Elon Musk Wants Twitter Engineers To Go 'Hardcore'

This story does not involve a horse ... or does it???

Elon Musk's $44 billion bonfire continues to burn bright, with each new day bringing a new shitshow for our horrified amusement. The debacle du jour involves a mandatory agreement for all employees to go "extremely hardcore" or else .

“Here’s the text of the email Musk sent to Twitter staff overnight. Those who don’t commit to being “extremely hardcore” by 5pm ET today must leave the company. ‼️ Story: https://t.co/expt0d63dH”

— Donie O'Sullivan (@Donie O'Sullivan) 1668602368 

"Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore,” wrote the man who once offered to trade one of his employees a horse for a handjob. Allegedly ! "This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade."

The message went out to all staff at midnight along with an ultimatum: Agree to hit this undefined metric, or GTFO.

"If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below," it went on. "Anyone who has not done so by 5pm ET tomorrow (Thursday) will receive three months of severance."

Since his shotgun wedding to Twitter, Musk has already cut staff at the company in half, sometimes firing employees without notice, booting them from Slack and email while in the middle of their shifts. Meanwhile his first foray into paying off the $1 billion annual debt service he just saddled the company with flopped ignominiously — as literally everyone warned it would.

Twitter Blue Verified, Musk's plan to sell blue checkmarks for the low, low price of $8 per month, was taken offline after Musk's bet that no one would pay eight bucks to spoof a company turned out to be wildly, hilariously wrong — but not before taking several hundred million off of drugmaker Eli Lilly's stock price and costing Twitter an advertiser.

 You Know Who ELSE Cost Eli Lilly Billions Of Insulin Dollars?? 

And speaking of "hardcore," the Washington Post reports that the paid verification system skewed toward "a few niche communities" whose algorithmic amplification will likely do little to halt the mass exodus of advertisers.

The Post describes the new subscribers to the Blue Verification program as "accounts promoting right-wing politics, cryptocurrency speculation and users hawking adult content such as pornography."

Meanwhile the plan to charge so called "power users," i.e. the people who tweet shit to pad out the ads in normal people's feeds, could end up costing the site money if the cash cows refuse to pay for the milk:

Twitter earned about 79 percent of its U.S. ad revenue from just 10 percent of its most valuable users, according to the internal document reviewed by The Post. Its top 1 percent of U.S. users — who are in turn the ones most likely to shell out $8 — earn the service more than $40 each month in revenue, the document shows.

Nonetheless, Musk tweeted that the program will be restarted later this month: "Punting relaunch of Blue Verified to November 29th to make sure that it is rock solid."

Which might be reassuring if it weren't coming from someone who seems convinced of his own infallible expertise on topics with which he has only a passing familiarity at best. Here's Musk today under oath in a lawsuit brought by Tesla shareholders about his compensation:

“Elon: "The consent decree was made under duress. An agreement made under duress, is not valid, as a foundation of law." "Are you trained as a lawyer?" "I have some familiarity with the legal system. If you're in enough law suits, you pick up a few things along the way." /50”

— The Chancery Daily (@The Chancery Daily) 1668611628 

Nothing to worry about, this is all going swell!

[ CNN / WaPo ]

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