Twitter’s “spam bots”: Musk’s comments on the merger deal with Tesla, Agrawal, and the Stock Exchange
The financing structure of Musk’s acquisition shifted over time, but even after promising in April to “no more TSLA sales planned after today” Musk sold another huge batches of his shares. “In the (hopefully unlikely) event that Twitter forces this deal to close and some equity partners don’t come through,” he tweeted soon after, “it is important to avoid an emergency sale of Tesla stock.”
In relation to the case of the merger agreement, the messages were part of court files and were made public Thursday on the eve of trial. The court will look into the matter on October 17.
“I’m not seeing anything we didn’t know already that’s legally relevant. Some information in there is bad, but it has previously been made public and it’s in the original complaint that references Musk’s text.
Musk at first declined a seat on the board, then accepted a day later and immediately proposed to Agrawal that the platform “unwind permanent bans on users.”
“Frankly, I hate doing mgmt (management) stuff. I kinda don’t think anyone should be the boss of anyone. But I love helping solve technical/product design problems,” wrote the cofounder of six companies.
Musk has spent months deriding Twitter’s “spam bots” and making sometimes contradictory pronouncements about Twitter’s problems and how to fix them. But he has shared few concrete details about his plans for the social media platform.
The Cache of Twitter: After Trump Gets His Co-Investors, Musk’s Twitter Controversy, and Why Twitter Shouldn’t
The cache of text messages is revealing, but legal experts who are watching the case closely say there’s more entertainment value than new legal evidence.
The text messages support the idea that his interest in the platform was based on its role in public debate and free speech issues, not because he thought he could make the company profitable, Lipton said.
Yet by accusing Twitter of fraud, Musk set himself a high legal bar to clear. Miller says it’s hard to prove fraud if you aren’t able to show that the person is lying or that they didn’t know about the problems.
Twitter also showed that Musk’s own data scientists mostly confirmed the company’s estimates about how many human users versus spam accounts are on the platform, which is key to his argument.
With such narrow chances of victory, pressing on in court could have seen Musk do more damage to the company it seemed increasingly likely he would end up owning. That could have jeopardized his relationship with co- investors who had taken financial pressure off the entrepreneur by agreeing to finance his acquisition deal. “The more this continued, Musk risked not only buying a company that was worse off than when he began this process, but doing it with less equity support,” Lipton says.
If the deal goes through, it could soon return to Trump what was once his preferred social media platform. Trump, whose tweets as president often drove the agenda in Washington, DC, had almost 90 million followers before he was banned permanently by the platform two days after the January 6 attack on the Capitol. (It’s unclear whether Trump would automatically regain his followers if unbanned.) The risk of further insurgencies was what led to the decision.
Jack Dorsey, who was the CEO of Twitter when the company banned Trump but has since left the company, responded to Musk’s comments saying he agreed that there should not be permanent bans. He said Trump’s ban was a “business decision” and it “shouldn’t have been.”
But relations between the pair seem to have soured since, with the men publicly trading barbs over the summer. After Trump called Musk a “bullsh*t artist” at a rally in July, Musk responded by tweet, writing, “I don’t hate the man, but it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset.”
Although Musk has suggested in public statements since he first questioned the deal in May that he could easily walk away from his $44 billion commitment, legal experts were not surprised by the U-turn.
Elon Musk’s Deposition of Twitter after the Facebook Deal Closed: A Key Hole View of What Social Media Should Really Look Like
The trial is scheduled to start on October 17th. “The parties have not filed a stipulation to stay this action, nor has any party moved for a stay,” the Delaware Chancery Court judge overseeing the case, Kathaleen McCormick, wrote on Wednesday as reported by the Wall Street Journal. I will keep on working towards our trial which is set to begin on October 17 The trial is almost certain to be put on hold given the current negotiations.
Musk may have felt that the trial would damage him personally when he decided to fold. The entrepreneur watched the internet chew over a tranche of his personal text messages with major figures in Silicon Valley last week. This week he faced what Miller says would likely have been “a very embarrassing” deposition.
Elon Musk will no longer be deposed by Twitter’s lawyers on Thursday morning, after both sides agreed to a delay as they worked to close the $44 billion purchase of the social media network, the Financial Times and Bloomberg report. Musk was scheduled to be deposed for two days in Tesla’s home of Austin, Texas starting at 9:30AM, ahead of the trial’s scheduled start on October 17th. His deposition was moved back because of the concerns over COVID-19 exposure.
When Musk agreed to buy Twitter back in April, he said he would “unlock” the company’s potential by advancing free speech and “defeating the spam bots.”
In the official deal announcement, he said that “free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and also the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”
If the social networks are allowed to allow all legal speech then it would lead to toxicity, from misogynist, racist and transphobic abuse to false claims about the security of voting and the effectiveness of vaccines.
