Elon Musk says free employee lunches at Twitter costs more than $400 per meal

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-free-cafeteria-lunches-cost-400-dollars-each-2022-11

by nitramm • 4 years ago

10 10 4 years ago

powera• 4 years ago

As Twitter is no longer a publicly-traded corporation, it is my understanding that Mr. Musk no longer has any obligation to ensure his statements about the state of the business are truthful. Is that correct?

JohnFen• 4 years ago

It depends on what the statements are and to who. If the statements are relied on by investors to make investment decisions, for instance, they better be truthful.

johnthuss• 4 years ago

I don't blame him for trying to rein in costs, but man, it would be hard to work under these conditions. Why would anyone stay?

smt88• 4 years ago

You could say this about a lot of his other decisions, but ending free lunch at a failing company seems very reasonable. Most people don’t get free food at work at all.

kevincrane• 4 years ago

And then the person who actually ran the lunch program said "no it doesn't, that doen't make even a little bit of sense". Elon is just pulling numbers out of thin air based on hunches.

https://twitter.com/_hawko/status/1591909771124539393?s=20

dekhn• 4 years ago

I don't think it was pulled out of thin area- he found a number that he wanted to be a numerator (total cost of providing meals), and a number that he wanted to be a denominator, and did the basic division. It's very likely the values he used were simply not appropriate, or existed without some context.

boeingUH60• 4 years ago

I think Musk is mistaken or intentionally misrepresenting...the idea is that Twitter has a $13 million-per-year contract with its food vendor. But, due to the Covid pandemic and the acceleration of remote work, many employees have stopped coming to the office and taking advantage of the free meals...so, he's dividing the total contract value by the average number of employees now badging in at the office instead of the total number of employees during normal times.

mrtksn2• 4 years ago

Okay, Twitter originally had 7500 full time employees. There are 260 workdays in a year and let's say %10 of those show up in the office as Musk says and 2 meals a day are served.

So this works out as (13000000/(7500* 0.1 * 2 *260)) ~= $33 a meal. How to get this to $400 a meal? That's more than order of magnitude difference. 13M at $400 a meal buys you 32500 meals and this is 125 meals a day served. 125 meals a day feeds ~60 employees only. Are there 60 employees in the offices of Twitter? Considering that Twitter is not a bank branch and the occupancy is not for only 260 days but for 365 and they don't close after 5PM, the number of people who can be at the office for the $400 meals must be considerably lower - something like 22 people at the office at a time on average(32500/(365*4)).

Can anyone with info on the Twitter HQ occupancy can confirm that there are about 22 people at the office at the same time?

Elon Musk says free employee lunches at Twitter costs more than $400 per meal

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