How Long Before Only The Sewer Rats Are Left At Twitter?
Elon Musk thinks he's the smartest guy in the room. He's a dangerous moron.
So 2022 was the year many people spent WAY too much time obsessing over Twitter, eh? At least according to George Will, who knows about such things. Me? I prefer to rejoice over 2022 being the first year that one person- Elon Musk, of course) managed to lose $200 BILLION of net worth (seriously).
Do you have ANY idea how stupid and incompetent one must be in order to lose $200 billion? You and I could f**k up everything we touch for the next 20 lifetimes and STILL not come close, but Elon Musk managed to do that in one calendar year. [insert golf clap here]
That’s impressive.
Yes, Virginia, 2022 was the year karma proved she IS a real bitch. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Musk’s ignorance, arrogance, and lack of self-awareness combined to bite him in the ass. So, you’ll have to indulge me for a moment while I head back to the buffet for my third heaping helping of schadenfreude.
The latest episode of Musk’s stupidity is genuinely mind-blowing. He- and I swear on my uncle Ed’s grave that I’m not making this up- laid off the janitorial staff from all Twitter offices.
I wanted to take this opportunity to address some changes you may have noticed in our various Twitter offices. Aside from three-quarters of your co-workers no longer working there, of course….
Obviously to save the company, I needed to make some cuts. And among those cuts are the janitorial staffs that keep our bathrooms clean and stocked with toilet paper.
Because let me make one thing clear to you: I, Elon Musk, never poop. And if I don’t poop, none of my employees should ever need to poop either….
I can hear all your complaints now. “But Elon, that backup of waste in our bodies is unhealthy! We could become septic! Our bowels could literally explode!”
Wah wah wah. That’s what you all sound like. A bunch of betas not one hundred percent committed to living, breathing, eating, and have dominant alpha sex with Twitter. A bunch of whiners who think highly invasive abdominal surgery would be a reasonable excuse to miss work.
Do any of you think I got to be the world’s richest man by concerning myself with biological issues like going to the bathroom? Every two-minute trip to the bathroom is two minutes I didn’t spend shaking down the government for subsidies or telling Twitter randos that they have shrunken nards. And that’s the sort of bold leadership we need to make this microblogging site load one-thousandth of a second faster on the iPhone.
OK, so this is, strictly speaking, satire. Work with me, though, and you’ll see where this is going…and who knows? Maybe I will, too.
So again, let me reiterate: If I don’t need a break to take a dump, then none of you should need a break to take a dump….
Do you know the last time I pinched a loaf on company time? It was 2002, and afterwards no one wanted to go into the PayPal server room for days.
Twenty years without dropping the kids off at the pool! That’s the sort of hardcore commitment that we need if we want to transform Twitter into the premier microblogging/merchandising/gaming/journalism/sports gambling/dating/fetish porn/recipe app on the planet.
So if I sleep at the office, you sleep at the office. If I don’t shower, then you don’t shower. If I eat nothing but takeout from that Mongolian place on Fulton, then you eat nothing but takeout from that Mongolian place on Fulton.
And above all else, if I don’t move my bowels, you don’t move your bowels. If you need a diaper, we’ve got all those #StayWoke t-shirts I sneered about finding when I took over the company.
Because it seems that Elon Musk doesn’t understand that being “woke” means giving a damn about others, and he thinks giving a damn about others is energy that can’t be spent making money for him. That’s wasted energy, as is “dropping off the kids at the pool.”
Do you see? I told you this would begin to make sense, right?
Of course you can all keep whining about unsanitary this and plagues of sewer rats crawling out of the toilets and overrunning our garbage dump of an office that. There are probably items and luxuries I haven’t cut yet. I already stopped paying rent on our offices. I can cut off heating as well. I can have overseers with bullwhips marching around the offices like you’re all a bunch of loom girls in a Victorian-era factory and I’m the owner with the giant beard and the sociopathic lack of interest in your health and well-being.
Wow, doesn’t Twitter sound like a great place to work, sort of like rowing on a slave ship? Don’t you wish you could work there?
No, it sounds like a modern-day sweatshop, one step removed from the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. How soon will it be before we hear about people chained to their desks, forbidden to take bathroom breaks or even to look away from their monitors? If Elon Musk is determined to drive Twitter into the ditch, and it’s beginning to appear as if he might be doing precisely that, he’s doing so at an impressive pace.
It seems quasi-miraculous that any rational person with even a speck of self-esteem would choose to continue working at Twitter. But, on the other hand, it’s difficult to imagine there aren’t enough decent tech jobs for employees to jump ship to, especially for people who want to bug out of the ridiculously expensive San Francisco Bay Area.
For a company that was once (reasonably) professionally run, Twitter has begun, in a metaphorical sense, taking on water like the Titanic. And Elon Musk is the iceberg.
Elon Musk’s orders were clear: Close the data center.
Early on Christmas Eve, members of the billionaire’s staff flew to Sacramento — the site of one of Twitter’s three main computing storage facilities — to disconnect servers that had kept the social network running smoothly. Some employees were worried that losing those servers could cause problems, but saving money was the priority, according to two people who were familiar with the move but not authorized to talk about it.
The data center shutdown was one of many drastic steps Mr. Musk has undertaken to stabilize Twitter’s finances. Over the past few weeks, Twitter had stopped paying millions of dollars in rent and services, and Mr. Musk had told his subordinates to renegotiate those agreements or simply end them. The company has stopped paying rent at its Seattle office, leading it to face eviction, two people familiar with the matter said. Janitorial and security services have been cut, and in some cases employees have resorted to bringing their own toilet paper to the office.