“If you’re looking for a key hole view of what Musk will look like, go to Parler, Gab and Truth Social” said the president of Media Matters for America.
He said that being able to say and do things that are forbidden on more mainstream social media sites is the main feature on those sites. And what we see there is that they are cauldrons of misinformation and abuse.”
The new owner of the micro- networking site says he will establish a content moderation council made up of differing opinions to help determine its policies. He says the platform policies haven’t changed yet.
He was a member of the company’s board and later backtracked because he didn’t want to remove permanent bans for those that advocate violence.
Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist who was kicked off for abusive behavior in 2018, is possibly one of the people who could have their bans lifted.
The person recommended that Musk hire someone who has a savvy cultural/political view to lead enforcement, and that they should be called a “Blake Masters type”. Masters is the Republican Senate candidate in Arizona who has been endorsed by Trump and has echoed his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.
Trump Can’t Return On Twitter – But He Can: Twitter Can Help You Make Twitter Better, and It’s Good For The Silicon Valley Billionaire Steve Jobs
Allowing the former president to return could lead to a precedent for other social networks, such as Facebook, which is not allowing Trump to return while it’s still banning him.
“If Trump is replatformed on Twitter, it makes it easier for [Meta president of global affairs] Nick Clegg and [Meta CEO] Mark Zuckerberg to say, ‘Well, he’s already back on Twitter. We might as well let him back on Facebook,'” said Nicole Gill, executive director of Accountable Tech, a progressive advocacy group.
Whoever is in charge of day-to-day operations will likely have a smaller workforce. Hundreds of employees left the company in the months after Musk’s plan to remake the company was announced, according to reports.
Musk’s texts reveal that an initially cautiously friendly relationship between the two men when Musk first invested quickly soured after Agrawal told Musk that his tweets criticizing the platform were “not helping me make Twitter better.”
It’s good news for the billionaire who complained that twitter’s costs outstrip revenues and implied that the company is overstaffed.
The Washington Post reported last week that Musk told prospective investors that he plans to cut three quarters of Twitter’s 7,500 workers when he becomes owner of the company. Papers and unnamed sources were cited by the newspaper.
He may have little choice other than to find alternate sources of revenue besides advertising, given the weak state of the digital ad market and the changes he wants to make to content moderation.
“Advertisers want to know that their ads are not going to appear alongside extremists, that they’re not going to be subsidizing or associating with the types of things that would turn off potential customers,” Carusone said.
Twitter, the Everything App, and the Competition: The Case of Musk and the U.S. Acquisition of X-Words
More broadly, Musk has talked about using Twitter to create “X, the everything app.” This is a reference to China’s telegram app which began life as a messaging platform before growing to encompass multiple businesses, from shopping to payments and gaming. “You basically live on WeChat in China,” Musk told Twitter employees in June. “If we can recreate that with Twitter, we’ll be a great success.”
The Chinese-style super-app that other American tech companies have tried but haven’t caught on in the United States is currently the only way to go.
It is not known which agencies may be conducting the probe, or what actions Musk US officials may be investigating. The filing said authorities were looking into the conduct of Musk.
The company’s court filing elsewhere accused Musk’s legal team of failing to produce draft communications with the Securities and Exchange Commission and a slide presentation to the Federal Trade Commission as part of the two sides’ ongoing litigation over whether Musk can walk away from the deal.
The Federal Trade Commission, which is responsible for enforcing the terms of a 2011 consent order with Twitter that Zatko alleges the company violated, has not publicly disclosed an investigation. If the FTC determined that Twitter executives were responsible for illegal activities, it would hold them personally accountable, according to the chair of the FTC.
In a separate filing on Thursday, Twitter also maintained that it did not instruct Zatko to burn several notebooks as part of a separation agreement, as Musk’s team had claimed in a filing earlier this month. Zatko destroyed his notebooks of his own, according to a report by the social networking site.
Musk will be extended his influence by the acquisition. The billionaire already owns, oversees or has significant stakes in companies developing cars, rockets, robots and satellite internet, as well as more experimental ventures such as brain implants. Now he controls a social media platform that shapes how hundreds of millions of people communicate and get their news.
Within weeks of the acquisition agreement, Musk began raising concerns about the prevalence of fake accounts on the social networking website and eventually tried to end the deal.
An Insider’s Guide to Argawal, Musk, and the Story of Elon (@Elon, we you)
Delaware Chancery Court chancellor Kathaleen St. Judge McCormick gave the parties until 5 p.m. on Oct. 28 to close the deal or face a rescheduled trial.
Many Twitter employees have recently noted the absence of Parag Argawal, their current CEO, who Musk soured on after the two initially started talking about Musk joining Twitter’s board. A current employee who asked not to be identified said that he had been completely absent for weeks. One person said that he had ghosted them. According to a set of images that have been posted by The VERge, both the blind section and the employee-only section of slack have the same amount of comments about Argawal.
