Commentary
When billionaire Twitter owner Elon Musk cleaned out 3,700 superfluous Millennials from his company, the internet went crazy.
“How dare!” shrieked the celebrities (who fancy themselves to be human rights lawyers).
“Sue them!” demanded the Democrats, trampling over each other to profit from the social credit points on offer.
The moral outrage was something to behold, with personalities like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) frantically posting information for workers to confront Musk.
“If you’re on Twitter (or any) employee subject to mass layoffs, New York has a WARNS law too. NY WARNS requires 90 days for mass layoffs from large employers. Employers who violate may be required to back pay your wages and benefits.”
Perhaps she posted this without realising Musk—the richest and most successful businessman of modern times—checked with his lawyers before telling half the staff to take a hike? Plenty of users corrected her.
Despite generous staff packages offered by Musk, there were plenty of Democrats whinging that businesses “can’t just fire people!” as if employment had become a right rather than a privilege (unless you’re unvaccinated).
They missed the material point.
Twitter was a monstrosity bleeding millions when Musk acquired the company. It was riddled with superfluous departments, ineffectual tech teams, and virtue-signalling “safe spaces” where employees were more likely to be found napping than typing.
No company can survive with this sort of “I work when my mental health feels like it” attitude prevalent among youthful tech employees.
We’ll be kind and call this a “relaxed” work environment that was set up in perpetuity by former CEO Jack Dorsey and kept alive by recently fired CEO Parag Agrawal. Twitter bent over backwards to placate the feelings of “frightened” staff during COVID—never asking why they didn’t mind drinking in bars but feared sitting in an office.
“Decisions about where you work, whether you feel safe travelling for business, and what events you attend should be yours,” they declared.
Long Overdue Clean Out
Other Silicon Valley tech giants have been trialling hybrid employment models. They have enough money to play around with inefficiency, which is probably why these structures are only found in companies with the luxury of lacklustre staff.
Elon Musk didn’t become the world’s richest man by embracing inefficient workforces. Aside from sacking the “chaff,” he has made perfectly reasonable demands on the remaining staff. They will work in the office (not at home) and put in a full-time week.
“Basically slavery!” some shouted, clearly ignorant that everyone else in the country is working a lot harder than them.
“Weak, pathetic, and cruel: HR managers weighed in on Elon Musk’s Twitter mass layoffs,” wrote Fortune magazine. Hopefully, Musk sacked the HR department first.
But Musk’s little bonfire of dreams involving 3,700 staff is tiny compared to the raging fire-front of Facebook.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has cut his team by 13 percent with 11,000 staff already sacked. The only difference is Zuckerberg did his best to sound remorseful, calling them “talented employees,” while Musk made no apologies for duct-taping over Twitter’s cracks.
Where are all the social justice warriors to scream down Zuckerberg as a fascist, tyrant, and “literally Hitler?” Where are the salivating Democrats sharing tips on how to sink Facebook in litigation?
If Musk is bad, surely Zuckerberg is worse?
Both companies are sacking staff for the same reason. In the words of Zuckerberg: “To become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1.”
Zuckerberg’s company is facing competition from rising social media platforms. As a legacy entity with the largest customer base, Facebook has struggled to evolve its clunky structure while maintaining increased levels of censorship. It has plenty of users but rising dormancy which harms monetisation.
Facebook (which now likes to identify as “Meta”) maintains 87,000 employees around the world. Every day, there are more stories about foreign teams being impacted by mass layoffs.
“How did we get here?” Zuckerberg’s letter asks rhetorically.
He goes on to blame COVID, a surge in e-commerce that “outsized revenue growth,” a failure to predict user behaviour, and disappointing ad revenue. In order to survive, Zuckerberg, just like Musk, has to thin the herd and invest wisely.
“We’ve cut costs across our business, including scaling back budgets, reducing perks, and shrinking our real estate footprint. We’re restructuring teams to increase our efficiency.”
Facebook is even revising its “desk-sharing” policy. Things must be tough.
Silicon Valley in the Face of Competition
For those paying attention, the Golden Age of Tech has been crumbling for a while. Gone are the free lunches, smug salaries, and “work from the pool” selfies. The monopoly of Silicon Valley is collapsing, and so too is its privileged position as a generous employer.
Australia has already experienced this, with local tech companies who led the field 20 years ago gradually replaced by cheap labour in India and China.
Why pay Australian developers $200 (US$133) an hour when some poor bloke will do it, in a different timezone for $2? It doesn’t matter that the cheap work is sub-par—it just has to be “good enough.”
It was inevitable that the discarded, talented developers would start making new products, creating a thriving and competitive technology market that has gradually eroded the supremacy of Silicon Valley.
We don’t know what’s going to happen to the world of social media.
What began as a fun idea to connect people around the world and allow them to gossip in an uncontrolled spasm of noise has become a powerful political tool and corporate gold mine.
Social media is the toy of politicians and CEOs. They flood these platforms with ads, pressure developers to censor anything that harms their MO, and mine the private data of users for re-sale on the commercial market.
This is the first time in history that social entities like this have existed.
Their future will depend on whether they are owned by CEOs who kowtow to the ambitions of predators, are overrun by government control, or if they are purchased by entrepreneurs who value the rancorous soul of discussion that gave them birth.
Musk is the latter. Let’s see if he survives.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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Alexandra Marshall is the online editor for The Spectator Australia, contributor to various publications, political commentator on GB News and Sky News Australia. She is the Young Ambassador for Australians for Constitutional Monarchy and the English-Speaking Union, a political advisor, and a former AI database designer.
