Given what Elon has said about valuing people who work long hours and have an "extremely hardcore" work ethic, I can't imagine it's healthy to stay for too long.
An idea I had (not sure if correct) is that many people have a similar amount of "work ethic", but distribute it differently. So, for example, person A can invest nearly 100% into their job and will be perceived to be "extremely hardcore", while person B might have the exact same absolute amount, but only allocate a fraction to their job, distributing the rest to other activities. This person will be "normal". Most people should limit the allocation to their job because they have very limited upside. Most entrepreneurs should allocate much more than employees because of less limited upside.
I feel like many bosses want people to allocate more to a job, but don't offer the corresponding upside.
I had a [founder] boss who would say to his team "I want everyone on the team to act as though they owned the business!" He and his family owned 100% of the equity.
In reality, that boss probably was just repeating something that he heard - hoping that his boss would like how it sounds. I recall similar parables in early 00's agile. It is a lot easier to say things like this than come up with an actual strategy.
Usually the response is either to just double down "this is the most important thing that we do" (with no further explanation), or anger: "Idiot! How can you not possibly know what I mean to be committed like the pig in my story".
The context I have heard the ham and eggs analogy was for certain scrum rituals that were supposed to be for ham people only (ie, excluding people without a stake in the outcome). Someone probably told this boss to butt out of a meeting.
It is all dumb stuff, imo. 00's agile got away with a lot of stupid things - usually with the implicit aim of increasing the number of billable devs (or to sell conference tickets or books. It was almost like, the more absurd, the better. There are still remnants of that but, thankfully, it has mostly disappeared.
I dont think the metaphor breaks down at all I just think it is saying things that while very true are not meant to be communicated to the pigs and hens.
>I feel like many bosses want people to allocate more to a job, but don't offer the corresponding upside.
I agree, and I think that if you look back at the early dot com startups that did things like food, recreation, laundry and even housing right on-campus you'll see a culture that tried to actually meet that need in a way that doesn't seem unfair. The idea was "you give us everything you've got at work and everything else will just take care of itself". Then, as inevitable as death, came the investor class demanding more for less and eliminating the benefits with the hope that the sigma grindset would just perpetuate itself anyway.
Thread makes a good point that everyone should be evaluating their time investment in work vs. their potential upside, especially if they're sacrificing time to other aspects of life. (Relationships, family, travel, etc)
Giving everything you've got with a potential huge reward = risky but possibly worth it
Doing the same without a huge reward = you're a sucker, because your company is getting more from you than they're giving
Yeah they can. That's exactly what someone who does your laundry for you does. They give you that time back, and in exchange for some of your time (in the form of money, which for working people is never anything but time spent doing things other than what you want). If I make $70/hr and can buy an hour of doing laundry back for $20 I can work that hour instead of spending it on laundry, have the same amount of time and $50. Or I can work that hour and buy laundry three times, netting me $10 and 2 hours.
Same with the food and housing examples. Save meal prep time given back, commuting time given back (I am assuming corporate housing is relatively close to the office compared to usual, self selected housing).
I see what you're trying to do here but....yes, actually? Or to be more accurate to what I'm thinking is that not also the job of money? To provide what's needed for a happy life and a retirement plan? And for those of us who are not in the rent-seeking class, money is acquired by working for pay. The only actual issue is exclusivity - when you can only live in company housing and can only buy at the company store they're free to take advantage of you. When the company housing has to compete with other housing and the company store has to match or beat prices at other stores they become just one more potential source and you as the wage-earner get to decide between them and everyone else.
Yes, they want you to give all you've got and neglect all other aspects of your life. Young people are very good candidates to fall into this trap. Once they burn through those precious years working for somebody else and get none of the upsides they get it too. But there are always new young people ready to "change" the world.
This is what unions are all about - most people should limit the allocation to their job, but a lot of employers (not just Musk) want employees to work "like owners" without providing real ownership of the equity upside of the company they work for. Even most equity packages do not provide upside on a remotely similar scale (you might make 500k extra) compared to what the founders, execs, and VCs will make on your labor. I'm not sure that HN is going to be very Marx-friendly but Capital Vol 1 gets into this if you can hang through all the blathering about coats and fabric.
This is true in the sense that everyone has the same number of hours in the day, and someone who is 25 and single and lives in a studio apartment 3 blocks from the office will by definition be able to spend more time working than someone who lives 90 minutes from the office in the suburbs and has 4 school-aged kids.
But there are absolutely different levels of work ethic and stamina between people. And I'm not even talking about willingness which obviously varies, but some people can work for 12 hours straight and some people are just physically incapable of doing it.
I think there are some companies / missions / bosses, who can clearly identify goals and a concrete strategy to achieve them. This, plus some equity, can really help set people's incentives in the right direction such that people want to put in more time and effort.
On the other hand, a lot of companies don't offer either and seem to believe that simply rallying the masses to put in 20% more time (on average) will somehow lead to outsized gains.
did you know that in EU way back in imperial times some of the worker protection rules where not introduced by angry workers by companies which realized that having well rested and healthy worker will long term produce much better results and then countries following up by enforcing it to boost their countries productivity (and internal stability)?
(and yes I _very_ grossly oversimplified it including lumping all EU countries together even through they had very different inner political histories)
The reason I'm pointing it out is because recently some people seem to be forgetting that at the core a lot of work protection isn't rooted in "being social/nice to your citizens" but in "having a more internal stable and international competitive" country.
Henry Ford was largely responsible for the popularization of the 40 hour work week and paid his factory employees nearly double of what they would ordinarily get.
1926: Henry Ford popularized the 40-hour work week after he discovered through his research that working more yielded only a small increase in productivity that lasted a short period of time. Ford announced he would pay each worker $5 per eight-hour day, which was nearly double what the average auto worker was making that time. Manufacturers and companies soon followed Henry Ford’s lead after seeing how this new policy boosted productivity and fostered loyalty and pride among Ford’s employees.
Of course, this is a rarity. Most employee concessions in the US were earned with blood.