The execs received huge payouts for their trouble, according to Insider, with some of them getting as much as $50 million.
There are a lot of fast- moving parts to this story. The story will probably stretch out for a while over the next few months. So we thought we’d put together a guide for you, our readers, that can be updated as things continue to unfold. Because, like Elon, we ❤️ you.
How did Musk get Twitter? When Twitter went public after Musk lost his bid for a $e+e-$ monopoly
In a matter of a few days, you were responded to the exact same way: your argument is invalid, and, as always, you can’t either.
Many of the tech industry’s leading figures, including Larry Ellison and Jack Dorsey, have filed subpoenas ahead of the trial. Dorsey was a surprise but seems likely to have plenty of pertinent information, given both his tenure as Twitter CEO and the fact that Dorsey reportedly pushed hard to convince Musk to buy the company in the first place.
We wouldn’t normally tell you that, but a lengthy legal filing about measuring bot instruments is worth the read. A lot of the legal fighting in this case was clearly written to be read by a wide audience. It’s a good yarn.
Twitter’s first all-hands meeting after Musk’s bid went public was a weird one. After serenading employees with Backstreet Boys and Aretha Franklin, the company said it would continue to evaluate the offer.
The turmoil has divided the company into roughly two camps: those waiting nervously to see whether they still have a job after those cuts land, and those who are frantically working to ship new features under a threat of being fired if they don’t.
Musk needs to convince shareholders that his offer is in their financial self-interest. What are we doing here?
Comments on Tesla CEO Jon Gadde’s “Telicon” tweets aren’t being used against free speech in Silicon Valley,” he added
Although they came quickly, the major personnel moves had been widely expected and almost certainly are the first of many major changes the mercurial Tesla CEO will make.
He criticized the company’s top lawyer on the social networking site. They followed his post with a lot of harassment from other accounts. Racist and misogynistic attacks were just some of the harassment faced by Gadde, who is also the head of public policy and safety. The harassment on Thursday started once again, after she was fired.
He continued: “There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.”
The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School says the note is a change from Musk’s opinion that tweets is wrongly violating free speech rights by blocking misinformation.
But it’s also a realization that having no content moderation is bad for business, putting Twitter at risk of losing advertisers and subscribers, she said.
Yildirim said “you don’t want a place where consumers just become bombarded with things they do not want to hear about, and the platform takes no responsibility.”
“Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!” – Musk, the Times, and The Guardian: Declining the Twitter Media Landscape with a “Reliable Sources” Newsletter
But Musk has been signaling that the deal is going through. He strolled into the company’s San Francisco headquarters Wednesday carrying a porcelain sink, changed his Twitter profile to “Chief Twit,” and tweeted “Entering Twitter HQ — let that sink in!”
And overnight the New York Stock Exchange notified investors that it will suspend trading in shares of Twitter before the opening bell Friday in anticipation of the company going private under Musk.
Sarah Personette said she had a “great discussion” with Musk on Wednesday and appeared to endorse his Thursday message to advertisers.
Musk’s apparent enthusiasm about visiting Twitter headquarters this week stood in sharp contrast to one of his earlier suggestions: The building should be turned into a homeless shelter because so few employees actually worked there.
Thursday’s note to advertisers shows a newfound emphasis on advertising revenue, especially a need for Twitter to provide more “relevant ads” — which typically means targeted ads that rely on collecting and analyzing users’ personal information.
Musk gave credence to the fringe theory about the Pelosi attack on the platform in the last 24 hours. Then, when media outlets reported on his irresponsible behavior, Musk assailed them. He trolled The New York Times in one tweet and chastised The Guardian as a “far left wing propaganda machine” in another.
A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. Sign up for the daily digest chronicling the evolving media landscape here.
Charging for Blue Checks: What Will We Do if the Verification Process is Reconsidered? The Story of Musk and the Information Landscape
Instead of communicating through conventional means, Musk has chosen to make significant news through seemingly off-the-cuff tweets — just like Trump. For example, Musk disclosed that “the whole verification process is being revamped” in a random reply message to a photographer. Normally, such an announcement would be rolled out in a highly choreographed manner.
Not only has Musk contaminated the information environment he’s now controlling, but he’s also worked to dismantle the infrastructure that helps users sift through the daily chaos. Recent news reports, including from CNN, indicate that he plans to strip public figures and institutions of their blue verified badges if they do not pay.
Charging for verified badges might appear at first glance as a business story. But the move will have significant ramifications on the information landscape. It will be much harder for users to differentiate between authentic and inauthentic accounts.
