X’s director of engineering, Haofei Wang, has left the company
188 comments
·March 25, 2025Nckpz
dominicq
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.
otikik
I had a boss like that.
One time he told me "In a bacon and eggs dish, the hen contributes but the pig really gets involved. I want all my team to be pigs".
I internally thought "yeah, but you are neither the hen or the pig, you are the guy eating the dish". I left as soon as I could.
ryandrake
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.
osigurdson
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.
maxfurman
He used a metaphor in which he slaughters his entire team? Sheesh, talk about making the subtext text.
josefritzishere
Cannibalistic metaphors were not on my red flag list but they are now.
reverendsteveii
>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.
ethbr1
But nobody can give you more time.
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
tartoran
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.
ethbr1
Imho, this is the original staffing sin of the video game industry. An endless supply of naive labor is never a good thing to trust manangement with.
pc86
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.
osigurdson
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.
ctkhn
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.
osigurdson
Agree. He isn't very hardcore as he isn't working 16 hours a day at my company for $10 per hour.
dathinab
fun fact
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.
toomuchtodo
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.
Aeolun
The Netherlands may have a per capita GDP of (only) $65000, but people tend to forget that we work on average 5.5h a day.
Compared to the US’s $65875, and 6.7h worked on average.
dekhn
Ernst Abbe at Zeiss played a big role in this- helping to introduce an 8-hour work day along with employer co-ownership.
Clubber
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike
hadlock
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.
feoren
> 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.
kolanos
Here is an excellent video on the history of work. In short, the Dutch screwed it up for all of us. [0]
damnitbuilds
And the European equivalents of Tesla and Spacex's sucesses are where exactly?
Paypal? X even?
I am totally not hardcore, I value my free time, but driving the staff like this seems to have worked very well for Musk's companies.
stephenhuey
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.
toomuchtodo
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)
consteval
It works of course but it’s a short term solution. Because you’re trading off long term success for success right now.
It’s like a cash advance on a credit card. Great for getting 500 bucks in your pocket, but the interest is steep.
People, like most resources, can be extended past their maximum value at the cost of longevity.
otikik
Yeah but we don't have a Musk either. One compensates the other.
dboreham
PayPal isn't necessary in Europe because banks are properly regulated and hence provide the same service for free.
FireBeyond
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.
ferguess_k
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.
damnitbuilds
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.
ferguess_k
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.
lenerdenator
You'd think that the director of engineering would receive enough of the pie (read: equity) to make them consider staying.
I guess it either isn't enough of a slice, or the slice wasn't going to be valuable enough to deal with Elon, which is really saying something.
thih9
Tongue in cheek, Elon said that he intends to move to Mars, perhaps we shouldn't expect that he'd care about Earth's QOL.
On a more serious note, I see this as a net negative, both for employees and the company.
FireBeyond
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.
FirmwareBurner
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.
krige
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.
tw04
So when he promises fully autonomous driving is going to happen this year, you believe him?
GenerocUsername
A lot of big tech CEOs are promising full driving this year, they just don't have the cajones to say it. Elon is just saying the quiet part out loud
happytoexplain
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.
altacc
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.
ethbr1
> [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)
vonneumannstan
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.
FireBeyond
I mean it's widely theorized that Trump eats Adderall for breakfast, lunch and dinner, too...
feoren
"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.
damnitbuilds
I think there is a decent person inside Musk, I just hope his brother helps him find it.
techpineapple
It’s been 3 years, which seems like a normal tenure in tech, I don’t recall seeing front page headlines every time an employee leaves another company.
mcintyre1994
It's The Verge, they report on senior people at tech companies. They wrote about Meta's head of engineering leaving (https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/8/23160405/meta-head-enginee...) and Apple replacing their head of hardware engineering (https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/25/22249393/apple-senior-vic...).
9rx
> 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.
root_axis
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.
SecretDreams
> 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
How do you get three years from the article?
It's been like 20 months.
techpineapple
His LinkedIn shows he worked for Twitter for more than a year before then.
