The media does have its biases but their reaction seems perfectly reasonable to me. Occam’s razor suggests this is not only unorthodox, but shows extremely poor judgment. This demonstrates that (a) either Elon is actually NOT as smart he has been hyped to be, or (b) there’s some ulterior motive, but these are long-tailed.
Typically when one joins a company, you don’t do anything for X number of months and get the lay of the land. I’m inclined to believe this is not just a local minimum, but typically close to the optimal strategy for a human being (but not a superintelligence playing 5D chess). It’s unlikely the case that he bought the company only months from bankruptcy. Everywhere in big tech is doing layoffs but not to this magnitude. Also, coming into an office and demanding people work twice as hard and completely change their schedules around, would not work in any company. No employee with a family would be able to switch that quickly. No sane employee would be willing to pivot like this. Also, why should they? They have leverage.
None of the methods described above are actually reasonable in a real company, like blanket layoffs by LoC. Yes we can discuss above the motivations, how maybe to first order (probably not even that) it gives an approximation, but it’s not like it’s that hard to do it better and more accurate than this. No, at the end of the day, he’s either an idiot, or deliberately trying to destroy it either out of some kind of revenge, or maybe somehow in the view that this buys time for AI alignment :)
Here are my predictions: * He will have trouble staffing the company and complain loudly about it with the tired “no one wants to work anymore” * He will move the company to TX and hire from there at 1⁄2 the salary or so. * The site will stabilize, though not improve in any meaningful way, but he will be lauded as a hero in red states. * The move to TX will be intended to signal a shift away from Silicon Valley and have a small but measurable effect, but CA will remain the dominant hub.
I predict the move to Texas will be largely fake and just whining to get CA politicians to listen to his policy suggestions. They will still have a large office in California.
The media does have its biases but their reaction seems perfectly reasonable to me. Occam’s razor suggests this is not only unorthodox, but shows extremely poor judgment. This demonstrates that (a) either Elon is actually NOT as smart he has been hyped to be, or (b) there’s some ulterior motive, but these are long-tailed.
Typically when one joins a company, you don’t do anything for X number of months and get the lay of the land. I’m inclined to believe this is not just a local minimum, but typically close to the optimal strategy for a human being (but not a superintelligence playing 5D chess). It’s unlikely the case that he bought the company only months from bankruptcy. Everywhere in big tech is doing layoffs but not to this magnitude. Also, coming into an office and demanding people work twice as hard and completely change their schedules around, would not work in any company. No employee with a family would be able to switch that quickly. No sane employee would be willing to pivot like this. Also, why should they? They have leverage.
None of the methods described above are actually reasonable in a real company, like blanket layoffs by LoC. Yes we can discuss above the motivations, how maybe to first order (probably not even that) it gives an approximation, but it’s not like it’s that hard to do it better and more accurate than this. No, at the end of the day, he’s either an idiot, or deliberately trying to destroy it either out of some kind of revenge, or maybe somehow in the view that this buys time for AI alignment :)
Here are my predictions:
* He will have trouble staffing the company and complain loudly about it with the tired “no one wants to work anymore”
* He will move the company to TX and hire from there at 1⁄2 the salary or so.
* The site will stabilize, though not improve in any meaningful way, but he will be lauded as a hero in red states.
* The move to TX will be intended to signal a shift away from Silicon Valley and have a small but measurable effect, but CA will remain the dominant hub.
Not my worst prediction, given the latest news!
I predict the move to Texas will be largely fake and just whining to get CA politicians to listen to his policy suggestions. They will still have a large office in California.