Thread by @hondanhon

I have a theory that many of the people who thought Karen's purchase of Twitter would work out and would be a good thing have never had to deal with real, painful consequences of being disappointed by someone with power.

By that, I mean: it takes a certain kind of outlook to be able to look at someone and say yes, while in theory there's a good path forward, the *person* and their behavior indicates not just disappointment but likely harmful disappointment that needs planning for.

Shorter version: my theory is that the people who thought Elon would pull it off and discounted the possibility of his complete and utter omnipolyshambles because they have never, ever had to deal with real, personal, painful consequences of such behaviour.

It's harder to imagine the harm and shitshow that someone like Elon can cause if you've been near it and experienced it personally and viscerally, otherwise you overweight the potential upside, and any shitshow is "well, I guess that's also just Elon! Worth a shot though!"

So to keep going with no citation and a big MY OPINION AND THEORY sign, the pundits and commentators who thought this would work and that SK had (and still has) a chance of pulling this off have never been in a position where they've truly been threatened by someone like Karen.

(This is the bit where people point out how dare I assume x, y, z have not suffered trauma/childhood trauma/adverse event/needed to deploy grit in their entire lives.)

I'm mainly talking about people like Lessin and Gruber here, who are the biggest examples other than pretend techbros. And to be completely clear, don't tag them. I didn't on purpose.

A bunch of people clearly thought that all Musk had to do was "make good product decisions and ship them", the latter of which arguably Twitter had not been good at (acknowledging that shipping compliant features at a company already under a consent decree is difficult!).

The "make good product decisions and ship" crowd completely discounted the signals that a) Elon doesn't actually know what he's doing from a software + social network product management point of view... [cont]

b) he's a *shit* manager, c) again, he has no idea what's involved in even "shipping software" (see every single time he's made some sort of technical pronouncement) and d) again, he's a *shit manager* who doesn't know what he's doing.

All those people who thought he could've made "good product decisions and shipped things" understood, I think, that you don't necessarily need deep knowledge about what it takes to run a stupendously large social network and its day to day operation ("non-eng" and eng)

the thing is, they thought that, I don't know, maybe Elon would moderate his shitty behavior and not act like a complete dick and double down on his lack of knowledge *and* not listen to people? really?

his entire thing is *not listening to people*

sv's entire complex over the last 20 years has been *great leaders are people who don't listen to people* and have singularity of vision and that's been boiled down to such a reductive, shitty extent that you get sam stole your banks free and space karen being worshipped

all these people who thought he could've acted with humility and listened to the team, sure yes, fine layoffs, but also jesus christ of *course* he was going to act this way

the people who thought he could've pulled this off are very blatantly telling on themselves

"judge him by his actions" all these people said, as the transaction closed, and for some of us, we looked at *all his previous actions -- AND ACTIONS INCLUDE SPEECH* and *applied them to what it would take to run twitter well* and noped the fuck out

for fuck's sake people of course judge people by their actions but *speech is also action* and also can be a *strong indicator of action* and who the fuck is surprised now?!

when I say "telling on yourselves", you really looked at someone who's shitposted their entire career, doubled down on it, thumbed their nose at authority, made that their *entire thing* and you're suddenly *surprised* when he destroys morale and an organization this way?

like, really, it honestly feels like you haven't been on the receiving end of someone in power being a complete shit to you and acting that way, in which case, lucky you!

you really thought someone who does off-the-cuff shit *and talks about it the way he does* and gets away with it was going to handle a giant transition in a way that wasn't going to be deeply, shitly disruptive & destructive and lose the trust of critical people?

if you didn't realize that before, you do know that's a signal that you've likely been enabling him? praising him?

come on, the signs were there. it was clear he was out of his depth. he acts like a shitty person, he treats people shittily, that's been *reported on* and you thought he would pull it off?

at least from my pov it's horrible because it's *even worse than I imagined*

send screenshots of your fucking code, come on

and before any reply guy bootlicker comes in, even sending an email like that *as a provocation to troll* is shitty management, COME ON

stack ranking! i mean really! lines of code written! that wasn't even surprising! that's how he thinks! that is not a surprise!

and also in before any boot reply licker guys are all "well if you know so much about it why don't you do it" well, because it's fucking hard! and it requires a giant team! and, you know, collaboration!

the difference is he's consistently said *that it would be easy*

every single tweet he's literally either

a) how hard could it be, michael or
b) i am the shittest manager who through my actions will only ever fundamentally attract a fraction, at best, of the people needed for this "mission"

i spent all last night rejoicing in the collective drama of imagining this site going down immediately and of course it didn't, it won't die quite that way

i'm so fucking angry and sad now at what this shitty, shitty person was enabled to do

i've spent my whole life connecting with people through the internet through practically every fucking social medium and this one was certainly a transformative one and it's a fucking tragedy and loss and I'm so pissed and sad and everything

you know why we're acting/alternating with so much absurdism/surrealism/humor on here? because it's a fucking totally acceptable response to shitty horrific destruction or in a sense _you've got to fucking laugh sometimes_

that shitty atlantic piece "well, i prefer his honesty over sv's hypocrisy". hold the fucking front page, both of them are completely shitty and we deserve better. just because a maladaptive trait of shitty person has pushed things forwards doesn't mean it's a fucking requirement

what a callous, stupid, mean, vindictive, hurt asshole, and fuck everyone who gave him a by and praised him for it

way to completely miss the point. this isn't "creative destruction" you can do fucking "creative destruction". what this is, is

