this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
881 points (97.7% liked)

News

23261 readers
3462 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There's this weird balance with businesses. While narcissists and sociopaths make the wealthiest business owners, many successful business owners are merely "unpleasant".

Look at Musk. If he were competent (and the Twitter thing wasn't originally just an attempt to manipulate stock prices), the whole "buy and gut" attitude can be quite effective at making money. Dump compliance folks. Dump critical personnel and let them "figure it the fuck out", etc. I've seen businesses run by sociopaths do things like that all the time.

And hell, let's look at Musk a bit more. Everyone talks about how much money Twitter is losing. Nobody is talking about how much money Musk is losing (or not losing). First, a full 1/3 of the purchase price are loans in Twitter's name (!!!). That puts Musk on the hook for only $30B directly... which he paid in equity of other companies (making the purchase tax-sheltered).

Burned utterly to the ground (the product and the staff), 2023 might be their first profitable year since 2019 (albeit as a MUCH smaller company), and I'm guessing Musk is collecting a fair chunk of change in salary and bonuses. Ironically, I'm guessing he's still going to amortize the "losses" as he builds his own ROI.

Yes, a better leader would have created a successful Twitter. And YES, Musk never really wanted to spend that much on it. But I firmly believe he's taking it to the bank anyway.

And as horrific as most CEO's are, a lot of them don't have this type of behavior in them. Which is the other side of the "reason business owners need good workers". Not every CEO is willing to embrace "profit-focused mass-layoffs"