I don't think he did it out of the goodness of his heart, the calculus just happened to work out in favor of the worker in this singular case. With large factories you have training costs, retention costs etc. Paying higher than the going rate meant you had higher quality workers because you could select the best ones from a larger pool. This caused manufacturing defects to go down and remanufacturing costs (extremely expensive) to shrink. Paying more for better workers reduced costs. Limiting hours worked per week reduced costs as well as those workers made fewer mistakes reducing remanufacturing/rework costs. Stable employment, good wages and short(ish) work weeks resulted in worker retention going way way up which meant less churn, less training expenses etc.
TL;DR Henry Ford realized car manufacturing was a semi-skilled job, not an unskilled job, and hired and paid for it accordingly, quality went up and costs went down. It's not rocket science.
> I don't think he did it out of the goodness of his heart, the calculus just happened to work out in favor of the worker in this singular case
It wasn't a singular case.
He was principled enough about it that Dodge sued to compel him to put shareholders' interests ahead of employees and customers-- a suit Ford fought against, and lost.
Not just "in this singular case". I don't think Ford's assembly lines needed uniquely skilled people; most assembly line work would be the same, with the same calculus.
And the calculus was not just "the most skilled workers". It was also "diminishing returns".
Healthy, happy, rested workers are more productive, full stop. Folks who force the grind are eating seed corn but don't care, they'll be gone by the time it matters.
GDP per Capita is a metric for value of production as a whole.
Much of that GDP per Capita for NL can be attributed to high margin industries like Oil Refining (Royal Dutch Shell, Dutch Disease), Financial Services, and Biochemicals Manufacturing [0], which are not industries where at 5.5h workday is realistic.
And once you remove part-timers, the hours worked in Netherlands are comparable to the US [1].
The bigger question should be why part-time labor participation is significantly high in Netherlands, as part-timers and youth appear to earn at least half of full-timers [1], but this could also be confounding due to age along with gender [2].
Imo this makes Netherlands' job market look similar to post 2010 Japan's labor market, which isn't a great thing.
That said, it does go to show that median income and personal living standards are not tied with GDP per Capita.
> And once you remove part-timers, the hours worked in Netherlands are comparable to the US [1].
Sure, if you remove 40% of all the people working (maybe more?) then you are left with the people working full weeks. That’s… not very surprising? The point is kinda that so many people work part time that it significantly skews the average number of hours worked.
It’s kinda wonky that the average for full-time still sits at 40 hours though. I know very few people working 5 day weeks (e.g. 60 or 80%), and I’d assume they’re still classed as full-time due their contracts.
> Sure, if you remove 40% of all the people working (maybe more?) then you are left with the people working full weeks. That’s… not very surprising?
And how many of those 40% are working at an Oil Refinery owned by Shell PLC, an assay workbench owned by Solvias, or working on Clearing or ForEx at Goldman Sachs Amsterdam?
The majority of Netherlands' GDP is derived only from those kinds of activities in ONG, Biopharma, and Finance (also agricultural exports but that's a whole other story).
Not all jobs are made equal, and this is where productivity (as is defined in economics) comes to play.
It's the same in Japan with almost all economic activity being derived from automotive, medical device, and biopharma manufacturing along with financial services [0]. Most other roles are cost centers in some shape or form, and even Japanese companies have been offshoring roles not associated to those sectors to the rest of Asia.
From a competitiveness standpoint, it's not good, as it prevents other industries from being sparked and prevents economic diversification. If there's an ONG glut, or the EU signs an FTA with a major pharma manufacturer hub like China or India (as is the plan this year), or trade normalization between the EU-UK finally happens, then major sectors of the Dutch economy can become extremely wobbly, and reduce the ability to provide a social safety net, as those cost money. There's a reason why it's called "Dutch Disease".
Even the TNO [1] and CBS [2] has pointed out this issue, as the rise of part time labor in the Dutch economy seems to have been sparked by the Eurozone crisis.
> It’s kinda wonky that the average for full-time still sits at 40 hours though. I know very few people working 5 day weeks (e.g. 60 or 80%), and I’d assume they’re still classed as full-time due their contracts
If you are on HN, most of your peers are probably also working in tech or chill white collar jobs like government or back office work.
> having well rested and healthy worker will long term produce much better results
You said the two words which will ensure this never happens in the US: "long term". Most companies have zero decision-makers who care about the "long term". They are not the company's stewards, they are its parasites. Despite popular belief, most American corporations are not ruthless money-making machines, they are festering husks being ruthlessly parasitized by sociopaths while they slowly sink to the bottom of the ocean.
Confinity created its PayPal product in 1999 and Musk's company got merged into Confinity in 2000 because Thiel said they were both working crazy long hours and it would be more beneficial for everyone to join forces into a monopoly instead of compete with one another. Then Musk got kicked out of the company because they didn't think he was doing a good job, and he was fortunate to benefit financially when they sold to eBay. So it's a pretty classic case of survivorship bias, and the fact that he invested into an already innovative electric car company does not mean his taskmaster leanings are assuredly the key to success. For every one of Musk's companies, there are countless others enjoying a healthy amount of profit without the excessive hours.
Paypal is not some monument of success (how much did Adam Neumann make from WeWork?), nor is X, he just bought Twitter by borrowing against his Tesla shares at an inflated valuation (inflated by sentiment and hype). Is he good at slave driving people who mostly care about mission? Yes. Does that mean it is what we want to optimize for at scale? I argue no. Important to be mindful what we are and what is worth optimizing for collectively and how that changes over time.
If I drive my workers to various flavors (emotional, physical, etc) of failure to succeed economically, are you going to look up to me? If so, you've failed the litmus test. Progress is nice, but so is a reasonable balance for our short existence on this rock. Be Woz, not Jobs or Musk.
(high empathy human, early TSLA investor, own Teslas, know people at SpaceX, etc)
If Europe wants to be "more internal[ly] stable and international[ly] competitive", then its 40-hour-per-week, 5-weeks-holiday-per-year companies have to compete with Tesla, Spacex, Paypal, X etc.
Europe has SEPA for instant value transfer, they do not need paypal. AT Protocol can replace X, no need for Europe to have their own X ("protocols, not platforms"). Europe can eventually build EVs faster and/or better (~20 moving parts in a drivetrain) and improved space vehicles when they're ready, they're not trying to live on Mars.