* inept destruction
* counter-productive destruction
* whole-ass *stupid* destruction
* full-on bad management destruction

https://twitter.com/redesign/status/1593740985032376320

for the avoidance of fucking doubt, you can "shake things up" in a way that isn't this fucking terrible and honest to god counterproductive to your actual goal, and people *thought he'd be capable of doing it in a productive way*

you can fucking "turn a ship around" and you can even do it relatively quickly without being *this fucking inept* and if you can't even see that this is inept then honestly I am sorry for the people who've ever had the misfortune to work with you, never mind for you

a lot of these people also don't appear to have begun to appreciate the scale at which something like these products even work, have refused to listen to people with experience of running what I'll call a *legacy* evolved product of over 230 million daily active users...

230 million! do you know how many things there are operating at that scale *at all* in the whole world? that are also 16-odd years old? that have, kindly, all that tech debt? of course you'd do it differently now

look, here are the signals of how completely out of his depth I thought he was going to be:

* thought he'd have a fully automated car factory, that didn't work
* gave up and made cars by hand outside, with shit fit/finish quality

the thing is *you can do that for cars*

the person who says fine, everyone come in, we'll fucking put on a show in the barn and everyone pitch in and we'll bang a car together?

that doesn't work for running/maintaining/building on a fucking worldwide network with 230 million daily users

but that's his mindset and that's how he thinks of things: hey everyone come in and let's just fucking make this car

that's a signal that his level of understanding is "lines of code"

"everyone come and fill in on the assembly line and help make model 3s" or whatever, *which worked for cars* doesn't fucking work for "this is a software company, everyone come in and write more lines of code please"

at least that's how *I* saw it

so his complete lack of understanding in this field, *exemplified by his "let's fucking put on a show in the barn!" where everyone can pitch in* also combined with his *i'm an asshole but you love me fucking you over really* shtick to create this shitty polyomnishambles

what, you're surprised the guy who offered to make a submarine and called someone else a pedo *and got sued over it and lost*, you're *surprised* they acted in a way that either made the entire payroll team walk out? that alienated a whole bunch of critical engineers?

at the very *least* someone realized that maybe this isn't a "hey, just need people to help put up this barn, anyone come in off the street" because he tried to entice people back but guess what! shitty person manager sabotaged himself! what a fucking surprise!

we're watching with fucking popcorn, bc there's this spiral of :

a) "fuck you all, lol aren't I edgy and funny" in management + leadership when guess what a lot of people can't be fucked with that

b) *repeatedly* trying to manage and showing he has no idea what he's doing

he has *no* idea he's losing the respect of people, otherwise he wouldn't be behaving this way after being so fucking stupid and lacking the awareness to realize and read the fucking room that offering 3 months severance was going to do worse than decimate his pool of staff

fucking idiot

but no, this is obviously 5d chess

and the horrific fucking thing is people are looking at this, people who got fucking lucky and started lucky, they're looking at this and thinking:

you know what, this guy knows what he's doing, *i'm going to give him more money*

and you know what i'm perfectly happy to admit that I think spacex has done a fantastic job, that it did it with a shit ton of government money, and that my suspicion is gwynne shotwell is the hottest shit

he never *ever* had a gwynne shotwell equivalent for this

longest streak of rocket launches ever with no problems? awesome

reusable ones, too? amazing

could you have done it without being such a shitty person? actually you know what, *I think you could've*

also want to reiterate again that every single person volunteering to help out and how-hard-could-it-be-michael-ing is telling on themselves as the barnraising model of putting on a show to save the whatever

this isn't an hbr case study this is a hundreds of millions of dollars new campus of look at this fucking guy

oh wait I haven't even started on the banks that loaned thirteen billion dollars to this idiot

a) they thought they could do it because
b) they thought they could sell it on because
c) they thought there would be buyers

and you know what's terrible is they were probably right

anyway if you really do need to read an hbr case study coming out of this you're a fucking idiot no disrepect to @styer because I hope to god none of the case studies are "don't be a fucking asshole"

https://twitter.com/styer/status/1593749098456227841

there are genuinely people who don't understand this is:

* planting multiple bombs in your hq
* setting them off on purpose bc you think it's a good idea
* also bc you think it's be funny
* not even knowing what the bombs would hit

[cont]

https://twitter.com/hondanhon/status/1593741765261283328

* not understanding that, generally, people don't want to go to work somewhere that has fucking bombs planted in it
* or working somewhere where those bombs have gone off
* or being told that they must be near bombs all the time

the fucking irony of me yelling this thread here and getting to meet new people during it

I could go on but what's the fucking point

I love this place and it's a fucking tragedy

oh right, buy my book or whatever, it's full of me thinking and typing stuff like this:

verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1

also of course I have a newsletter with more stuff like this because someone who writes a thread like this would totally have an insufferable newsletter. it's free, if you want.

newsletter.danhon.com