On Hacker News, everyone's a comedian! And, yeah, as the sibling comment pointed out there've already been failures as a result of some musky action. While Twitter isn't likely to fail on its own, E-Lon is actively causing problems. You need people to deal with that, and even if he had motivated, relevant, and competent engineers… how long will they stay motivated without a paycheck?
Let's not forget that whatever code monkeys are left are now personally liable for running afoul of the FTC. Whatever motivation they may have now will run out pretty damn quick once they stop getting paid.
Pretty sure that the developers that are left will not be liable for anything unless they are knowingly participating in criminal activity such as criminal negligence that is the direct cause of someone getting seriously injured or killed.
Generally speaking prosecutors want to target the highest level individuals responsible for directing such activity in the first place, not low level implementers who have little say one way or the other.
For now I'm talking about the FTC consent decree, so administrative penalties not criminal charges. Musky fired the folks who were responsible for ensuring compliance.
How do you propose Musky does that with no payroll department? E-Lon walked back the mandatory return-to-office policy last week. Surely if he could find (or thought he could find) suitable replacements he would be pretty comfortable demanding RTO.
I'm not really familiar with how they do payrolls in USA, but I'm pretty sure it isn't some rocket science (pun intended) and can be done rather cheaply by an outsourced firm.
Also, why are you (and many others here) refer to Musk as "E-Lon"? Is it supposed to be a derogatory nickname?
It's simply an abbreviated version of Elongated Muskrat as far as I'm concerned. Payroll is easily one of (if not the) most complex systems at any company. It's not just statutory stuff but personnel stuff as well. With Twitter you're not just dealing with 50 states and the feds, but with every other company in which Twitter has (had?) employees. There's a cottage industry of payroll firms precisely because payroll is so obscenely complex.
Even if you outsource it you'll still need people within your company to manage your service provider. At one company I worked for they got all of their outsourced HR+payroll for free (indefinitely) because the provider (Gevity) consistently fucked up everything they touched. This was at a company of like thirty people.
If you're suggesting Twitter can simply outsource payroll, sure. But you do that before you fire your whole payroll department. You still need people to handle the transition.
Let's not forget that whatever code monkeys are left are now personally liable for running afoul of the FTC. Whatever motivation they may have now will run out pretty damn quick once they stop getting paid.