SecretDreams
So at Twitter for about 3 years and head of eng for <20 months. Is <20 months a long tenure in such a position?
draw_down
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anshumankmr
Well deserved.. On web, I get labelled as a bot for no reason and its so bad I just stopped using it on web...
alabastervlog
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.
wlesieutre
Something went wrong... try reloading
ryandrake
"Something went wrong"
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.
jandrese
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.
aurareturn
This has gotten worse for the web in general because AI bots are going nuts.
timeon
> I just stopped using it on web...
Just on the web? You have been labeled as bot and you are still using the service? This reminds me Stockholm syndrome.
anshumankmr
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)
only-one1701
When I saw this headline I thought it was going to be a blog post about announcements of heads of engineering leaving at a given company X.
I hate that stupid name.
kps
X? Wake me when Wayland's director of engineering resigns.
ignoramous
Wayland? Mainline Surface Flinger already.
Oras
> 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?
ljm
I wonder how many of those investors have skin in the game and are sycophantically trying to avoid Musk leaving them holding the bag.
timmg
> What? I don’t get it. So almost 3 years and “growing profile” to reach the same valuation? What was the growth for?
In fairness, that was a frothy time for stocks. Twitter stock price was at an unsustainable price (IMHO) when he bought it.
cma
Compare market cap of others in their segment: Meta has grown a lot since then, Snap not so much.
ergocoder
To be fair, twitter hasn’t really competed or been comparable to Meta for a while.
Not saying that they aren’t competitors, but it is more like they have been out-executed by Meta even before Musk’s acquisition. Way before.
To be more fair, any company being compared to FB would mostly look worse.
rchaud
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.
Zigurd
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.
llm_nerd
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.
rvz
> Everything in US equities is absolute farce, especially anything that involves Elon Musk. It's all fantasy numbers.
Exactly. Then you would also agree that the entire startup industry, especially these AI startups are beyond overvalued.
What matters is when it all crashes down to reality.
flanked-evergl
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon...
yyyk
You're assuming it was a business transaction. Of course not. Musk never intended to make a direct profit.
As a political transaction, if anything, Musk paid very little for what he got.
Macha
> You're assuming it was a business transaction. Of course not. Musk never intended to make a direct profit.
> As a political transaction, if anything, Musk paid very little for what he got.
I think the fact that he tried to get out of it, indicates that this wasn't a long term plan, though he did eventually make political use out of it.
JumpCrisscross
> Musk never intended to make a direct profit
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.
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DonHopkins
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".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism
>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':
https://www.foxnews.com/media/msnbc-guest-musk-libs-tiktok-p...
>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."
davidham
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.
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ergocoder
I just saw Trump in a press conference announcing huge funding for OpenAI, whom Musk tries to destroy
“Tremendous power” you say?
llm_nerd
Unassailable?
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.
naasking
> He used it to help get Donald Trump elected
The idea that X had any influence on the election is laughable.
bbarnett
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.
Izkata
> This is why he wanted to backout.
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.
aurelien
Well .... The point is that working for Elon meen that you are not one of the best, but a fanatic.
Same for all Elon stuff ... Poor Elon
Last year I would have been be proud to works for SpaceX, today I will not accept an offered Tesla -_-'
curtisszmania
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curtisszmania
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rvz
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gmays
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.
smileybarry
> 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.
haswell
> 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.
throw0101c
> 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.)
pc86
Is "I don't have social media apps on my phone" the new "I don't even own a tv"?
tpm
> what value are people finding on X these days?
I find value in:
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.
MattSayar
Yeah, Ethan Mollick commented that BlueSky has an anti-AI bias which is difficult to overcome
https://bsky.app/profile/emollick.bsky.social/post/3lku5ei5l...
jonkoops
The API is broken by design, even before Musk took over they slowly crippled it so you would only use official Twitter apps.
gmays
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.
avs733
>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).
abxyz
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.
pc86
The GP doesn't have a product that happens to have a dependency on X. They have a product that is by definition intertwined with X.
"Do it somewhere else" is just as bad a piece of advice as you would think "integrate with X" is.
DonHopkins
People who make poor political decisions very often also make poor technical decisions too, since they've decided for themselves not to be reality or evidence based. No big surprise. Also no big surprise when they start self-pity-tweeting about leopards eating their face, just something you can set your watch by.
pc86
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fauxpas
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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.