What has US tech built that Europe needs? Europe has services and great quality of life, the US has performance art capitalism paperclip maximizing for shareholder returns and is a third world country [1] [2] [3], broadly speaking. The race is not what you think it is. What are you building for? To just keep grinding or building? Or for people to live happy, healthy lives at scale? Engineering is fun, and leads to progress, but it is a means to an end, not the point of life.
I don't disagree with this (love Bosch except my dishwasher IoT annoyances), but OP believes you need to be Tesla or BYD to be "successful." You can always succeed if you get to define success. It's a marathon, not a sprint, and life is meant to be lived, not brutish and short grinding for silly KPIs.
good luck getting Linus Torvalds back from us! Jokes aside, i think the EU needs to reach consensus on a new operating system if you want digital sovereignty. So far I know of a few nations doing so for law enforcement/military, and I know of Jolla or webos, but I am unaware of any efforts like Huawei and harmonyOS to create a sovereign unified ecosystem.
If you believe in optimizing for company success at a macro level from a mental model perspective, why are we talking? Go grind and be prepared to make peace how you wasted your life on your deathbed. I have attempted to show you a different perspective, whether you internalize it is up to you. I've been down that road, and caught myself in time with some life left to be lived. Never stop asking "why?" OODA loop style.
You seem to get it [1], so I'm not sure why we're arguing? I wish you the very best. Stay curious and openminded. Don't work too hard, we're all dead eventually, enjoy the ride.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43471675 ("Even if I was programming Starship's flight computers, I would miss my family too much to work more than 40 hours per week. Regardless of really believing in their work, people want to have time with their loved ones.")
Old money is a toxic accretion of capital: because it optimizes for "not losing" as opposed to "maximally investing"
There's a reason the British industrial revolution was funded by new, sugar/slave-trade money -- because it went to people open to investing in this new, weird steam power thing.
this is a pointless argument as close to all US mega cops have been quasi subventioned until they became monopolies, not sure how you expect a proper competition there (specifically subventioned by a few very wealthy entities, not the state).
in addition many of them did end up where they are by taking advantage of a major technological change, while being quasi subventioned, while being in a huge country which has until recently exported it's culture and tech, while systematically breaking all kinds of (non employee protection related) laws and regulations (including US laws/regulations, through seldomly with consequences in the US)
there is little which indicates that mistreating your employees was overly relevant for them to get where they are in most cases
actually it's even the opposite to some degree, multiple of the US mega corps have been known to be quite good employers (e.g. MS, Google). Microsoft was also one of the first huge companies which tried out a 32h week in some of their offices (and the results of that study indicated that it was leading to improvements).
and in general I think most people have no issues with highly payed highly skilled people "working hard like crazy" if
- it's well payed (i.e. you work "crazily hard" a few years and then can lay back for years after
- it's fully free of your choice to end up there
- you are also fully free to leave if you realize it's hitting your health to hard
Like company founders working "crazily hard" at the start of their journey is as normal in the EU as it's in the US. And paying people which work "crazily hard" extra, often in form of annual Bonus payments, is also in some markets not that uncommon in the EU. Also jobs which people very often don't do for more then a few years, because it's just not healthy.
But what Musk is pursing is so far beyond that on the unhealthy spectrum.
And a more normal employees has to be able to work their job without larger gap for like what 50 years at least. That just isn't compatible with "working crazily hard".
But Musk is just an extreme example of what you see in in general more in the US:
Indirectly force people to work harder then long term substainable and when it start causing chronic issues take "medicine" to fix it.
And then be surprised if your country has pain killer/drug addiction epidemic which doesn't just affect the people which did fall through society but like all levels of society.
And wrt. internal stability, have you looked at the US recently!? It's more unstable then it ever has been since the civil war.
Musk's operational involvement in PayPal was 4 months (though he remained on the Board for a while, IIRC).
He didn't create it, it was a (pre-release) working thing when his company (which was failing at building an online bank) merged. He was made CEO, and spent his tenure trying to throw away the working app because it was Java on Solaris for ASP because that's what he knew.
Four months in, he gets married. The BoD attends his wedding on the Saturday, and on the Monday morning when he leaves for his honeymoon, they fire him in absentia. Not "other priorities", "family time", but "fired on your honeymoon".
Since then, most of Musk's "contribution" to PayPal has been cashing the dividend checks.
Yes. U.S. is way behind in banking tech. Even in poorer countries like many of those in latam, you can easily do direct bank transfers. It's pretty common to see e.g. street vendors with QR codes that you can scan to send money directly without the need for a non-bank intermediary.
I'm not sure that it's entirely that the US is behind, it's that they introduced credit cards so early that they've ended up with those dominating the space.
And now because of that, there's lobbying against direct bank transfers and capping of interchange fees.
That explanation makes sense to me, but I'd still consider it accurate to say that the U.S. is behind in this regard since credit cards are pretty ubiquitous in most of those countries as well.
True, but that's a lot more recent than US use of credit cards. Like, up till about 10 years ago most Irish consumers had non visa/mc debit cards and credit cards were rarer (mostly those Maestro debits).
I mean, the US should definitely improve their bank2bank stuff and implement FedNow (I think that's what it's called) but there's less pressure to do so as basically everyone has and accepts credit cards (not true in lots of Western Europe).
yes kinda, it's complicated (as in depends on country and in some countries is still can involve a 3rd party "middleman" even through you do auth with your bank and don't need an account with the middle man)
through what matters is that in the end you can pay on most EU sites without having either paypal or a credit card
so that use case really doesn't need paypal
and for the p2p money sending you need it even less
and if you buy stuff from outside of the EU you most times can pay with both paypal or credit card, so if you have a credit card you don't need paypal for that either
Umm, yes? Not sure about the rest of Europe, but here in Czechia most of merchants have a direct payment method based on QR code.
Basically: 1) you select your bank at the checkout; 2) you're redirected to the bank's payment page with a QR code; 3) you scan the code from your banking app and confirm it; 4) the bank redirects back the merchants page with the payment status confirmed/declined. No payment processor involved and the money goes straight from your account to merchant's account.
Shocking, isn't it? Not that Europe can do it, but that the US can't, and people like you apparently don't even realize it and are actually surprised and skeptical to hear it. The US is a third world country in so many ways, and even more so now.
