Also, weirdly, she references twitter's customers as being distinct group from their advertisers. The fact that she does not mention who those customers might be however is not surprising.
Isaacson did the same thing with Steve Jobs, he followed him around for a long time, getting a sense for his day to day, on top of interviewing the people that spent the most time with him. That's one thing that makes Isaacson one of the best biographers ever, he goes to the source whenever possible and gets candid interviews with the right people.
This is a very well written article and I really enjoyed reading it.
However, I do think the author has romanticized how a privately owned company has exploited, abused and treated their workers like objects. Looking back of the past months of Elon's tenure, its been shocking to see how he violated so many legal and social covenants regarding how an employer should treat staff.
The true insult of it all is that Musk did not need to be so brutal on everyone. He could have restructured the company without the cruelty, drama and chaos. He could have been the reincarnation of Jack Welsh (in his glory days).
The author, being independently wealthy and in a safe position, didn't have the same downside risk as most of the people around them. Amusingly the author lacks a certain empathy through this romanticism, ironic given other parts of the article.
>He’s a complicated person with an unfathomable amount of financial and geopolitical power which is why humanity needs him to err on the side of goodness, rather than political divisiveness and pettiness.
It's more of an example why nobody should have that much power and money. We should depend on which side one person chooses.
It's like a monopoly of money and power and we know monopolies are bad.
I thought this was an absurd statement in her post. Maybe our societies do exist only at the sufferance of billionaires, but I sure hope not. And if the continued existence of our society is in fact totally dependent on whether Elon Musk chooses to act out of the compassion and goodness of his heart, then we lost the plot a long time ago and probably deserve whatever we have coming.
Few clicked on the original because most don't know who Esther Crawford is. The title of the article seems much more prudent than a random name and a vague quote.
There's a lot of good stuff in this post. You should read it for yourself before commenting here. (Word count is 2413 in case you're wondering.) I do want to call out one very questionable aspect:
> I’ve pulled many all-nighters in my career
> Sometimes I get asked about how I felt when I got laid off, and the truth is it was the best gift I’ve ever received.
> Going on a sabbatical afterward has been exactly what I needed to decompress and I’m finally feeling rested and relaxed.
In my long career, I've never pulled an all-nighter, and I don't think that we should ever allow capitalists to deprive us of the essentials, such as sleep. Musk doesn't give a damn about you or your sacrifices, and obviously he fired Crawford anyway, despite the all-nighters. Always put yourself, your physical and mental health, before your employer's profit. Crawford said, "I think of life as a game", but it's not really a game, which you'll eventually learn the hard way as you get older. You have only one life, and you need to pace yourself, protect yourself. What's the point of working so hard that you render yourself incapable of working anymore, burning yourself out and needing a long period where you cannot generate any income? I've seen this time and again, but it's actually counterproductive. Please don't pull those all-nighters, it only encourages the worst exploitation from management. Certainly don't be proud of your needless sacrifices.
> Certainly don't be proud of your needless sacrifices.
Who exactly are you to judge what she should or shouldn't be proud of ?
When she quotes :
> I’ve pulled many all-nighters in my career
She goes as far as adding a full explanation that you - conveniently - redacted:
> I’ve pulled many all-nighters in my career and also when I was a student for something that mattered to me. I don’t regret putting in long hours or being ambitious, and feel proud of how far I’ve come from where I started thanks in part to that type of work ethic.
To me this reads as someone who is perfectly happy with the decisions she took. You do not have to share same work ethics as she does and you don't have to make the same choices. But you have absolutely no right to take it away from her or to dictate what she can be proud of or happy with.
> Who exactly are you to judge what she should or shouldn't be proud of ?
It's not about what "she" specifically should be proud of. It's about all of us, employees and our relationship to management.
> She goes as far as adding a full explanation that you - conveniently - redacted
I literally said, "You should read it for yourself before commenting here. (Word count is 2413 in case you're wondering.)" So the comment about conveniently redacting seems a bit absurd.
> You do not have to share same work ethics as she does and you don't have to make the same choices.
Nobody who knows me has ever questioned my work ethic. But speaking of ethics, I feel that it's unethical for management to ask for, encourage, or condone this kind of needless personal sacrifice by employees. Management deadlines are nearly always totally arbitrary and only benefit management, not the employees.
I also noted that it's counterproductive, individually. You can't win a marathon by running a series of sprints.
> But you have absolutely no right to take it away from her or to dictate what she can be proud of or happy with.
You're making this way too personal. It's intended to be general advice, directed not toward Crawford, who isn't here (I don't think?) but rather to the readers of this comment. The problematic aspect of what Crawford said is the public glorification of needless sacrifice, not whether she specifically is (currently) personally happy or proud of it.
