The breathtaking cluelessness of Elon Musk

[themickey]

Musk got $82 billion pay deal to ensure his ‘tenacity’ for Tesla, chair says
By Randall Chase and Jef Feeley November 16, 2022
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...nacity-for-tesla-chair-says?srnd=premium-asia

Tesla Chairwoman Robyn Denholm told a Delaware judge the electric carmaker got good value by agreeing to pay Elon Musk about $US55 billion ($82 billion) to be its CEO, even though he was splitting time on ventures like building a colony on Mars or selling perfume and flamethrowers.

Musk, the world’s richest person, had the “vision and tenacity” to turn Tesla from a start-up into one of the world’s most-valuable companies, the Australian tech executive testified on Tuesday during the second day of trial over a lawsuit by a Tesla investor who claims the compensation was excessive. Denholm said she was less concerned about how much time Musk would commit to the company than in the results he could bring.

“We didn’t talk about time,” Robyn Denholm said when asked about her discussions with Musk about the compensation plan, which didn’t include any requirement on how much time he would devote to the company, as opposed to his other business ventures.

Tesla chair Robyn Denholm has defended the lavish pay packet for billionaire Elon Musk.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

“He was focused on achieving results, not on any quantum of time he would need to spend,” Denholm said. She added that she doesn’t know how many hours Musk — who last month took over Twitter after paying $US44 billion for the social media platform — devotes to Tesla.

 

[themickey]

Hopefully if Musk sends workers to Mars, he doesnt then fire them on the spot.

 

[themickey]

Former SpaceX Employees File Labor Rights Claim Against Elon Musk
By Elizabeth Stimmel 11/17/22
https://www.ibtimes.com/former-spacex-employees-file-labor-rights-claim-against-elon-musk-3637425

Eight former SpaceX workers have filed an unfair labor practices charge with the National Labor Relations Board saying they were illegally fired for criticizing Elon Musk's Twitter behavior.

Employees wrote an open letter in June calling on SpaceX to condemn Musk's "harmful twitter behavior." Musk had tweeted a denial to a news report about a sexual harassment allegation against him. A private jet flight attendant alleged that during a massage Musk exposed himself and touched the attendant's thigh without her consent before offering her a horse in exchange for sex. SpaceX paid $250,000 in severance to the attendant.

"Elon's behavior in the public sphere is a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us, particularly in recent weeks," the letter first obtained by the Verge, stated.

SpaceX employees have cited a work culture that allows sexual harassment and sexism to continue.

"To be clear: recent events are not isolated incidents," employees wrote. "They are emblematic of a wider culture that underserves many of the people who enable SpaceX's extraordinary accomplishments."

The letter asked SpaceX to "publicly address and condemn Elon's harmful Twitter behavior."

A day after the letter was circulated, SpaceX gathered 20 engineers to discuss the founder and CEO. According to two SpaceX employees, the meeting quickly became heated. Jon Edwards, the Vice President of Falcon Launch Vehicles at SpaceX reportedly called the letter an "extremist act" and announced the termination of five employees involved in writing it, according to the New York Times.

Two employees reported that Edwards declared, "SpaceX is Elon and Elon is SpaceX."

According to employees, the letter led to the termination of nine workers.

SpaceX was founded by Musk in 2002 and is based in Hawthorne, Calif. The company has 11,000 employees and is making attempts to bring humans to Mars to habitat the planet.

Musk, who is currently the Chief Executive Officer of Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX, has come under criticism recently for a litany of reasons.

After purchasing Twitter for $44 billion last month, Musk laid off thousands of employees, many of whom claim they were not given adequate notice which is required under California law. The billionaire has also been accused of firing Twitter employees for making insubordinate comments about Musk.......

 

[Overnight]

A horse in exchange for sex? Why not?!? So long as it was not sex with the horse.

 

[themickey]

Twitter 2.0 Shuts Down Offices, Blocks Badge Access Amid Employee Resignations: Report
By Marvie Basilan Chorawan 11/17/22
https://www.ibtimes.com/twitter-20-...ess-amid-employee-resignations-report-3637584

KEY POINTS

• All Twitter offices were shut down till Monday, but the internal system remained active
• Musk and his team reportedly spoke to some employees who were "critical" to Twitter
• Resignations likely hit 1,000 after employees were asked to comply with long working hours or resign

Elon Musk's Twitter has reportedly temporarily shut down all of its offices and also blocked employee badge access as the company deals with the increasing number of resignations......

 

[murray t turtle]

Hopefully if Musk sends workers to Mars, he doesnt then fire them on the spot.

%%
HOPEFULLY, he will fire them like all the deadwood + uneeded workers @Twitter.
Especially the Twitter censors. All the liberal loons @ NPR hating his actions seem to confirm the wisdom of his moves

 

[themickey]

Twitter staff wipeout under Elon Musk spurs concern for site’s decay

Mr Elon Musk this week asked employees to sign on to a “hardcore” version of their jobs or leave. PHOTO: EPA-EFE

Updated 7 Hours Ago Bloomberg

SAN FRANCISCO – Twitter’s mass exodus of employees leaves the platform vulnerable to a broad range of malfunctions. The social network will succumb to a major glitch at some point, technologists predict. It’s just a matter of when.

The social network’s staff has shrunk to a fraction of its size since Mr Elon Musk took over at the end of October, through layoffs and resignations.

Mr Musk this week asked employees to sign on to a more “hardcore” version of their jobs or leave; astonishing numbers opted out.