US added to human rights watchlist for ‘narrowing’ freedom and now ranks near Serbia and Congo:
>The U.S. was added to a watchlist of countries with “faltering civic freedoms” after a global watchdog group raised alarm bells over recent actions taken by President Donald Trump and his administration.
It's not rocket science, but maybe it's better to focus on solving problems here on Earth before going to Mars.
Because it’s directly related - the US’ political strategy is why PayPal exists. Politics is inseparable from economics.
We prioritize the private sector politically and there’s a lot of benefits, and a lot of detriments, to this.
One of the downsides is we have hundreds of more or less identical companies doing the same thing that don’t need to exist. This breeds inefficiency into systems we use, thereby opening the door for even more useless companies that just reduce friction. Friction that we decided we needed to have.
The most obvious example is healthcare in the US, but every industry experiences these detriments.
Edit: Then why did you put a question mark at the end of a statement of fact instead of a period? What he said was true, has been true for a long time in fact (not just Europe, but a lot of the rest of the world), and you can easily google for evidence if you don't believe him, without questioning his honesty. Were you honestly that surprised that you had to ask?
The US lags so far behind other so-called "third world countries" not only in banking, but also health care, freedom from gun violence and school shootings, and now also civil rights and freedom of speech and democracy. I don't think Canada or Greenland would vote to give up their advantages and freedoms to become US states, but if they did, they sure wouldn't vote for the current administration.
I didn't think anyone was lying. Not sure what you mean by that. I was wondering if what they were saying included that aspect specifically or not.
I am not even sure why you were putting words like shocking, surprised, skeptical seemingly into my response. None of these are accurate descriptions of my question and response.
Yes, at least in Poland. You can either use Blik (mobile payments integrated with your bank account) or get redirected to your bank website for fast wire transfer.
Working long hours is not a sign of success, it means things don't get done on a normal schedule so everyone has to bust their ass to meet the deadline. Working this way in perpetuity is wasteful and totally stupid.
I think the biggest problem is, 99% of the jobs out there is boring and meaningless, regardless of level and pay. I don't know about other people, but I can't really be "hardcore" unless I really believe in the work.
That's fair. Programming Starship's flight computers is definitely one hardcore job that I can sleep on the floor. I do have a family but this feeling of "in something, for something" beats everything else combined by one hand.
How sad. I'm sure your kids will speak fondly of how you missed major milestones in their lives so you could help Elon land himself on Mars. Imagine the headstone "Absent father but hey he wrote a kernel that handled Starship's fuel mixing servos."
Gotta disagree here. When you choose to have kids you're giving yourself to something greater. Ignoring them to dedicate yourself to a career is not someone's "yum", it's just being derelict in your duties to your children. Don't have kids if your "yum" is dedicating your life to your career, and no one will have any problems with your choice.
>Don't yuck someone's yum, if they're making decisions for themselves with open eyes.
Why? You cannot critique the decisions of anyone? They are free to ignore me, or think I'm wrong. In respect to you points, an engineer is not a astronaut, a seaman or a pilot. You are not required due to the nature of your job to be away from your children, or sleep in the a cold floor like an animal.
Not even the quality of the work needs it, it's just so you don't hire more people. Sure, there are real emergencies were you might take a rain check with your kid once or twice a year, but a constant culture of grind is different. The whole "hardcore" mentality is cultivated because it is cheaper, the sacrifice is yours and the Elons of the world reap the rewards.
This is not mere personal choice, it's purposely engineered. The plan is that everyone in tech becomes a corporate GameDev, and like it.
LOLOL. These companies have really got some people fooled. My goodness. If you're actually sleeping on your office floor, all you're "in" is "in line for extreme burnout" and all you're "for" is "for making your CEO and shareholders wealthy."
Oh, I totally believe that that is his perspective. And he's entitled to that.
The bigger issue for me is that he's making decisions, ignoring (and now "canceling") regulators who prevent or minimize the impact of decisions he makes along that line to protect our QOL. Because Musk sure as hell isn't bringing along anything up to 8 billion of us with him.
All big-tech CEOs would value people working long hours even if they wouldn't say that publicly. Elon is the only one saying the quiet part out loud that every big-tech CEO was thinking but never saying to avoid backlash.
In a way, I value Elon more than the rest, since he has no filters, what you see is what you get, unlike the rest who are walking PR machines, saying one thing while meaning and doing another. The devil you know is better than the ones you don't.
But Elon lies too, and frequently. Worse still, at least some his lies seem to be motivated by a childish need to score brownie points and/or worship from random internet users. His continuing claims of being a "top player" in online games spring to mind.
Except that in 2025 Elon Musk promised FSD in 2017. A lot of marketing delivers grandiose claims but Musk's are extraordinarily grandiose & unrealistic even by marketing's hyperbolic norm.
There was a web site[1] that cataloged Every claim and prediction Elon Musk has made and how long it's been since he made them, but it looks like they stopped updating it. It was probably a huge amount of work since he makes ridiculous claims every day.
Where are they promising it then? Board meetings? I don't think lying (or creating unsubstantiated truthyness) is the same as saying the quiet part out loud.
I know decent people with no filter. But in the past decade, increasingly, phrases like "has no filter", "doesn't sugar coat things", "calls it like he sees it", etc, have come to be used simply as attempts to positively portray obnoxious, tribalistic, anti-social, antagonistic, mocking, disrespectful, superior, or petty behaviors (behaviors which, not coincidentally, are also up over that time period, especially in leadership).
Also, your premise is flawed. CEOs get a lot of justifiable hate, and yes, many surely wish for employees devoted to the business, rather than proportionally devoted to each aspect of their life. However, there are also plenty of CEOs who genuinely don't want employees to work overtime. And Musk's attitude is arrogant/authoritarian even by the standards of less reasonable CEOs.
Its going to be funny to see the cognitive backlash when it comes out that Elon has a serious ketamine addiction and has essentially been a drug addled raving lunatic for the past half decade.
> I mean it's widely theorized that Trump eats Adderall for breakfast, lunch and dinner, too...
I have never heard this before, but it's an interesting perspective given some of his less coherent actions (tarriffs for you! Oh wait no, actually wait have some more tarriffs).
Social media and tech news is full of CEOs praising long hours, start up culture, hustle culture, putting success first or whatever euphemism they prefer. Musk is just on the extreme and in the public eye a lot.
