WWED: What Would Elon Do?

Here we are in Advent, waiting for the messiah, and some people think his name is Elon. Except that the poll he ran about whether he should step down would make even John the Baptist wonder whether he is the one. The puzzle for me contnues to be the sinecure problem: Twitter pre-Elon is said to have hired some dozens of ex-FBI agents into sinecures, except their job at Twitter was to control the narrative. But if a sinecure is a do-nothing job, how were they expected to contol the narrative?

Other accounts suggest that much of the roughly 10,000 workforce pre-Musk got free meals, free red wine on tap, yoga rooms, work-from-home, pet insurance, and much more. Yet Musk laid at least half of them off, and Twitter stayed up. That says to me that it wasn't just the former G-men who got sinecures. In the video below, Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford Medical School professor and prominent COVID skeptic who was shadowbanned from Twitter for "misinformation" under the old regime, recounts a personal tour he was given of Twitter headquarters that Musk gave him after taking over.

He spends most of the time outlining the specifics of his trendlisting, but I found other details of Twitter's current state more interesting. At about 7:00, he speaks incidentally of the tech people currently at Twitter, who he says are primarily engineers brought over from Tesla who are "still trying to figure out the system". At about 11:00, he says,

You walk into Twitter headquarters, it looks like a five-star hotel that's been abandoned. There's a very fancy restaurant-looking thing, there's all kinds of -- the decorations, the artwork, it all looks like a five-star hotel. But nobody's there. Almost nobody's there. Except . . . that, when you go into the engineering area, with all of the cubicles, it's filled with lots and lots of people trying very hard to make sure Twitter doesn't explode or something. It's Saturday, during the day, and they're working hard. I meet with Elon briefly, he sends me to an engineer. He introduces me to an engineer who was assigned to help me. So I learned a few things.

But at that point his interlocutor steers him back to what Elon told him, not the engineer, but I was much more interested in the engineer. What I gather from Dr Bhattacharya's account of the current Twitter work environment is that, having fired or encouraged the resignations of Twitter's own engineers, he's brought a bunch of "engineers" over from Tesla. Now, "engineer" is a difficult term. At various times, I've been called an "engineer" although I never had the title on a business card, in part because I've been told that in some states you can't call yourself an engineer unless you have a degree or a certification in it. My degrees are in Eng Lit, and I worked with software, not strength of materials or something. So Dr Bhattacharya's use of the term is at best imprecise, although it's not his fault.

But there's still a problem. As far as I can tell, nobody at Tesla worked with the specific circumstances of social media that Twitter has. They did internal network, they did payroll, they did inventory, they did data base. It doesn't matter how many dozens Musk brought over, even if they were his best guys at assembly line automation, they wouldn't know a thing about Twitter. It doesn't matter if they were working their little heads off all day Saturday, it wouldn't help.

This is one of my main takeaways from my career in tech, that if people are working all day Saturday, as Dr Bhattacharya relates, if they're working all night, working all weekend, it's a key sign they don't know what they're doing. That's because they, or at least the people they're replacing in Twitter's case, had months, probably years, to do the work they were supposed to be doing, and they didn't do it (we're back to the meaning of "sinecure"). A few frenzied all-nighters aren't going to make up for years of free red wine and yoga rooms.

This is part of Musk's problem and why he's now toying with stepping down. But the overall conundrum is bigger. Twitter had a product of sorts, although it lost $1.4 billion in 2020, somewhat less in 2021, but is projected to lose far more this year. In other words, it sustained the free red wine and pet insurance for 10,000 employees for a while, but even after laying half of them off, that's not going to fix it. Nor is a big show of we're-working-all-weekend gonna help a thing. But even with a team of "engineers" with no social media experience trying to keep Twitter from exploding, its silly rinky-dink product just keeps on keepin' on, which itself is probably a misleading indicator.

Still, the right-wing organs think Elon has something up his sleeve. Matt Margolis at PJ Media:

[I]n response to a tweet suggesting that Musk already has a successor picked out, Musk tweeted, “No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor.”

Does this sound like someone who’s about to step down? It sure doesn’t sound that way to me. The fine print of the poll is that anyone who would take over as CEO of Twitter would need to have the same vision for the platform as Musk does, and that’s a rather significant caveat.

A new CEO would need to have the same vision for Twitter as Musk? Pray tell, what on earth is Musk's vision? Nick Arama at Red State:

He tweeted on Sunday that there was “no successor” because “no one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive.” So it sounds like he was feeling out folks but hadn’t had luck yet.

According to CNBC’s David Faber, sources told him that Musk had been looking for a CEO since before the poll. As we’ve said, he always intended to put a CEO in charge which was why the left cheering and trying to bomb the poll was funny because having a different CEO didn’t mean that Musk was going away, just that he wasn’t going to be the day-to-day head of operations.

. . . But it doesn’t sound like he has the person yet, so don’t count on him leaving immediately. Sounds like it’s going to take a while yet. This isn’t going to make those on the left happy.

Just you wait! Elon's still going to fix Twitter, and that's going to fix everything. Oh come, divine messiah!

Really? Elon Musk??