Elon Musk Went on a Firing Frenzy at Twitter. Now He's Paying for It: Robert Reich

[appalachiablue]

- 'Elon Musk went on a firing frenzy at Twitter. Now he’s paying for it,' by Robert Reich, The Guardian, Nov.21, 2022.

Where employees are a corporation’s key assets, workers’ greater power comes in threatening to walk out the door.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44bn, he clearly didn’t know that the key assets he was buying lay in Twitter’s 7,500 workers’ heads.

On corporate balance sheets, the assets of a corporation are its factories, equipment, patents and brand name. Workers aren’t considered assets. They appear as costs. In fact, payrolls are typically two-thirds of a corporation’s total costs. Which is why companies often cut payrolls to increase profits.

The reason for this is corporations have traditionally been viewed as production systems. Assets are things that corporations own, which turn inputs – labor, raw materials and components – into marketable products. Reduce the costs of these inputs, and – presto – each product generates more profit. Or that’s been the traditional view. Corporations are systems for directing the know-how, know-what, know-where and know-why of the people who work within them.

Yet today, increasingly, corporations aren’t just production systems. They’re systems for directing the know-how, know-what, know-where and know-why of the people who work within them. A large and growing part of the value of a corporation now lies in the heads of its workers – heads that know how to innovate, know what needs improvement, know where the company’s strengths and vulnerabilities are found, and know why the corporation succeeds (or doesn’t).

These are becoming the key assets of today’s corporations – human assets that can’t be owned, as are factories, equipment, patents and brands. They must be motivated.

So when Musk fired half of Twitter’s workers, then threatened to fire any remaining dissenters and demanded that the rest pledge to accept “long hours at high intensity” – leading to the resignations last week of an estimated 1,200 additional Twitter employees – he began to destroy what he bought. Now he’s panicking. Last week he tried to hire back some of the people he fired. On Friday he sent emails to Twitter employees asking that “anyone who actually writes software” report in, and that he wanted to learn about Twitter’s “tech stack” (its software and related systems).

But even if Musk gets this information, he probably won’t be able to save Twitter...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/21/elon-musk-went-on-a-firing-frenzy-at-twitter-now-hes-paying-for-it

[keithbvadu2]

1. The value of human capital was recognized during Trump's COVID period.

The value of human capital was recognized during Trump's COVID period.

So was the value of legal liability immunity.

MEAT INDUSTRY CAMPAIGN CASH FLOWS TO OFFICIALS SEEKING TO QUASH COVID-19 LAWSUITS

https://www.democraticunderground.com/111711013

[brush]

2. This is not rocket science. Shouldn't a rocket science CEO know this?

Duh!

Come on genius boy, you gotta have people who know what's up, and you gotta treat them well to get good results...management 101.

[SWBTATTReg]

3. Idiot should have known better. A good software engineer is worth their weight in gold, especially

one that has been around for some time, and knows the Ins and Outs of interrelated software systems. Systems are so complicated nowadays, and someone knowing this is worth their weight in gold, and can guide the company through the intricacies of installing new or revised software, do a better job of testing, etc.

Idiot.

[republianmushroom]

4. GOOD

[forgotmylogin]

5. I'm really enjoying Mastodon!

Once you get over the initial hurdle of signup confusion, it's got a lot more flexibility than Twitter. You can edit, you can specify how public your posts are, you can include content warnings for text. You have to opt-in to a lot more content by default rather than it all being one giant continuous thing of everyone in the same "room".

And moderation is local based on your own server. It's possible for server mods to block and moderate other users on other servers. So if there's a group of pestering right wingers on maga.redwave.social (not a real server) my server can ban individuals on that server from seeing or replying to anything on ours, or ban the entire server en-masse. Just because someone might get banned from one server doesn't mean they are banned from other content on Mastodon.

It seems like it'd be self-regulating - the more a group breaks the rules and gets shut out of servers, the less likely they are to appear in people's federated (global) feed and see other posts they want to argue with.

[SouthernDem4ever]

6. Musk presents a crude example of coporations of today in general

With the advent of automation, corporate executives devalued the contribution made by their human employees which shows up in how they are treated on a daily basis. To counter this, some corporations have tried implementing little things like prizes or trophies to employees that get customer compliments but this doesn't address the overall corporate culture of dog-eat-dog, low pay, no benefits, no pensions and disregard for how their decisions affect the workplace which ALWAYS shows up in the finished product.

[appalachiablue]

7. ++