Let’s start with this tweet from Esther Crawford, Director of Product Management at Twitter. It’s said Crawford is so loyal to the company she often sleeps in her office rather than go home.
The worst take you could have from watching me go all-in on Twitter 2.0 is that my optimism or hard work was a mistake. Those who jeer & mock are necessarily on the sidelines and not in the arena. I’m deeply proud of the team for building through so much noise & chaos. ?
— Esther Crawford ? (@esthercrawford) February 27, 2023
Musk fired her today. She must have posted this right after being fired. I take it she’s not ready to go through the stages of grief yet. More from TechCrunch:
Recall that Crawford had been swept up by Musk’s hardcore takeover of Twitter last year, even boasting on the platform about sleeping at the office to handle round-the-clock demands from her new boss.
The layoffs came this weekend after Twitter employees realized they had been cut off from using Slack. While it later came out that Twitter hadn’t paid its Slack bill on time, that’s not why the platform went down. The Platformer reported that someone at Twitter manually shut off access. Many employees worried that this was the first sign of layoffs to come, and while correlation does not equal causation, an entire company being cut off from their main mode of communication as layoffs started dropping like bombs caused confusion and panic all around.
At this point, why would any competent person not absolutely desperate for a job go to work for Elon Musk? Alex Kirshner writes at Slate:
Crawford was the head of Twitter Blue, the subscription service that Musk has hyped as a key business plank but that has not attracted subscribers in large numbers. She had been as public as anyone in her embrace of Musk’s grindset cultural demands. When people pointed out that maybe it wasn’t a good idea for a leader to promote sleeping at the office, she stood up for it in an extensive thread. Musk, who brags about not sleeping much, probably loved it. Not four months later, Crawford’s payoff for going extremely hardcore was that Musk fired her.
They may well all have been Esther Crawfords. Those latest 200 Twitter layoffs had all remained at the company, or taken jobs there, after Musk made his demands of Twitter and its workplace culture quite clear. All of these people were prepared to stick around long after Musk had slashed everything but his expectations for their performance. These were the workers who were all in. There are many fair reasons for a person to stay in a demanding job with an unsatisfiable boss—money, health insurance, a fear of unemployment, and immigration status all come to mind—but Musk didn’t even give them the choice for long.
It will probably happen again, to more employees, at all of Musk’s companies. (Twitter is not the first Musk firm, or even the most troubling, to have staff sleeping on the floor.) The CEO glorifies the grind in which someone gives nearly their entire self over to their work. But that commitment isn’t a two-way street. …
Now that the world knows this, good luck hiring the best and brightest, dude.
A few days ago Musk fired a top engineer because views of his Tweets had gone down:
Earlier this month, when Twitter CEO Elon Musk locked his Twitter account to personally test whether locked tweets generated more views than public tweets, many wondered why he didn’t just ask a Twitter engineer how the platform worked. A new report says Musk did meet with engineers—after his test—and that meeting led him to impulsively fire an engineer who attempted to provide an alternative explanation for why Musk’s tweet views might be declining.
The meeting took place on Tuesday, according to the tech newsletter Platformer. Bringing together engineers and advisers, Musk asked his team why his account, which has “more than 100 million followers,” would only be getting “tens of thousands of impressions.”
“This is ridiculous,” Musk said, according to multiple sources.
A principal engineer stepped forward to explain that the decline may be due to easily chartable waning public interest in Musk. To back up the engineer, Twitter employees provided internal data that corresponded with a Google Trends chart, Platformer reported.
You know the rest. Musk threw a fit and fired the engineer for telling him the truth. And, sure enough, a few days after that the Verge reported Twitter is just showing everyone all of Elon Musk’s tweets now.
The latest, coming out after Scott Adams’s declaration that Black people are a “hate group” that White people should stay away from —
“The media is racist,” was Musk’s response to the widespread decision to terminate the Dilbert strip. “For a very long time, US media was racist against non-white people, now they’re racist against whites and Asians.”
He went on to compare US media with elite educational institutions in America where he claimed the “same thing happened”.
It was also reported that Musk deleted a tweet in which he responded to a comment from Adams about his comic strip being dropped, saying, “What exactly are they complaining about?”
Musk is said to have Asperger’s, which partly explains why he is so tone deaf. But that doesn’t explain why he’s such a jerk.
