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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
I feel like many bosses want people to allocate more to a job, but don't offer the corresponding upside.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvk_XylEmLo
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.
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.
Regardless of really believing in their work, people want to have time with their loved ones.
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.
On a more serious note, I see this as a net negative, both for employees and the company.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
How do you get three years from the article?
It's been like 20 months.
Dead Comment
But, yeah, seems like just a nothing burger from the Verge.
Just on the web? You have been labeled as bot and you are still using the service? This reminds me Stockholm syndrome.
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)
I hate that stupid name.
Not much of a story to be honest.
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.
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.
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.
Considering that was probably all Elon's money, he could've priced the round any way he wanted.
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...
As a political transaction, if anything, Musk paid very little for what he got.
This is why he wanted to backout. The metrics had changed, by no fault of Twitter or him.
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 -_-'
Dead Comment