By the way, note that the infamous sleeping bag photo was infamous precisely because she posted it publicly for everyone, as some kind of model for work. And she was after all a manager, setting an example for others. It wasn't just a private photo she took for her album at home that she could look back on later and reminisce fondly about "the good old days".
She also specifically says that anything she asked her employees to do, she'd do herself, but if you read that backwards, the implication is that she is setting up a cultural expectation here: to achieve a tight deadline, if necessary, you should sleep in the office.
Which is not only an incredibly unhealthy expectation (for individuals who will burn themselves out for someone else's schedule and benefit; for team leaders who will destroy any sense of team cohesion and motivation in the long run; and for managers who would get more results from a slower but more consistent pace), but it also doesn't seem to have won her anything in this case - she got fired, and it doesn't sound like she was particularly listened to or respected by Musk, despite trying to provide genuine insight and wisdom.
It's not a questionable aspect to be honest. This is her experience and decision.
> I don't think that we should ever allow capitalists to deprive us of the essentials, such as sleep
Your strong claim is actually questionable.
I can already think of one realistic scenario where pulling an all-nighter is a sensible choice like: you are on an H1B visa and, if you are fired, you would be beyond fucked with your life, so you pull an all nighter.
> I can already think of one realistic scenario where pulling an all-nighter is a sensible choice like: you are on an H1B visa and, if you are fired, you would be beyond fucked with your life, so you pull an all nighter.
Perhaps. But this point still stands: "Certainly don't be proud of your needless sacrifices."
I suspect that tech companies like to hire people on visas precisely because they can be abused like this.
Abuse is a strong word for a situation where you earn 30x more than what you would earn back home, and the work culture is actually better even with some all-nighters.
We must either move back to our home country or avoid doing all-nighters. We have no free will to make our own decision. We are to be labeled as an abused person forever.
You said yourself: "if you are fired, you would be beyond fucked with your life, so you pull an all nighter." If you don't think that's abuse, I don't know what else to say.
> We must either move back to our home country or avoid doing all-nighters. We have no free will to make our own decision. We are to be labeled as an abused person forever.
I really don't understand what you're saying here, especially about "free will". My impression is that you seem to be implying with your response that bosses demanding all-nighters is fine, but a mere critical comment from a stranger on Hacker News has equal authority and power, somehow even worse and immoral. But that would be quite overdramatic, so maybe I'm misunderstanding.
Says bad things about their moderation; this is literally the worst video in the world and any other large company would have it autobanned instead of leaving it up for days. Though I expect the mandatory legal reporting still works.
If your plan is anything other what I said, it is either a crime or it will cause people to commit crimes by seeing the material in question. You need a lawyer, not your intuition.
He's providing a platform and cover for a child pornographer, live, in realtime, in public. There is something profoundly wrong in your worldview that's going to snap in one direction or another, and it's probably time for some self reflection.
Too often people believe that if they write and think in a detached and dispassionate way that their approach is intrinsically superior. Terms like "partisan pitfalls" and "irrational extremism" stake a claim that these things this person disagrees with are inherently bad.
Musk may be brilliant in engineering (Many claim he doesn't, but I'm willing to give him at least some credit for the clearly revolutionary technical advancements both Tesla and SpaceX have achieved. I think the idea that both companies only thrive in spite of him is patently ludicrous.), but he has a teenager-level emotional maturity when it comes to social and societal issues. And it shows when it comes to his explicit tolerance and encouragement of discrimination on Twitter.
Esther, meanwhile, is an admitted escapee of a genuine cult, that somehow missed all the signals, and dove into the same patterns headfirst when it came to Twitter post-Musk. I'm not going to psychologically diagnose someone from afar, but I suspect she needs help of the type neither Musk nor Twitter nor Hackernews can provide.
> I'm not going to psychologically diagnose someone from afar, but I suspect she needs help of the type neither Musk nor Twitter nor Hackernews can provide.
I'm not a fan of this flavor of discourse, and frankly find it offensive. But I will tolerate it.
I appreciate your callout, and recognize my callousness. However, I think I can clarify it somewhat.
This is a person who formed an early part of her internet identity as an "escaper from a cult". She wrote articles about her time in a cult, and how she didn't realize she was in it until she got out.
Then Musk bought twitter, fired thousands, and she excitedly posted pictures of herself sleeping in the office, and for a few weeks was Musk's primary mouthpiece on Twitter about upcoming changes, posting product updates first.
Then he fired her too.
Some people have addictive personalities and is why they have to learn to go cold turkey from any type of addictive stimulant. Some find it so difficult to escape that they simply must replace one habit for another (a lot of recovered heroin addicts end up smokers).