In other news, I see that Tesla stock value has surged recently, making Musk the richest person in the world again. It’s not clear to me why that happened. Today we learned that some of Tesla shareholders are suing Tesla for “overstating the effectiveness and safety of their electric vehicles’ Autopilot and Full Self-Driving technologies,” it says here. So let’s see what that does to the stock price.
As far as I know, the source that says Elon Musk has Asperger’s is… Elon Musk. Literally no medical professional that I can tell has ever diagnosed him. He said he has it on SNL. That’s the sum total of the claim.
in other words, it’s more BS he made up because he thinks it gives him a pass somehow.
Didn't Eric Carmen make a lot of money selling ass burgers?
Musk may or may not suffer from Asperger's Syndrome.
But Musk definitely has ASSpredator's Syndrome!
That's where everyone has a miserable life/work balance because of the the predatory behavior of the insufferable ASS who has ASSpredator's Syndrome – and who is ALWAYS the boss/owner.
Musk, like tRUMP = ASSHOLE!!!!!
***Sigh…***
So many little men, and all of them in search of a balcony they can call their own.
This last line is kinda comes from the GREAT Jimmy Breslin's take on Rudy Guiliani (while he was still a DA):
"A little man in search of a balcony."
And that's the greatest description of Rudy EVER!
Elon Musk sucks, which is why I wouldn't think of owning one of his non-union rat cars. Plus they are the ugliest cars I think I've ever seen? Unfortunate that the EV revolution has been tethered to his gigantic ego? As far as twitter is concerned I never understood why anyone would want the aggravation, who fucking cares what 20 billion people think, so I don't have to quit twitter because I never joined. The only way Musk could ever make a positive contribution to society is if he was taxed at 95%, other than that just he's a waste of air.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWqxFMUnskw
The cars are just flat dangerous. Why are people are people so awed by this jerk?
WTF gives with these drones working thanklessly for an egomaniac who has NO understanding of the business that he's driving into the ground? Musk thinks he's something special, superior to mere mortals. You see the same arrogance in Trump and his compulsion to lie about golf and the size of his inauguration crowd. (You thought I was gonna mention his fascination and exaggeration of the size of something else.)
There's a compulsion in many people to be a servile drone to an Alpha male. There are people who believe these arrogant pricks are better than everyone else. I have speculated that many of the Confederate soldiers were fighting for the Southern aristocracy – not against freeing the slaves. Those plantation owners and their heirs were exempted from the compulsory army service that the regular white man in any of the southern states was caught up in.
What I'm describing (perhaps badly) is hard for any liberal to wrap their head around. We're outraged by the mindset of (if Golag will allow me) "the little man in search of a balcony" and tend to overlook the crowd that does gather under the balcony to applaud. It's not just that they are deceived (that's possible in the beginning) they operate in denial of the lies, faults, failures, and criminality of the "little man" long after any reasonable doubt is gone.
The corollary psychosis is the abused woman who makes excuses for the evidence of abuse to protect the abuser and his reputation. But for Musk, there are limits. These aren't coal miners who must dig or freeze to death in the winter. An educated person who has work/business options isn't the best host for this mental illness. Musk will keep the numbers private but when/if he has to replace workers he laid off, he might find it difficult. And expensive.
(I've been a systems analyst – some programmers will work 'for' Musk as freelance programmers with no intention of staying. They work on contract, cash up front, and when the contract expires Musk has to renegotiate. Or they move on, which is fine with them. This is far more expensive than in-house programmers but you can down-size without paying severance and unemployment. You really can't push them around without getting into breach-of-contract problems. I'd love it if former employees form a freelance company as the only source with the expertise to keep Twitter running – and skin Musk alive.)
My oldest grandson is on the spectrum: Asperger's, autism; is tone deaf, a bit of a jerk, and quite adept at using it as an excuse to be tone deaf and a bit of a jerk.
Also about Musk, I believe that he is a Russian asset, he has purposely allowed almost every Putin propaganda spreader back on twitter after they were banned over the past few years. He didn't just let them back on he is promoting their tweets? There is no explanation for this other than he wants to help Putin. So Musk, Carlson, Ailes, MTG, et-al they are all in the same boat in my opinion, hopefully one day they will all stand trial for being complicit in war crimes!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMO3MJSns3g
Remember, along with "asset" there is also "useful idiot", … man-child could be either one.