Elon Musk Trolls Everyone With His Move into Twitter HQ Mere Hours After His Future Employees Issue Their List of Demands
Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Elon Musk's Twitter feed knows he's a big symbolism guy. He's constantly sending messages with photos, emojis, memes, GIFs, cartoons, Venn diagrams and so on, often without captions. I guess it's just a product of how his brain is hardwired to assess situations and visualize solutions to them. That's how he gets from, say, the issue of fossil fuels to EVs and getting us to Mars where we can drill that planet dry.
Anyway, I'm not great at symbols (more of a metaphor/reference/allegory brain), and sometimes struggle to figure out his posts. But this one is obvious even to me. This is him trolling his future employees. Trolling the bejeebers out of them. Trolling them with everything he's got. Trolling the kitchen sink at them.
Probably in reaction to this:
Deadline - As Elon Musk nears an Oct. 28 deadline to acquire Twitter, employees of the beleaguered social media platform are slamming the billionaire for plans to possibly lay off up to 75% of staff when he takes over.
A draft of an open letter seen – and published — by Time while it was still circulating among staff, insisted that, “A threat to workers at Twitter is a threat to Twitter’s future.”
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Let's be clear here: It's awful anytime someone loses a job. Especially a working/middle class person. It happened to me once, due to company wide layoffs. Right after we'd bought a house and had our first baby on the way. Even with some severance coming in, it was the worst couple of months of my life. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. So stressful that to this day, I'm reluctant to demand even a referee or a pitching coach gets fired. I don't want that bad juju on my conscience.
To that point, I don't even want to see people who work for a social media platform that is the de facto public square of the age in which we live, yet are committed to making sure that speech they don't approve of gets muted, demonetized, deplatformed or otherwise banned, lose their jobs. That is, until I read this open letter.
Notwithstanding that these people have openly complained about their future employer before:
… this letter is enough to do the unthinkable. And that is take the side of the richest man in the world over 75% of his workforce.
Again, we can all feel bad for them. But dig deep into the language used here. We demand. We deserve. Concrete commitment. We can continue. Demand. Demand. Demand. Demand. This might be 4th grade reading level vocabulary. But the ideas expressed are straight out of a 2-year-old not wanting to take a nap.
The whole basis of their argument is "We want to keep our jobs because we want to keep our jobs." Which I totally get. As I learned myself, having a job very much beats the snot out of not having a job. That's all the reason a employee needs to keep their job. However, the employer has a different set of priorities than you liking to have a salary, benefits, work visas, coffee in the break room, Friday pizza parties and the like. Like getting value out of paying you. Crazy as that may sound.
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Nowhere in that letter did they ever address what they plan to offer Musk in return for him paying their bills. That might seem harsh to someone who was raised to believe you go to college, get a job, and the company respects, understands, and appreciates you for the whole person that you are and your inherent worth as a human being. But the sooner you learn someone needs to profit from your effort, the better. Then you're able to function in this world, not the utopian fantasyland your Film Studies professor with the Che Guevara poster in his office who makes 200 grand promised you.
Let's ballpark this. How many Twitter workers who approved this message could sit down with the Bobs and answer the question every working adult should be able to?
I'm guessing it's 25%. And we'll know who they are because they're the ones who'll still be cashing paychecks from Elon Musk in a few weeks.