Likewise, there are certain mental and personality attributes that make some people more susceptible to cults. Proper cults, or even more societally acceptable ones like religion or multi-level marketing.
The author has a demonstrated track record of this, and as such is difficult to see as an impartial observer of her time at Twitter because it is necessarily coloured by this lens.
I can't quite articulate it, but I find the Paradox of Intolerance to be wrong (or at least, incomplete).
It seems to me that, in the context of Popper's idea, what should be tolerated vs. what should not can be largely subjective and is often just weaponized against ideological opponents.
And yet, it's also self-evidently true at the margins -- we cannot tolerate Nazism or those who call for ethnic cleansing and so on.
But it's so overused on social media as a way to say - "I find your politics to be gross, and I will use the Paradox of Tolerance to claim moral superiority."
For example, I have seen people claim you should not tolerate Republicans or fundamentalist Christians or figures like Jordan Peterson. That seems quite extreme to me, as these are all within the American mainstream.
I think you articulated it quite well, and I hope you see this reply so we could continue talking about it.
I also am very uncomfortable with it, because like many progressive ideas like this that are based on value-based judgement it is susceptible to be abused by anyone with different values. (Even, in the extreme case, by actual Nazis who may claim that ethnic cleansing and racial purity IS a moral virtue that is worth pursuing).
I also don't know how to draw the line, but I would proclaim that it's fine to draw A line. The truth is there is no such thing as a universal human common sense on such things. Countries and societies and patterns draw out of the median expectations of that society. Some cultures are more collective and collaborative, some are more individualistic.
Which is why in the US, free speech is considered more sacred than stopping Holocaust denial propaganda. But most of the developed world believes otherwise. I see both perspectives (and am personally in the latter camp, because I believe nuance is important and the US seeks very harsh lines in the sand that I don't think are practical)
So I don't think there is a universal answer for what you can or cannot choose to Intolerate (not a word?). Canada is typically closer to the US with its perspectives on the subject than Western Europe, but it also bans holocaust denial, and considers deliberate denial of trans people's preferred gender identity as the same class of discrimination as against gay people or black people. Yet in the most recent years the conservatives have settled in a very comfortable sweet spot of hate speech that isn't illegal but not supported by most Canadians. It's the same message as in the US - the whole "Trans people are pedophile groomers", and we are wrestling with what its doing to our society. For Canada, Jordan Peterson IS quite extreme. He started with occasional nuanced takes on male vs female gender roles, and a thought-provoking (even if i ultimately disagreed with him) conversation about whether recognition of pronouns was "compelled speech". But at this point, even you must admit that he's embraced the full wing of the American internet-savvy right wing.
Which is where we come to my last point - Shapiro, Walsh, and Peterson may be within the American "mainstream" but American mainstream is wildly outlandish compared to the rest of the world. It's hard to treat the Republican party as a serious group of voters when 54% of them would still gladly vote for Donald Trump today after everything that's happened over the last 7 years.
1. The paradox of tolerance is itself a paradox. None of the modern "solutions" embraced by partisans (most notably, the complete abandonment of tolerance) are anywhere close to a real solution.
2. On one hand, you accuse the GP of cargo cult intellectualism, on the other hand, you "did not" psychologically diagnose the OP.
1. It doesn't proclaim to be a solution. It just points out the counterintuitive outcome of unfiltered tolerance leads to authoritarianism and intolerance.
And as you point out, the "solutions" are themselves intolerant, and if abused or do not match the expectations of the rest of the populace, also create something that feels like authoritarianism and intolerance to some of the population.
When confronted with this conclusion, you have two options:
A) Decide that authoritarianism and intolerance is inevitable, and simply aim to be on the right side of repression, aligning yourself with whoever is the most powerful and violent.
B) Try to understand what level of intolerance is the relevant acceptable one for the majority of your culture/population, and strive to find a balance, even if it's not the balance a different culture/people's/nation on the other side of the planet would take.
So much coverage of Twitter since the Musk acquisition is entangled with partisan politics, ultimately in part thanks to Musk provoking such a reaction. That makes this post feel ever more illuminating and thoughtful—it avoids the partisan pitfalls and irrational extremism seen in virtually every other article on the topic.
I too don't agree with many of Musk's decisions with Twitter/X. I don't like the new name and thus far refuse to use it. I don't like the ads I see as a Twitter user. I have not (yet) paid for Twitter.
But on the other hand, I am thoroughly disinterested in the unhinged vitriol I see so often from Musk's haters. The incessant lazy discourse about how Twitter is dying, for either technical or other reasons. The ridiculous blindness to the awfulness of other social networks when critiquing Twitter (have you ever seen Reddit or Facebook?).
It's a shame journalists have been largely unable to cover Twitter as well as this former insider and I am thankful to Crawford for publishing this.