This one is going to be long and bumpy folks – so buckle up and strap in. So many jokes. Must resist.
In an ode to that dickens, Charles, I present the ghosts of corporate world: present, past, and future.
Ghosts of employees (not) present.
Let’s start with Barstool Sports. Arguably, the “it” sports brand for the millennials. Everyone wanted in on that. I co-ran a fund and the ownership is so complex it makes my head hurt. Fortunately all you need to know is BS was worth LOTS of money. Call it a billion to be round.
Two days ago, the folks who owned lots of BS sold it back to the founder (Dave) for $1. Yes, ONE dollar. And, something if he ever sells it. Which is like saying I traded you some broken down pitcher for a bag of bats. These kinds of “future considerations” are worth babkas.
Dave shows up at BS Corporate and posts this on Barstool:
How Fucking Brain Dead Are All My Employees?
I have an honest question. How fucking dumb are all my idiot employees? I’ve literally owned Barstool again for less than 24 hours, they know I’m in town and literally none of them have showed up at the office today before 10am. Nobody is here. It was so silent I noticed how silent it was. And I’m not talking about valuable employees either. This isn't murderers row of content.
Sorry, Matt. The cuss words are a direct quote. A clear case where the message is the message
Every word is a WINNER. That’s why they’re all highlighted.
Let’s break it down.
BS create BS content. Read that how you like.
Employees don’t care to even LOOK like they care.
Marc Andreessen has this adage that “good” companies have 2x more staff than they need. “Poor” companies are at 4x.
Ghost of companies past.
It used to be called Twitter. Now, Mr. Musk calls it X. It’s his toy, he can call it Rosebud for all I care. I prefer the diminutive, X-ee.
Like it. Hate it. Like or hate him. Fine. Float your boat.
There’s something going on here that’s so big it goes unnoticed. It’s like the big Blue Sky. It’s there, but you only notice the sun, moon, or clouds.
When Elon bought Twitter he shed 1000s of employees. This is the point where I’m suppose to say something like, “It’s so sad. All of these people have to put food on the table. I hope they get jobs… soon.” And, if I loved the old Twitter or dislike Musk, I add, “That dang Elon Musk. He’s such a jerk.”
But, I’m not. I’m not going to say any of that because while I don’t hate people and even like some people, re-read Dave’s comment above. People are people. Employees are employees.
I’m reminded of all those day in the life videos on people (not employees) at Twitter in the pre-Elon era who took videos of yoga and smoothies and showing up for work for a few hours a few days a week.
If you’re not seething, re-re-read the Dave headline.
Here’s the big reveal. The big blue sky of Elon’s Twitter buy…
Elon is running X-ee like it’s a startup. Think of Hewlitt and Packard Bell in their garage. Or Jobs and Woz in theirs. Inventors invent in private. They show you what they want to show you when they’re ready to show it.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are big companies. When you fix a Big Co, you take it private. When a big fund – like KKR – wants to fix a Big Co they buy it, put it their garage and tinker in private until it’s ready for prime time again. Again, I did this stuff (on a very small scale – but the premise applies).
What’s going on with X-ee is relatively unprecedented. Elon is tinkering in public.
Days into his ownership, Elon tweeted six slides that outlined his plans for the company. The whole deck had 12 words. Hell haiku’s are nearly 50% more loquacious.
This is the kind of deck a startup founder would use as teaser to get his aunt, Sally, to invest. Not the plans of a company just bought for $44b.
He’s pared the company back from 8000 people to about 1000. Forget the Andreessen adage. Twitter wasn’t just poorly run, it was a bloated mess.
At each step along the way, pundits scoffed.
You can’t shed heads and keep the lights on. “It will break.” Nope. Servers kept serving even with only 12% of the staff was there to sip coffee and keep watch.
Ok, but you won’t be able to stop hate speech. News flash. This isn’t Facebook where the aforementioned aunt Sally is looking at family pics. Twitter is for news. People get riled up. They argue about stuff. And somewhere in that mass of 300 million odd people someone will say something not nice. It’s honestly never happened in my timeline. Now, when I go into the town square I see some not wonderful stuff. But, I’ve seen some yucky stuff in San Fran’s Union Square too. Yuck is the realities of reality.
Really: one, hate speech is down; two, Twitter offered advertisers some; and three, no news platforms offer actual safeguards. Threads doesn’t even pretend to have them. Beside the hate angle is a strawman. I’m not here to defend it or dump on it. It’s a further point that 7000 “employees” didn’t stop hate speech. Which – was our point.
Elon kept on downsizing and the detractors kept warning us that something negative would happen. If you can’t attack X-ee’s past and present, you target it’s future. X-ee wouldn’t be able to roll out new features. I heard this over dinner from a friend in IT. Her source, … she read it on mainstream media. She was – of course –completely wrong.
Twitter under Elon is a startup. Run fast. Do stuff. Break stuff. They’ve rolled out more features in less than a year than public, bloated Twitter did in six years.
All, with 12% of the staff.
Because – go re-re-re-read Dave’s point.
Which brings us to…
Future of employees ghosts.
Bah humbug. In the past, companies would hire to excess. For a while there, it was impossible to hire. So you hired more. More people. At more pay. With fewer skills.
People are smart. They know when they’re superfluous. So, they don’t show up. 2x, 4x, in Twitter’s case 7x employee don’t matter.
In economic terms, I’d argue that make a lot of money for doing not a lot. And, they stick around for (in some cases) long times.
Because, until Elon…
Companies didn’t do mass layoffs, because: (1) it would look bad, (2) it would make it tough to hire people in the future, and (3) it would look bad. Yes, one and three are the same. Because that was the best reason not to do big layoffs.
But, now companies can let hoards of people go. The stigma is a little less. Because Twitter didn’t break. Because they rolled out new features. Because layoffs don’t look so bad.
As a person, this is not good.
As an employee, I better not be an idiot and start showing the eff up.