He's in the public eye because PR is one of his primary skills. He constantly says one thing and does another, just that his following is such that people believe him and do significant internal justifications and contradictions to do so. Musk leads the marketing hype of his companies, which consistently promise one thing and deliver another. He's doing the same with DOGE. Tesla FSD is not going to be delivered in 2017. Mars is not going to be colonized by 2050. Elon Musk lies, a lot, and a large number of people's identities involve celebrating each of those lies.
> [Elon is] in the public eye because PR is one of his primary skills. He constantly says one thing and does another
Indeed. At this point, he's a real world manifestation of an Instagram influencer: 'You'll be wealthy with these 3 tricks!' (ignores thousands of hours off-camera or how money was really made)
"no filters", "what you see is what you get", "tells it like it is" has been said about a lot of pathological liars. I don't really get it. People said the same thing about Trump. There seems to be this thought that people who are saying extreme things must be telling the truth, and the rest of us are merely thinking extreme things but we filter it out. No, I am not thinking those things. I do not to apply some social filter to prevent myself from doing Nazi salutes. The reason I don't do Nazi salutes is that I have no desire to be a Nazi. He's genuinely just a liar and an awful human being.
I'd much rather live in a world where the fascist lying sociopaths are under societal pressure to hide their true selves, rather than the one where they can openly do Nazi salutes and threaten to jail their political opponents. Give me the walking PR machine any day.
> I don’t recall seeing front page headlines every time an employee leaves another company.
I haven't seen it in quite some time either, but it has been more common during previous downturns. Presumably because everyone is trying to find signals that tech is dead to support their preconceived notions.
This kind of thing gets reported on all the time, there are dozens of similar front page stories on HN over the years. It looks like you just didn't pay attention to those.
> Wang first joined Elon Musk’s X in July 2023 and has been an integral part of the company’s leadership, often serving as a conduit between Musk and the rest of the company’s engineers. More recently, he was seen internally as X’s defacto head of engineering and product
They seem to be one of those sites that intentionally makes their Web version suck, to push you to the app. The behavior predates Musk, even, and during the first few months of his ownership this markedly improved (I assume as a side effect of ripping a bunch of stuff out) before getting even worse.
These kinds of error messages are often a dead giveaway that a company (or product) doesn't know what it's doing. How can you know something went wrong, but not actually say what went wrong in the error message? Either 1. You don't have sufficient logging and/or error handling to know what specifically went wrong, or 2. You do know specifically what went wrong but don't know how to fix it or what to tell the user to do to fix it, or 3. You know what went wrong but are being deliberately vague with the user. None of the above are a really good look.
It's really not justifiable to have in-actionable error messages for things like fraud prevention. You don't necessarily need to say exactly why it was triggered or even that it was fraud detection, but at least give me steps to get my issue resolved. If I need to contact support, say so. If I'm locked out for 10 minutes, tell me so I don't waste my time. If I need to change settings, tell me what to do.
Getting told to "try again later" every day you try to send money through a payment app is not a useful error. (I'm not entirely sure if it's fraud protection, but I also have no idea why I couldn't send money because it won't give me any resolution steps).
People familiar with fraud protection or security may assume that the error message is related to fraud protection or security, but actual users are just going to be frustrated.
Was he the guy who made X block Firefox unless you turn off the tracking protection? I will say that change has made it much easier to stop using the site.
I follow some accounts like Chip Huyen, Andrej Karpathy and some cat pic accounts etc..., and a couple of close friends are almost exclusively active on Twitter.
Also ocassional Marvel news is nice to check out in a while...
But its true that toxic crap does pop up on my feed, esp. before the Presidential election, I felt it had gone haywire so I just block some triggering words though even that doesn't work at times..
And by bot, what I meant was when I did try to tweet, way too many times it says to "This action seems automated. Please try again later" or "You have reached your daily limit for this action... Please try again later" or Add your phone number to proceed (though I have done this ages ago) ... not been literally labelled as a bot.
Maybe it is stockholm syndrome... social media does seem like a way to get my fix (cut out Instagram cause of doomscrolling on an ex's profile, Reddit cause its pretty toxic too but its still good place to get some esoteric knowledge, HN has been very good, Facebook is useless unless I try to sell something... speaking of which if anyone is open to buying a 21 speed cycle in Bangalore, please DM)
> Thanks to the growing profile of xAI and Musk’s newfound political influence, X’s business appears to be turning around. The company reportedly just obtained a $44 billion valuation from investors — the same price Musk paid for Twitter in 2022.
What? I don’t get it. So almost 3 years and “growing profile” to reach the same valuation? What was the growth for?
Nvidia in same timeframe far outgrew Meta, maybe no other major ones, except maybe netflix recovering from an even earlier drop. A good portion of Meta's gain was just getting back to where they were before the Apple store changes induced drop (that also hit Twitter).
Yeah and weWork got a "$50 billion" valuation from its bagholders. Then they released their actual books for the S-1, and well long story short, they're circling the toilet as a publicly traded company.
It's worth noting that the widely reported "$44 billion valuation from investors" was Elon Musk himself making someone who co-invested in the original buyout whole again. e.g. Elon Musk is the one who set the valuation.
All of these numbers are fantasy. Similarly Musk has been giving lenders stakes in "xAI" as well to compensate for the eventual failure of their loans, and again that is being reported as X debt losing its discount.
Everything in US equities is absolute farce, especially anything that involves Elon Musk. It's all fantasy numbers.
Evidently, that $44 billion valuation didn't stick long enough for the most recent investment round, in which Elon and some tiny investor group I've never heard of and isn't an actual VC invested $1 billion at a $32 billion valuation.
Considering that was probably all Elon's money, he could've priced the round any way he wanted.
Musk severely overpaid for X. The valuation is not the same as the price someone paid for it or would pay for it. Someone could today buy it at twice the valuation, it would be dumb, but they could.
Musk actually wanted to terminate the sale, but the twitter board chair pursued legal action to force the sale[1] at the $44 billion discussed here.
If Bret Taylor did not force Musk to pay that severely inflated price, Donald Trump would likely not be president today. Not all heros wear capes.
