by theGeatZhopa | 2025-06-09 03:44:20+00:00
Sorry, you're wrong in your thinking. You took the time to discuss and now it's my turn to do the same. I'm German and we're direct in our arguments. No intent of offense or to come at ya.

> No you don’t (in general), a common business model in tech is to spend investor’s money covering this deficit.

A common INVESTMENT model is to accept (risk!) money burned for a perspective of (sustainable) returns in future. The dicision on investment is usually driven by figures and CPIs. A common BUSINESS model is to become fin-sustainable as possible, with steady minimal spendings and reoccuring earnings that cover the spendings in the least. This is called by you "primitive business rules". And yes, they are. Thats the most primitive rules.

Investors don't just give money. They get a share of the company and become partial-owner. No investor will give money, if there's no return to expect in a set time horizont. If you want, have some read on that [1].

Musk & Friends are THIS very investrors you're talking about. They invested together into full ownership of 100% shares. They have the solely power to decide. They decided not to dillute their shares by getting others onto the boat - in fact, Twitter has been bought to squeeze out other deciders (taking off public listing). So, what you actually asking investors for is to burn money and to accept the losses resulting by creadit loans and interest fees, because its common business-sense. Interesting economical thinking you have..

> Also, it wasn’t just fixed costs.

Variable costs can't be cut by definition. They can be steered/controlled/altered/reduced, like the monthly electricity bill in winter/summer time. But not cut. Variable costs MAY occure irregularly. Fixed costs WILL occure regularly. The aim is to cut the fixed costs, such as rent, salaries & loans, interest rates. Coleterally, variable costs change. Of course, "it wasn’t just fixed costs" - they are correlated!

> And if you cut too deep and lose a lot of revenue as a result as with Twitter you’ll still not get enough money.

Pardon, what??

profit = earnings - expenses

cutting expenses, while earnings stay unchanged = the profit rises. Full-cut of expenses, while earnings stay unchanged = earnings are the profit. If earnings go down but expenses are not cut' = profit sinks or becomes net negative in case earnings < expenses (loss!). Cutting expenses while earnings go down = profit is proportional to the cuts, but will never turn neg, as long earnings > spendings.

When the revenue goes down one has to cut expenses or increase the revenue by any means. Or both. Thats "what he did" - staff reduced drastically and system redesigned to run unattended, with self-healing-features. That is done, BECAUSE Twitter's yearly revenue only once was enough to cover the expenses in whole time being, without perspectives to change in a mid-distant future. It was a money-sink. So your argument backs my argument ;) Thank you. Even more, the new calculations showed even higher financial needs: amounted and running expenses by ex-Twitter and additionally costs of buying credit loan and its interest rates are to be served now, too. And we're back to:

> Instead of all this "thinking hard about the stack" in reality here is how people got fired: > ....

So, can you suggest a different way? They are fired like all employees in a hire & fire society are likely to be fired. Some without or with a few minutes notice, some days ahead their planed exit, ..., some in a friendly way. Sometimes owner decides alone, sometimes he gets pre-filtered decisions, sometimes the decision is delegated to lower menagers. Absolutely business as usual.

> - like Frohnhoefer without notice, without "brainstorming", by Musk alone, for daring to say the "technical stack" truth to ignorant power

The idea is to have people who truelly belief its possible to achieve results working on something everyone denotes as "impossible". Frohnhoefer did not align with that vision.

I'm in Germany and was "fired" like that: "sorry, do you have a minute?" during me holding a customer meeting. Left meeting, went into boss' office. "We don't want to prolonger our relationship together and thus decided to fire you. Sign here and here.." then 30sec of small-talk and some legal advices later "Take your backpack and your jacket. The other things you can collect at some other time. Please leave now." I was "running" that company's production and education for 14 years and was the only senior with wide skill set, actually - I was thrown out in 2 mins without a thank you or given time to say good-bye to others. You tell me something about Frohnhofer ... lol!

> - engineers were told today to print out their last 30 to 60 days of code, so they could show it to Elon Musk himself.

Musk understands what it means to code. So to select who can code, who do code, who efficiently can and do code and who are up to propper selected algorithms and efficiency - there is just only way:

you let them show what they can / did in the last xx days and let them explain why they coded what they show. Thats an very efficient knowledge and performance test. To let them print it out is actually important. It shows the amount of LOCs written and problems solved - its not always good to write a lot. Each application at FAANG, or others, nowadays consists of such assessments, whether live-coded or problem-assigned. Nothing different what musk did, too. Just think about your argument once again.. How do you want to assess whom to keep and whom to fire in a fast manner under time pressure?

> - or there was a guy who couldn’t even get info from the dedicated function for such stuff - HR - whether he was fired. That also had to be resolved by Musk in a Twitter exchange

Seriously? I can't even get the info if my train is delayed in a working public transport system and you expect everything to simple function, while the whole HR and loan filebase is being restructered and turned upside down?? ...

> How come you ignore that a huge portion of employees aren’t involved in any tech stack? Think 80% of employees were fired.

I don't ignore them. They're inluded. The tech-stack means the technology twitter is running on and the ressources (human, non-human, financial, ...) needed for running it. Including the ones who do not directly operate the servers, code or design the systems. Who's not needed for restructure, will go. If needed, the position can be filled later again.

> What’s your proof of competence? Like in this case: on paper, .... .

Exactly this has been done. They [all] were asked to present, explain and argue on their works, not on their CVs. It doesn't matter what reputation one has gained. Its pure skills that are here accounted for. And pure skills can usually work under time pressure w/o problems. Only the necessary for restructure will be kept.

> These are just empty words, care to give specific examples of what fresh ideas/synergies and other work-force positive things this great process resulted in?

You can't imagine that there are or might be some? From [3]:

> Among the dozens who Elon Musk enlisted specifically from Tesla are: director of software development Ashok Elluswamy, director of Autopilot and TeslaBot engineering Milan Kovac, senior director of software engineering Maha Virduhagiri; Pete Scheutzow, a senior staff technical program manager, and Jake Nocon, who is part of Tesla’s surveillance unit, as a senior manager of security intelligence.

What could the benefits to pull in some directors & seniors into the process only could be? ...

There is clearly a bias in your thinking, if such a basic thing like "a bunch of people are thrown into problem solving under time pressure" do provoke a question as "what benefits does this great process bring", then I can't help. But sure, you are not that interested in this topic as it would be enough to get the information for your argumentation by yourself. May be you should read up the news and not ask others to do the work for you?

> Doge was also accompanied by "qualified stuff from tesla/twitter/etc", but instead of uncovering blind spots they were mostly acting blind.

How does DOGE fits in here? Ah... "Musk and his qualified not-able'ers from tesla run DOGE".

> Because you’re supposed to maximize revenue and profits, not minimize them?

I think, I answered this excessively already. Forbes and Bloomberg write about the "magical" turn-around. You should read up the actual news about X and X.ai. Instead going ad hominem at insert some enemy here, you could account what has been reached at Twitter/X - its still there and running with less costs and rising revenue. It dio not collapse as it was foreseen by all.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/10201...

[2] https://www.scu.edu/media/mobi/Fixed-and-Variable-Costs.pdf

[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/31/elon-musk-has-pulled-more-th...