The right has for years lashed out at “blue checks,” whom in their eyes represent elitist gatekeepers who control the conversation, even though many conservatives also don blue badges. Taking away those free blue checks, and the air of authority they give upon the profile they are appended to, will certainly delight some conservatives.
The best thing a person could do to save social networks, the internet, civil discourse, democracy, email, and reduce hacking would be to authenticating users.
What did Musk’s CEO tell us about the stock market, and what he may have to do about it? A story filled with emotions about Musk and his employees
No such message has ever been delivered to the company’s employees. It appears that Musk will have to make some decisions soon, as many of his employees will receive new stock grants on Tuesday.
The process has been frightening and disorienting, according to conversations with eight employees today and over the weekend. Workers have been using private chat rooms to share rumors with one another without official communication.
In Slack, one employee shared a note they’d received from Leslie Berland, Twitter’s chief marketing officer. “It’s very destabilizing I know and the press swirl is making everything worse,” Berland wrote. There is a lot of planning happening and moving as quickly as possible. I wanted to make sure that everyone saw that there was a misconception about him, that he was planning a 75% lay off, and that he was actually trying to rush it in order to have a vest on. Neither of those things are true.
The Washington Post reported that layoffs would hit roughly a quarter of the staff, heavily impacting teams including sales, product, engineering, legal, and trust and safety.
One thing that made people nervous was the instruction on Friday afternoon that engineers print out the last 30 to 60 days of code they had written, as Platformer was the first to report. It was one of the measures Musk and his team had taken in order to identify the highest and lowest performing employees who may be at risk of layoffs.
Both Calacanis and Krishnan, who are focused on thecryptocurrencies, said they are working with Musk to organize the company and come up with new products.
Getting Your OBE on the App Store: The Vine Software Engineering Project (via Slack and TechCrunch), Revisited
If you are feeling sad and depressed right now, just want to know that you are not alone. this sucks.
Another employee tells us that in other chat channels, contact information is shared in the event of a sudden loss of access.
Musk has ordered engineers to finish at least two major projects within days or weeks. Changes to the program that would require users to pay could be as high as $20 a month. We are certain that the second plan is a plan to revive the short term video app, either as a stand alone product or a component of the core Twitter app. The changes to Blue must be finished by November 7th or the team will be fired according to a report by AlexHeath.
The Vine project has generated moderate enthusiasm so far, we’re told. More than a dozen engineers agreed to work on the project after Musk gave the go-ahead Sunday night.
Employees are being encouraged to build something and show it off to Musk. In one Slack message we saw, an engineering director urged his team to come up with new products and features and share them directly with their new CEO. “At best: you will get some feedback. The director asked if he could ship it asap. “At worst, you will be asked to stop and work on something else. Even in this case, at least you worked on something you love.”
Similarly, on Monday, Behnam Rezaei, senior director of software engineering at Twitter, sent a note to his team acknowledging “big changes” were coming. “I think most important change is going to be cultural change,” he said, according to a copy of the email obtained by Platformer. There is some good and some bad.
So if you ask what should I do now: do good engineering work. Write code. Fix bugs, keep the site up. I know the criteria for being at Twitter is that. It’s not working on a fancy project for Elon. Shipping and delivering is a good example of a culture change. I encourage you to rotate more on coding and shipping, and less on documentation, planning, strategy etc. If you want to be in a “special” group this week, code and ship 5x as [much as] before. Sexy isn’t the criterion for building what you think is sexy. Helping users is a criteria of being impactful and changing product. So you don’t need commands from me. You are all software engineers. You know the situation and what needs to be changed. Do it. You are in charge.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/31/23434002/twitter-layoffs-internal-messaging-uncertainty-elon-musk
What Will CEO Mark Musk Tell Us About Twitter? An Employee’s Perspective on a Phenomenologically Disturbed View of Musk and Vine
But Musk’s attention can be very frightening. One employee we spoke with said they had mixed feelings about working on a project Musk is known to be focused on, such as Vine.
In their place, Musk is now the CEO and sole director of the social platform, according to a securities filing, cementing his unique influence over one of the world’s most influential platforms at a time when he is weighing significant changes to how it operates. At the same time, Musk is also running several other companies, including as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.
Nick Caldwell, general manager of core technology, changed his bio to a formerTwitter executive, while Jay Sullivan removed the company and his title from his bio. The New York Times also reported Tuesday that Chief Marketing Officer Leslie Berland had left the company; on Tuesday night she tweeted a single blue heart.
Calacanis said he was in New York to meet with the marketing and advertising community. He asked about the subscription and bookmark features on the platform.
What’s uncertain is how the federated social network, if it were adopted under Musk, will function in practice. If Musk is to follow the original vision of his boss, then Twitter will act as a client of the Bluesky standard, but its unclear what this will mean for the end user. Bluesky has not explained how the AT Protocol will change the way platforms are able to monetize and moderate content.