I think he bargained on getting a lower price, but it was definitely a political decision, it's only that the horse he was originally betting on was DeSantis. After that fell through he eventually found his way to Trump.
Musk didn't intend to buy Twitter. That's incredibly clear from his statements in and out of court in the months leading up to the purchase. (Also, the fact that he had to be dragged into court.)
Musk being Musk, however, once he was forced to, made lemonade from lemons.
He overpaid that much so he could publicly humiliate and bully and lie about his own trans daughter who he hates so much in public to his hundreds of millions of followers without getting banned, so it was worth it to him.
Financing stochastic terrorism ain't cheap, and a lot of innocent people get caught up in the crossfire of his personal family feuds against the "woke mind virus".
>Stochastic terrorism is a form of political violence instigated by hostile public rhetoric directed at a group or an individual. Unlike incitement to terrorism, stochastic terrorism is accomplished with indirect, vague or coded language, which grants the instigator plausible deniability for any associated violence. A key element of stochastic terrorism is the use of media for propagation, where the person carrying out the violence may not have direct connection to any other users of violent rhetoric.
MSNBC guest accuses Musk and Libs of TikTok of promoting 'stochastic terrorism' on Twitter.
Kristofer Goldsmith claimed Elon Musk is deliberately trying to turn Twitter into a 'raging cesspool':
>An MSNBC guest accused Elon Musk of promoting "stochastic terrorists" like Libs of TikTok to cultivate an "extreme far-right audience" on Twitter Monday.
>During a segment on "Deadline: White House" focused on the emergence of extremist groups in the U.S., host Nicole Wallace asked self-declared fascism-fighter Kristofer Goldsmith to discuss how Musk's purchase of Twitter has contributed to the issue.
>"Elon Musk is very deliberately cultivating an extreme far-right audience, and very specifically an anti-trans audience," Goldsmith, who serves as CEO of Veterans Fighting Fascism, responded.
>Goldsmith claimed that Twitter accounts like Libs of TikTok and Gays Against Groomers created a "trans panic" online by using "slurs to try to dehumanize trans-Americans and trans individuals abroad and say that they're predatory toward children." He also blamed them for causing alleged threats against "drag events."
>Both accounts repost others' social media content to expose members of the LGBTQ+ community and others who espouse radical views to children.
>"What they’re doing is they’re taking this like QAnon myth, their Pizzagate pedophile conspiracy theory…and they’re mainstreaming it. All through what has become one of the most, whether we like it or not, important social media platforms in existence," Goldsmith said.
>According to his website, Goldsmith, who has made frequent appearances on MSNBC, describes himself an "investigator and consultant who takes an unconventional approach to fighting against domestic fascist organizations and unlawful militias."
>Goldsmith told Wallace that he believes Musk is intentionally destroying Twitter and turning it "into a raging cesspool because Elon thinks he has something to gain from the chaos."
>"That is why he is promoting not just stochastic terrorism on his own, but he’s interacting with stochastic terrorists like Libs of TikTok and Gays Against Groomers and all of these other far-right activists who single out the trans community and the broader LGBTQ+ community with acts of violence and threats of violence," he alleged.
>Libs of TikTok, which boasts over 1.4 million followers on Twitter, was suspended six times prior to Musk's takeover for allegedly violating the platform's "hateful conduct" policy. The second installment of the "Twitter Files," revealed last week that Twitter internally acknowledged that the account had "not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy" but still proceeded with the suspensions anyway.
>The account publicly thanked Musk for giving her a sense of "vindication" by publicizing Twitter's internal communications.
>"They suspended me multiple times knowing I never violated any policies. This is what happens when you talk about things that they don’t want you to talk about," she wrote on Twitter. "So glad those days on Twitter are over. Thanks @elonmusk."
>Musk responded to her post, promising to make Twitter "much better" under his leadership.
>"You’re welcome. Twitter won’t be perfect in the future," he tweeted, "but it will be much better."
He over-offered in hindsight. At the time however, no, as mega-low interest rate money was still a thing, and companies such as Twitter had significantly higher valuation as a result.
This is why he wanted to backout. The metrics had changed, by no fault of Twitter or him.
I think people completely forgot about this part: After the initial offer he tried to back out of it, saying Twitter wasn't actually worth that much. Twitter sued Musk to force the deal through, and it was finalized after months in court.
Are you sure? He used it to help get Donald Trump elected, and now Musk has an unassailable position in government and tremendous power to steer government spending to his businesses, and to cripple the agencies that regulate them.
Musk is a lightning rod. Surely he must realize that after he has served his purpose, he will be cast aside and likely end up imprisoned if not worse, right?
Have people paid no attention to what happens to almost everyone in Trump's orbit? In Musk's case it will be hugely politically valuable to use him as a sponge for anger, pretend that he was free-ranging, and cast him aside. Therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. We've seen this pattern with Trump time and time again, and it's amazing that Musk seems so completely delusional about this guaranteed outcome.
I think the idea that Trump and Musk have a falling out is wishful thinking - they have too many aligned long-term incentives. Also, Trump consistently rewards public loyalty, especially the extremely sycophantic kind that Elon exudes. "Unassailable" is a dramatic way to phrase it, but its more or less accurate.
I'm not being wishful. It is an absolute certainty. Like as certain as the heat death of the universe. We're only two months in and already the friction is growing.
Both have absolutely colossal egos. Both demand being the centre of attention at all times, and both have a weird Mafioso "family dynasty" thing going on. I mean, look at Musk dropping in on various Trump meetings. I don't think you could say he was being sycophantic at all, but quite contrary is giving off major "these are my employees" energy.
Add that Musk is increasingly whiny. He's starting to realize that the people aren't going to love him for the things he is doing, and he's realizing this isn't the long term advantage he thinks.
At some point, sooner rather than later, they're going to disagree on something. It might not even be a big thing. Or maybe Trump will just decide it's political capital to jettison Musk during some crisis or other. The egos will clash, Musk will be declared a "RINO" (like almost 100% of Trump's first cabinet and underlings) and every protection will evaporate.
Musk's "favorability rating" is collapsing (currently -19 and dropping). He is a sponge taking all of the negativity, and once he has absorbed enough he's going to get jettisoned.
