Elon Musk Is Watching His Back; His Security Guards Are Watching Him Poop

Re: Halli Thorleifsson’s quip about Elon Musk not going to the restroom by himself, the context is this report from Marianna Spring at BBC News, primarily about harassment and CSAM content moderation falling apart:

In San Francisco, the home of Twitter’s headquarters, I set out to look for answers. What better place to get them than from an engineer — responsible for the computer code that makes Twitter work. Because he’s still working there, he’s asked us to conceal his identity, so we’re calling him Sam.

“For someone on the inside, it’s like a building where all the pieces are on fire,” he revealed. “When you look at it from the outside the façade looks fine, but I can see that nothing is working. All the plumbing is broken, all the faucets, everything.” [...]

The level of disarray, in his view, is because Mr Musk doesn’t trust Twitter employees. He describes him bringing in engineers from his other company — electric car manufacturer Tesla — and asking them to evaluate engineers’ code over just a few days before deciding who to sack. Code like that would take “months” to understand, he tells me.

He believes this lack of trust is betrayed by the level of security Mr Musk surrounds himself with.

“Wherever he goes in the office, there are at least two bodyguards — very bulky, tall, Hollywood movie-[style] bodyguards. Even when [he goes] to the restroom,” he tells me.

Sounds like a fun job.

★ Tuesday, 7 March 2023