Multiple teams that were critical for keeping the service up and running are completely gone, or borrowing engineers from other groups, according to people familiar with the matter. That includes infrastructure teams to keep the main feed operational and maintain tweet databases.

#RIPTwitter trended on the site, as users and departed employees predicted an imminent shutdown and said their goodbyes.

“It’s a pretty dark picture,” said Mr Glenn Hope, an engineer who worked at Facebook and Instagram and who earlier tweeted a list of possible scenarios that could cause failures on the social network. “The amount of tribal knowledge lost is simply staggering, possibly unprecedented.”

That doesn’t mean that Twitter will shut down completely and unexpectedly. More likely, remaining employees will be unable to fix issues in the code, and the site will start to lose some functionality, or be vulnerable to a major hack, technologists said.

In general, computer servers don’t run on autopilot. A platform like Twitter requires all sorts of software to keep it running – from the front-end website that people scroll to the back-end databases that store billions of tweets – and can be stressed during major global events like this weekend’s World Cup.

The complexity of these systems means they may require constant tweaking, maintenance and institutional knowledge of the way things are set up. It gets even more complicated if software was built under rushed or less-than-ideal circumstances, said Dr Chester Wisniewski, principal research scientist at the cybersecurity company Sophos.

“It’s a nightmare scenario for almost any firm, especially a tech firm,” Dr Wisniewski said.

Rot over time
It is natural for network security at a platform like Twitter to rot over time, as flaws in the company’s code base are found and nobody is left to fix them promptly, according to Mr Alec Muffett, a software engineer who has worked in host and network security for more than 30 years, including at Facebook. The most plausible risks to Twitter’s network security now are account takeovers or privacy breaches, he said.

And with far fewer engineers left at the company to troubleshoot operations issues, there is a risk that some critical system at Twitter will crash.

“Like a table losing a leg, important parts of the site – or even the whole site – will fall over,” Mr Muffett said. Users may lose the ability to retweet or log in, for instance.

If a site is unreliable, people may give up on using it. Advertisers might also lose confidence that the promotions they’re paying for are going to show up in front of the right people, further threatening Twitter’s financial future.

There are other concerns beyond keeping the site available, according to Mr Hope.

With fewer employees, Twitter may have a harder time grappling with thorny issues like content-takedown requests from foreign governments, the physical security of its data centres, or major events that lead to spikes in traffic and further tax its systems.

Then there’s the issue of user harm. If there aren’t enough adults in the room to constrain the poor behaviour of some users, as Mr Muffett put it, it could lead to a surge in upsetting trending content and abuse, further alienating visitors and advertisers.

Much of the company’s trust and safety team declined to continue their employment at Twitter past Mr Musk’s deadline for employees on Thursday, according to people familiar with the matter.

About half of the company’s information operations and threat disruptions teams, which stamp out foreign disinformation campaigns on the platform, also resigned, according to a person familiar.

This leaves entire swaths of Twitter’s global audience without content moderation, including the entire Asia-Pacific region, the person said, except for one contractor who was hired to help with spam in the Korean market.

Spike in outages
On Thursday evening, just after hundreds of Twitter employees resigned from the company, the website Downdetector.com, which gathers reports of websites not working, showed a spike in outages at Twitter. The issues continued into Friday, according to data on Downdetector’s website.

Meanwhile, Mr Musk posted late on Thursday evening that the site had “just hit another all-time high in Twitter usage lol”.

Mr Matt Navarra, a social media consultant and media analyst, said while more people have likely been on Twitter in recent days, it was not necessarily a sign of any sustainable growth.

“The analogy people use is rubbernecking like with a car accident or a trainwreck, and we’ve seen similar activity on platforms like Twitter when crises occurred,” he said, adding there was no evidence for “quality” or “sustainability” of growth on the platform, no matter what Mr Musk said.

And for Mr Hope, the former Facebook engineer, Twitter’s path forward without catastrophe is looking “narrow, and growing more narrow by the day.”

“Twitter is the public square, for better or worse,” he said. “There’s nothing like it, and I don’t think anyone wins by us losing it.” BLOOMBERG

 

[themickey]

Musk Starts Twitter Poll On Reinstating Ex-President Trump
Elon Musk has asked his Twitter followers whether former President Donald Trump should be reinstated on the social media site.
Tim Smith 19 Nov 2022

Former US President Donald Trump speaks at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, US, on Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2022. Trump formally entered the 2024 US presidential race, making official what he's been teasing for months just as many Republicans are preparing to move away from their longtime standard bearer.

(Bloomberg) -- Elon Musk has asked his more than 116 million Twitter followers whether former President Donald Trump should be reinstated on the social media site.

With 22 hours left, the poll has already had more than 2.3 million votes with about 59% of respondents voting yes, down from as high as 64%. Musk said earlier Friday that there hadn’t been a decision made on Trump’s account, but he did reinstate accounts tied to conservative media personality Jordan Peterson and satirical website Babylon Bee.....

 

[themickey]

Musk Starts Twitter Poll On Reinstating Ex-President Trump

Just wondering out loud whether this was Musk's reason in the first place for buying Twitter, to do Trump a favour?

 

[Overnight]

Just wondering out loud whether this was Musk's reason in the first place for buying Twitter, to do Trump a favour?

This is why he is our new POTUS in 2024. You hit the nail on the head exactly. And after he is re-elected, he will give massive amounts of money to Twitter and SpaceX in grants and loans, so he can "get us to Mars".