This sounds like a company being driven to destruction by a CEO who has no idea what he’s doing. If Musk had deliberately set out to drive Twitter into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, he couldn’t have done it more masterfully. And yet it doesn’t appear as if he’s being deliberately incompetent. It seems that arrogant and clueless are his default settings.
Musk bought the company knowing full well that it wasn’t profitable, and his $44 billion purchase of the social media platform will require it to pay about $1 billion in interest annually.
Twitter was already projected to lose about $3 billion in 2023, which meant that Musk, who considers himself a savvy businessman, bought himself a capsized ocean liner with little hope of being refloated.
“That’s why I spent the last five weeks cutting costs like crazy,” he said.
Those cuts may be yielding consequences. On Wednesday, users around the world reported service interruptions with Twitter. Some were logged out, while others encountered error messages while visiting the website. Twitter has not explained what caused the temporary outage. Three people familiar with the company’s infrastructure said that if the Sacramento facility had still been operating, it could have helped alleviate the problem by providing backup computing capacity when other data centers failed.
Twitter, which has eliminated its communications department, and Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
This makes sense, I suppose. You can’t talk to a company’s PR flacks when they’re on the unemployment line. And if you speak to Elon Musk himself, he’s likely to accuse you of having “tiny testicles” or some such childish insult.
You can’t hope the adults will take over soon when the CEO has fired all of them.
Although he has said he will appoint a new chief executive at Twitter, Mr. Musk remains closely involved at the social networking firm even as problems crop up at his electric vehicle company, Tesla. And his tight control of the daily management of Twitter calls into question just how much power he would cede to a new chief, who would inherit a bare-bones business that he still owns.
Since early November, Mr. Musk has sought to save about $500 million in nonlabor costs, according to an internal document seen by The New York Times. He has also laid off or fired nearly 75 percent of the company’s work force since completing the purchase.
There are a few significant problems with those two paragraphs:
First, what capable executive in their right mind would agree to work for a monomaniacal wackjob like Elon Musk? Musk will never let go of the reins enough to allow Twitter to become a professionally-run company. Any major decision made by a CEO will almost certainly be overruled by Musk, who has a pathological need to be perceived as top dog. That’s an untenable situation under the best of circumstances.
Saving $500 million in nonlabor costs in five weeks in a company that makes no tangible product is a virtual impossibility. You can’t sell off production capacity or factory space. Twitter’s product can be found only on the Internet- you can’t touch it, hold it, or ship it. So where’s a half-billion in nonlabor costs going to come from?
Firing 3/4 of your workforce is not a workable business model, not when you slash that workforce with no planning. So how do you account for the vital functions of your business- HR, PR, IT, legal, payroll, etc.? There’s no way to do it without causing immense disruption to your business, which is exactly what Elon Musk has done to Twitter.
And the lengths to which Musk has gone to cut costs are patently ridiculous.
At Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, where the company missed rent payments, Musk decided to consolidate six floors of the company’s operations into two. He then canceled janitorial services when workers went on strike for better wages. (I know; how DARE they ask for a living wage from the world’s richest man…at least he used to be…?)
As might be imagined, cramming employees from six floors into tight spaces on two floors sans janitorial services has created…problems.
That has left the office in disarray. With people packed into more confined spaces, the smell of leftover takeout food and body odor has lingered on the floors, according to four current and former employees. Bathrooms have grown dirty, these people said. And because janitorial services have largely been ended, some workers have resorted to bringing their own rolls of toilet paper from home.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, Musk’s behavior has been erratic, often interrupting meetings randomly and talking at length.
He’s also asked managers to snuff out leaks to the press and anonymous posts to social media sites. Musk has also focused on eliminating people within the company who he believes are opposed to him.
Again I come back to the question, why would anyone choose to work, or to continue working, at Twitter? Why would any rational, self-respecting person choose to subject themselves to the whims and paranoia of a monomaniacal freak show with a Napoleaon complex? Especially when that person’s management style was seemingly learned at the knee of Darth Vader?
Another problem for Twitter is that as Musk has restored the accounts of noted Right-wing trolls, including some who were banned as long ago as 2013, advertising revenue has dropped precipitously. Few advertisers want to be associated with a social media platform that enables racists, xenophobes, Islamophobes, homophobes, and misogynists.
And yet Elon Musk seems intent on transforming Twitter into a MAGA-friendly platform, which has caused several thousand Left-leaning users to quit Twitter for other, less disputatious platforms.
Let’s face it, y’all. If you care about decency and rational, reasonable discourse, Twitter has no place for you anymore. There are other options- Mastodon (I’m at @yuppieskum@yuppieskum@mstdn.social) and Post (I’m in the process of establishing an account) immediately come to mind, but there are others. Unfortunately, Twitter’s a Far-Right cesspool, and it will only get worse. Elon Musk will continue to run Twitter into a ditch until there’s nothing left but rancid Chinese food containers and fetid bathrooms that haven’t been cleaned in months and have long since been overrun by sewer rats. All of Twitter’s self-respecting employees will have long since left for jobs where they are aren’t treating like galley slaves.
Elon Musk has already lost $200 billion in net worth. How about we make sure he loses a whole lot more? My goal is to see him reduced to working the counter at a Dairy Queen in Rugby, ND.
Wouldja like sprinkles on that Dilly Bar??
