25 theses about Elon Musk's first three weeks at Twitter

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Twitter has been in constant turmoil over the last three weeks, as Elon Musk has announced a flurry of layoffs and new products—then quickly suspended some new products that didn’t work out as intended. Rather than write a conventional article with a clear thesis, I thought it might be better to offer some loosely-connected thoughts about how things have gone so far.

1. Let’s get this out of the way: so far, Elon Musk seems to be doing a worse job running Twitter than I expected. I expected things to be chaotic, but I didn’t expect them to get this chaotic this fast.

2. I don’t like the way Musk has treated Twitter’s employees. Layoffs are always painful, but Musk seems to be going out of his way to do it in a haphazard and disrespectful way. This must be an immensely stressful time for Twitter employees—especially those who are supporting families or have immigration visas tied to their jobs.

3. It would be nice to say that Musk’s efforts are doomed to failure because this kind of callous management style never works. And if I had to guess, I’d say it probably isn’t going to work. But I’m not as confident as a lot of his critics.

4. Musk is clearly trying to make Twitter more like those at SpaceX and Tesla, where employees routinely work punishingly long hours. You might think that was unsustainable, but each of these companies has been doing incredible work for close to 20 years now.

5. We’ve known for almost 50 years that programming productivity doesn’t scale linearly with the number of programmers. A major reason is that programmers have to coordinate with one another, and the cost of this grows more-than-linearly with the number of programmers.

6. So I don’t think it’s that crazy to think that a 2,000-employee Twitter with a SpaceX-like work culture could be more productive than a 7,500-employee Twitter with a conventional big company culture.

7. The big question is whether Musk can convince enough people to sign up for this. Reporting so far suggests that a ton of engineers are likely to quit beyond the 3,000-some people Musk fired earlier this month.

8. SpaceX and Tesla are dream jobs

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