This matters less than you think. Trump has no problem setting aside his ego to further his agenda. Remember his leaked calls with the Mexican president? Remember his submission to Putin in Helsinki? His entire cabinet is made up of people who have trashed him, his own VP called him literally the next Hitler. Trump acts very rationally when it comes to power dynamics, casting off Elon only creates problems for him, no benefits.
> but quite contrary is giving off major "these are my employees" energy.
That's just the vibes you're picking up, Trump doesn't care about this, he's the one sitting at the desk. What he cares about is the unending stream of praise that Elon glazes him with. "Trump was right about everything", "Trump is the greatest president ever", walking around in Trump swag etc etc. Allowing Musk to crash a couple meetings with the press means nothing.
> and he's realizing this isn't the long term advantage he thinks
Elon is all-in, he's burned every other bridge, a Trump alliance is the only long-term advantage he has.
> Musk's "favorability rating" is collapsing (currently -19 and dropping).
Except with Trump's base, where it has climbed from -10 to +50. There is close to 0 possibility of Elon being jettisoned.
> His entire cabinet is made up of people who have trashed him, his own VP called him literally the next Hitler.
You don’t think it helps his ego to bring these folks to heel? To make Marco Rubio preside over the destruction of a foreign policy system he personally values?
> Except with Trump's base, where it has climbed from -10 to +50.
The same folks suddenly hate Canada. They swing, wildly. The core principle is “what is Trump saying today” - what he said yesterday is unimportant.
>Trump has no problem setting aside his ego to further his agenda.
Everything Trump does -- on geopolitics, trade, business, law -- is 100% based upon his ego. Trump's bizarre hostility towards Canada and Europe is not based upon reality, it's based upon how Trump feels they have treated him (look at Trump's endless attacks on Canada...while the US has a $100B trade deficit with Vietnam of all places). Zelensky has thanked Americans and America endlessly, but to Trump and his puppy Vance, it's about thanking them personally.
Trump's ego is the root of literally everything the US does now. The world power being led based upon this clown's mafiosa type behaviour, which apparently the majority of America is happy to go along with. The guy sharpies maps and lies with every utterance if it serves his ego (in a manner that breaks the average person's brain, unable to comprehend that someone could be so insanely deceptive always, so they assume he surely can't be and it must be everyone and reality that is wrong). He holds laughable fake golf championships, that he of course wins on every outing. He posts fake man of the year magazine covers. It would be laughable if it wasn't so profoundly tragic.
All of the members of Trump's team have to subjugate themselves and metaphorically lick his toes at every meeting, in a scene that would make North Korea look on with shame.
EDIT: The US government just published the DNS for trumpcard.gov, likely for their "sell citizenship for $5M" hilarious plan. For anyone to seriously downplay this sociopath's extraordinary ego and need to be pandered to constantly is amazing.
>"Trump was right about everything"
Surely you realize that Musk's actual message was that he, Musk, was right about everything, right? Musk is happily going with this Trump is my puppet thing, and nonsense like this is Musk making it his own and about himself. Similar to how he often wears a black MAGA hat, because he's trying to make the cult his own. He won't succeed.
>Except with Trump's base, where it has climbed from -10 to +50. There is close to 0 possibility of Elon being jettisoned.
Sure, in the same way that Republicans suddenly hate Zelensky. The cult will follow whatever the cult leader demands.
With every passing month those big DOGE savings aren't going to materialize -- oh the excitement they all had for those imaginary $5000 DOGE savings checks they would get -- government will continue to fall apart, trade wars will put millions out of work and stagflation is going to go nuts, Americans will realize they are a global pariah (hey, but they've got El Salvador and Russia, so there's that), and things will turn really quickly. Musk will be an easy bit of chum to toss in the water. Trump loses nothing.
We'll revisit this. Musk absolutely will not last the term, and I doubt he'll make it to midterms. And when he is jettisoned, he should realize the outrageous, perilous danger he will be in.
Musk is different from the other people in Trump’s orbit. Trump can’t afford to throw Musk aside or turn him into an enemy. Not yet anyway.
This is not to say that there won’t be a breakup, there may yet be. But it seems like Musk was able to parlay his Twitter investment into tremendous direct influence over the government, a pearl without price. I don’t know that he ever cared whether Twitter made money or not.
Trump and the MAGA cult is far bigger than Musk. Musk was against Trump, and actually backed DeSantis. Did not matter at all.
If Trump turned his cult against Musk, Musk would be done. Immediately all of the bootlickers and retweeters would deride everything Musk has said or done. Musk's money would be meaningless, and he'd be the next "Soros" in their minds.
Musk clearly cares incredibly about whether Twitter makes money, and has been desperately flailing around to try to make it viable. They're currently suing advertisers who don't advertise there, which is farcical. Musk really believed his grand "we'll be your bank!" thing would be some simple thing (because everything is super easy to do for someone who doesn't actually understand or do any of it)
I’ve been wondering about that because it seems like the relationship is increasingly unbalanced in Trump’s favor.
Musk is very exposed to Trump now: he needs pardons or abeyance of enforcement for DOGE, all of his companies are exposed to multiple regulators, and he depends on government contracts. A lot of the money he throws around in politics is leveraged on his stock holdings, so a regulatory move which affects that would also cut into his ability to fight back.
In contrast, while Trump was somewhat addicted to X he doesn’t need it after the election the way he did before and he’s shifted a lot to Truth Social. Before the election, he depended on Musk’s money but he’s been taking in a huge war chest which he can use to keep Republicans in line, too.
1. Even if that were true, why is your "set of people" representative of such a large fraction of the US population that it would sway an election?
2. Even if it were somehow representative, is it more plausible that all of these people were on X getting these ideas (a platform that is small relative to other media), or that these ideas were simply blasted everywhere?
3. And even if it were somehow representative, and they did get those ideas from X, what makes you think that not having those ideas "false" ideas would have changed the election outcome [1]? People more often use "facts" to justify political positions they've already made, not the other way around.
> The idea that X had any influence on the election is laughable.
Likewise, the idea that a hammer has influence on building a house is laughable. But, of course, that is not what was said. It was said that Elon Musk had influence, helped by tools like X.
I fully expect that "Elon is gonna come and clean up all the useless jobs in government just like he did at X!" won a lot of votes. So, while X itself has no influence – it is inanimate, it was undoubtedly an important tool in allowing Musk to achieve the influence he offered.
