The Problems Musk Sees With Tech Go Well Beyond Twitter

The video above is a post on a UK YouTube channel called Podcast of the Lotus Eaters entitled "Corporate America is Adult Day Care". They're responding to a particular woman's TikTok portrayal of her typical work day at Linkedin, which is a Silicon Valley-based social media company comparable to Twitter, Facebook, or Google. On one hand, I would caution that working conditions and benefits vary widely among US corporate, small business, and government employers, and I would say that even among tech companies, not all engage in such extravagant pampering of employees.

On the other hand, the woman in the TikTok video makes it unintentionally plain that Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Google, and comparable employers do compete for the type of pampered, entitled pseudo-workers that she represents. I frequently commuted to Silicon Valley in my working career, and there's no question that the sorts of benefits, as well as other perks and tchotchkes, that she celebrates are routine. Free breakfast, free lunch, ping pong, quiet rooms, snacks, no-questions-asked drives home for those who get too drunk at work (possibly due to the free beer on Fridays), a whole range of other things I can't think of right offhand, I've seen them.

I wish I'd taken copies of the no-questions-asked drives home policies posted on the break room bulletin boards, come to think of it. On the other hand, I always came in as a field rep or a contractor and thus an outsider, and nobody ever offered me any free beer. In fact, as someone who was always paid to be on their premises actually to get something done, it was a real struggle to get brief slices of time from these people in order to do that -- I remember I'd have to show up at 8 AM per my employer's policy, but my contact spent his whole mornings on the phone with his broker, and nothing could be accomplished until after lunch, although the free beer cut into this time as well.

A small symptom of how Elon Musk's possibly aborted buyout of Twitter threatens this ecosystem comes in this news item from late last week:

Elon Musk‘s $44 billion bid to for Twitter is in serious jeopardy and the billionaire is reportedly reviewing his options after his team accused the social media platform of not disclosing enough information about spam accounts.

. . . Twitter simultaneously said on Thursday that it had let go of 30% of its talent acquisition team amid the potential Musk takeover.

The layoffs followed a May announcement Twitter implemented a hiring freeze as it sought to pare expenses, The Wall Street Journal reported. The new plans prompted restructuring and a reduction of the talent acquisition team, the outlet reported.

"Talent acquisition team" is Silicon Valley-speak for the human resources department, one of the most typically underperforming units of any corporation. In my view, it couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of people. But referring to the YouTube link above, these are also the people who create the environment in which companies like Twitter seek out employees on whom they lavish what Carl Benjamin in the YouTube aptly calls "bourgeois indulgence".

Benjamin then raised the question, "So what is it you actually do here?" which must have been in the TikTok comments as well. The Lotus Eaters commentators went on to compare how the woman portrays herself and her colleagues as functionally akin to domestic pets, with few expectations other than that they hang around and be friendly in a docile sort of way. At 9:50, Benjamin observes, "Everything about her life is artifical. It's all curated, the glass and steel buildings, the curated park and little ducks, the brands and fashion, it all just feels like the last days of empire."

This is in fact the artifical, curated world that's presented by all the social media companies, reinforced by their universally stringent censorship. Remember that Musk's objection to the Twitter deal is that the company has been trying to maintain an artifical, curated picture of itself, except that the circumstance of Musk's own offer has threatened the company's continued business viability:

Twitter has reason to seek to hold Musk to his original terms. The stock has fallen considerably since the board announced it had accepted his offer to buy the company at $54.20 per share. On the day of that announcement, the stock ended the trading day at $51.70 per share. Twitter shares sat at $36.81 as of Friday’s market close.

Musk is apparently paying attention to the stock price, too, according to the letter, “and is considering whether the company’s declining business prospects and financial outlook constitute a Company Material Adverse Effect giving Mr. Musk a separate and distinct basis for terminating the Merger Agreement.”

Two months ago, I mused that Musk had an underlying view of how actually to make a buck from Twitter, which in that case was simply an example of the built-in inefficiences of the present tech model. I noted a tweet he sent that suggested there'd be major cuts at Twitter, and those who remained would face heavily increased workloads. The self-satisfied Linkedin employee's TikTok posts are a good example of what would disappear from tech in general if a Musk-style business model were to take over.

This isn't to claim that Musk is any sort of corporate messiah -- others point out that the environment at Tesla isn't much different from that at Linkedin or Twitter -- and Musk himself isn't an example of corporate virtue. In recent news,

Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO and world's richest man, welcomed twins last year with an executive at one of his other companies, Neuralink, Insider reported on Wednesday.

Musk, who posted a tweet on May 24 saying "USA birth rate has been below min sustainable levels for ~50 years" and pinned it to the top of his more than 100 million-follower Twitter account, quietly fathered the children with Shivon Zilis, who works for Musk at the company which hopes to develop an implantable computer chip for the human brain, according to documents obtained by Insider.

This would be a flagrant violation of a normal corporate sexual harassment policy, and it would normally trigger a board-level investigation that would likely result in Musk's removal and expensive settlements to Zillis. Even if the relationship were entirely consensual, it would violate a normal policy against such relationships between supervisor and subordinate. An equivalent case badly damaged Bill Gates's reputation, although he'd already left Microsoft.

In the cases of both Musk and Gates, I wish Musk in particular would stop trying to run the world and just focus on making money -- he could actually do a lot more good that way. But he's smart and does know what's wrong with tech.