The really bad thing about unlimited power is probably the arbitrariness. The subordinates, the dependents, never know what will happen next. They are constantly under tension as to what will come next “from above”. For me, that is the quintessence of this long read about the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk and his homies, or as they are called internally: “goon squad”. The article is a collaboration of New York Magazine and The Verge. After interviewing many sources, many of whom remain anonymous for understandable reasons, he reconstructs what happened when the billionaire arrived at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco and immediately began ruthlessly implementing his ideas. A takeover, but not a friendly one.
The super-successful Musk cult plagued the Twitter workforce, who hadn’t previously worked for a particularly successful company, but one with a relatively open culture. Now people were fired, then hired again, then the impossible was demanded of them and then it was Musk mania again, but in a completely different way than originally planned.
Employees fluctuated between admiration for Musk, hope for his good ideas, fear for their jobs and irritation at the contradictory instructions, some of which were completely absurd. The case with the printed program code is a prototype:
The boss wanted to see their code. Employees were instructed to “print out 50 pages of code you’ve done in the last 30 days” and get ready to show it to Musk in person. Panicked engineers started hunting around the office for printers. Many of the devices weren’t functional, having sat unused for two years during the pandemic. Eventually, a group of executive assistants offered to print some engineers’ code for them if they would send the file as a PDF.
Anyone who doesn’t want to constantly deal with every little further development of the Twitter drama is in good hands with this text. He debunks the myth that Musk is a CEO genius, and does it thoroughly.