The plain English reading of "He used [X/Twitter] to help get Donald Trump elected" is quite clearly "X/Twitter was an integral part of getting Trump elected". There is zero evidence that this is the case.
> it was undoubtedly an important tool in allowing Musk to achieve the influence he offered.
I doubt it completely, mainly because there is no evidence of this, but please do cite the evidence that convinced you of this. Until then, I'll consider the most plausible scenario to be that this is a convincing story you've told yourself because social media is likely a big part of your life, and the lives of your immediate social circle, so of course you would think it was important, despite X/Twitter's relative unimportance compared to other social media.
> The plain English reading of "He used [X/Twitter] to help get Donald Trump elected" is quite clearly "X/Twitter was an integral part of getting Trump elected".
Sure. I can agree that "He used a hammer to help build that house" and "A hammer was an integral part of building that house" can be taken to mean the same thing. So it follows that X was an integral part of getting Trump elected by way of Musk using it to convince people that he has some kind of skill in hacking and slashing jobs and thus is able to do the same in government.
> mainly because there is no evidence of this
You didn't hear Trump say that he would call upon Musk to do reduce government – what at some point was labelled DOGE? In fact, he even followed through with it! This is all news to you?
> this is a convincing story you've told yourself because social media is likely a big part of your life
It was a convincing story reported in the mainstream press. I don't live in the US, so maybe it has all been made up – I'm not there to witness anything else, but that seems highly unlikely. Methinks you've been listening to Donald for too long if you are calling "fake news" here. We in my country still believe that the press has credibility. But if you know something else to be the case that contradicts what was reported, logically it is you who should be telling me. Me "proving" it to you makes no sense. You clearly didn't think that one through.
I've started using X a lot more in the last few months since I built an app that let's you track habits with a tweet called Xtreeks (yeah, I know..).
I enjoy the product, but wish they'd spend more time making the core elements of the product work. For example, aspects of the API just don't work as expected, like for some reason search and mention endpoints do not have support for long form posts (>280 characters) enough though X supports posts with thousands of characters. The result is the API appears to work for some posts and just silently fails for others.
In addition to the API issues, we've struggled with inexplicable labeling/suspension and shadow banning, even on the personal account I've had for over a decade (seemed to be triggered by using my VPN). I understand the desire to control spam, but it seems excessive. Or if you do it excessively, at least provide adequate tools/support to request review.
On my app's X account I paid for both API access ($200/mo) and the Verified Org status ($2,000) and had a hard time getting support that took days to reply, when it did reply at all. And when the person replied they had nothing to do with the account label process, so weren't able to help, which was quite frustrating. It was fine since this was a little side project, but if this was a business at scale and I was paying that much in addition to ad spend I'd be furious.
Anyway, I know nothing about the Head of Eng or what's at the root of these issues, but I'm a big fan of X and hope they're able to fix these things. It's such. valuable tool. I'm even fine if it's pay to play, but if someone is on the higher tiers of your paid plans the support should be available when they need it.
> For example, aspects of the API just don't work as expected, like for some reason search and mention endpoints do not have support for long form posts (>280 characters)
At the risk of sounding blunt, they probably fired the people who actually built the API at Twitter and it's now (internally) in maintenance mode. They very openly don't care about giving other companies data -- even with the new pricey API tiers -- or making the non-app/-website experience good at all. I doubt any of the new item types -- Articles, ordered media in tweets, etc. -- even have an API exposed.
> I'm a big fan of X and hope they're able to fix these things. It's such. valuable tool.
Genuine question: what value are people finding on X these days? I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, but I gave up on the site due to the rampant toxicity awhile ago. Are people just highly curating their feeds?
It started to feel like going to a trash dump with the intention of finding things that aren’t trash. Perhaps possible, but extremely smelly and occasionally the cause of a bed bug infestation.
1. Good ML accounts that allow me to stay up to date. Didn't find such concentration of them anywhere else, even after some have left. This is what mostly keeps me there.
2. Current info about the russian aggression from a few trusted accounts, mostly in ukrainian. Again, as I don't want to use Telegram, it's hard to find those in other places, though some good ones are also on Mastodon and Bsky.
> Genuine question: what value are people finding on X these days? I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, but I gave up on the site due to the rampant toxicity awhile ago. Are people just highly curating their feeds?
There are still a few Nitter instances running, so I use a web browser to check up on a few individuals (journalists, economists) sporadically.
(I don't have any apps from The Socials installed on my phone (and never have): always web-based lurking.)
> Is "I don't have social media apps on my phone" the new "I don't even own a tv"?
I know myself well enough to know that it'd be a bad idea for me. I have enough issues with screen time as it is, I don't need it in my pocket as well.
>I enjoy the product, but wish they'd spend more time making the core elements of the product work.
I think it might be worth stepping back and thinking about what the core elements of the product is. Not just with X, but with with all social media.
Personally I've migrated from thinking 'damn this is broken' to 'oh thats a feature not a bug'. I'm embarassed how long this really took me across a lot of platforms, but when I stopped thinking about my needs as driving product design decisions it all was less frustrating (albeit more disturbing).
For context in response to the questions about "Why build on X?"
I've be working to relearn math and there happens to be a large group of others also doing the same with Math Academy and sharing daily updates on X.
I found this inspiring (especially as the lessons got harder) so I tweeting my updates too. But I also wanted a way to independently track my progress across math and other areas to see progress over time, even if I changed tools or stopped tweeting.
So that's the reason I built app on X: So my tweets get logged in a GitHub-like habit graph to show progress over time. It just pulled my bio/profile from X (login with X) and tracks my habit tweets. It's super simple, but meets my needs perfectly. My habit page: https://xtreeks.com/gabemays
I understand the questions around the long-term stability of the API, but I'm optimistic.
Why did you choose to build it on top of X? X is no longer Twitter, it's Elon Musk's vehicle for his personal political agenda. Setting aside whether you are aligned with Musk's political views, it seems like a poor decision to align yourself to a platform that is so explicitly not intended to be used the way you're using it. You should take this as a sign to fix your dependency on X. Musk doesn't care about what you're doing, he cares about his political agenda, he will happily destroy what you're doing if it were to benefit him.
